Al-anwar Newspaper English news in Australia
Last week it was reported that in early July an Australian warship had been closely followed by a Chinese guided-missile destroyer, a nuclear-powered attack submarine and multiple military aircraft as it travelled through the East China Sea.
This incident followed a confrontation on 26 May, when an Australian maritime surveillance plane was dangerously intercepted by a Chinese fighter over the South China Sea.
Reportedly, the Chinese fighter flew treacherously close to the Australian plane, releasing flares, before cutting across its path and dropping chaff (a cloud of aluminium fibre used as a decoy against radar).
While there are good reasons not to exaggerate these events, the bad news is these incidents are almost certain to continue. When they do occur, it’s important to place them within their broader historical and geopolitical context and not sensationalise them – we must not frame them as if we’re on the brink of war.
There are three reasons why the significance of these events shouldn’t be exaggerated.
First, Asia’s seas are among the world’s busiest. The warships of different navies are constantly operating in close proximity with each other and most of these interactions are professional and even courteous. This includes most encounters with the Chinese navy.
A second, and related, point is that the Chinese and Australian navies have grown significantly in size over the past decade. More ships means more total days at sea, which means more opportunities for the navies to come into contact.
Most of these encounters are innocuous. In our research on Australia’s naval diplomacy, for instance, the team at Macquarie University investigated reports a Chinese ship had spied on HMAS Adelaide visiting Fiji.
The reality, however, was the Chinese ship was deployed semi-permanently to the South Pacific as a satellite relay and regularly came in-and-out of Suva (Fiji’s capital) for supplies. It was nothing more than a chance run-in.
The third reason is that, although confrontations aren’t common, they are also far from unprecedented. During the cold war, the warships of the United States and the Soviet Union frequently sparred. Few forward deployments occurred without some contact with the opposing forces that may have included overflights, shadowing or dangerous manoeuvring.
Indeed, potentially dangerous interactions were common enough that in 1972 the Americans and Soviets signed the incidents at sea agreement. The agreement spelled out the “rules of the road”. The superpowers also committed to an annual meeting between their senior naval officers, with the hosting responsibility alternating between them.
The agreement didn’t eliminate incidents at sea but it did create a mechanism for the two parties to vent their frustrations, voice their protests and work constructively on solutions. As the meetings were between the two nations’ top professional naval officers, there was a high degree of mutual respect and a genuine attempt to make the seas a safer place for their sailors.
The bad news
The US attempted to replicate their Soviet agreement with China. In 1998, the US and China agreed to the military maritime consultative agreement, which copied many of the successful parts of the Soviet agreement, including the annual meeting between their admirals to discuss concerning incidents.
The challenge, however, is that the geopolitical backdrop to the US-China agreement is significantly different from its cold war antecedent. During the cold war, tensions at sea rose and fell just as they did on land. However, the areas where the Soviet Union attempted to assert its claims (such as the Sea of Okhotsk and the Barents Sea) were isolated and icy and generally unimportant to everyone except the Soviets. The Americans would prod there occasionally on intelligence gathering, freedom of navigation operations or simply to rile up their rivals – but on the whole both sides understood the game.
