in 2023 the U.S. unilaterally added a million square kilometers (twice the size of California) to its own maritime territory (
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2015958824889549237
Fun fact as we speak - again - about China's 9-dash line: in 2023 the U.S. unilaterally added a million square kilometers (twice the size of California) to its own maritime territory (src: bloomberg.com/news/articles/).
With this latest addition, the area it claims as its maritime territory is now 12.35 million square kilometers, or roughly 3-4 times (!) the size of China's maritime claims (including the 9-dash line).
This is despite the U.S. having only 37% more coastline than China (19,924 km vs 14,500 km, see worldatlas.com/oceans/countri) so, proportionally speaking, the U.S. claims 2-3 times more maritime territory per kilometer of coastline than China does - even when including the 9-dash line.
And bear in mind that, this is just *formal maritime claims*: in practice the U.S. treats almost the entirety of the Pacific ocean as its exclusive domain (and a good chunk of the Atlantic), due to the constellation of islands, atolls, and reefs that they annexed there historically. As Douglas MacArthur said, for all intents and purposes, the Pacific is "an Anglo-Saxon lake" (ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/cgi/viewconten).
So please spare us the lecture on China "being so brazen it almost feels like a caricature"...
Last point: what everyone somehow omits to mention when they speak about the South-China Sea is that every single country there has its own version of the 9-dash line. Vietnam, for instance, claims an EEZ of 1.4 million km² plus the entirety of the Paracel and Spratly Islands - and actually occupies *twice* as many disputed outposts in the South-China Sea than China does.
I'm not making it up, these are the numbers:
- Vietnam "occupies between 49 and 51 outposts (the status of two construction projects on Cornwallis South Reef is unclear) spread across 27 features in the South China Sea" (src: amti.csis.org/island-tracker)
- China "has 20 outposts in the Paracel Islands and 7 in the Spratlys. It also controls Scarborough Shoal, which it seized in 2012, via a constant coast guard presence, though it has not built any facilities on the feature." (src: amti.csis.org/island-tracker) So they have 27 outposts in total, roughly half that of Vietnam.
So, even if you compare with its neighbors, China is not even the most assertive claimant in the South China Sea. Yet, all these other countries - including, ironically, Vietnam - always get presented as innocent victims of Chinese "aggression," when the data is clear that they're all active participants in the same territorial scramble, and they're often more aggressive than China.
Curious, isn't it? You could almost suspect the coverage on this issue has less to do with fairness and truth, and more to do with which country has been designated as the villain 
posted by Satish Sharma at
09:54
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