Samantha Power: prediction

Transcript context

…As you know, China for years had promised the United States and also President Obama that it would not militarize the South China Sea. Then they went ahead and they did that. Perhaps looking back, this has turned out to be more important than we might have thought at the time. What was or would have been the best proper response to China militarizing the South China Sea? First of all, there was an awareness across the administration, I think, of how this wasn’t just about a pile of rocks. This was about whether countries, especially an ascendant country like China that was going to just ascend and ascend and ascend for the foreseeable future, whether they were prepared to play by the rules of the road or whether might made right. These are enduring questions that have been with us through history whenever there’s a rising power but also whenever there’s a falling power. How do different countries deal with major changes in their status? And what level of entitlement do they bring to their practices? What we did was work with others to challenge them in the court of public opinion, of course, but also at the International Court of Justice, invoking the rules of the road, invoking the rule of law, and then to continue to try to maintain freedom of navigation in these critical areas. It’s very challenging because it’s also the case that you don’t have an American public, or an American constituency, let’s say, that would be terribly enthusiastic about a military confrontation over questions of land grabs in the South China Sea. So you’re balancing an invocation of the rule of law, a recognition that some of these claims are contested, and that it’s not for us to decide whether this belongs to Vietnam or to China but to, again, invest in a rules-based order where every country doesn’t just grab what it wants but is prepared to abide by these rulings. Unfortunately, what we’re seeing with China is, it just swats away those rulings, sort of as the United States has done in the past as well, I should note. And there is a tendency, especially among strong powers, to cherry-pick those findings that they like. So I’m not sure going back — maybe more of an emphasis on the freedom-of-navigation dimension, which is something that all the countries of the world, including China, should be able to agree upon. We did really pivot — to use the phrase that President Obama used at the time — to Asia and make very significant new investments, both in terms of trade and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Negotiating that, which I think would have been an enormous boon and also a real signal to China that all of these countries are going in a different direction, and that you can’t separate out the military land grab from the economic, and that there are communities of values also that can come together. But that of course has been walked away from by the Trump administration. But we also made sizable military investments in the region, really deepening our presence in Asia. Beyond that, again, I think it’s a balancing act. Looking back, I’m not sure that China was going to be bucked if we did six more freedom-of-navigation exercises, and I’m not sure, again, that the military confrontation approach . . . Some seem quite reckless in their prescriptions: “Well, why didn’t you answer?” How would that play itself out? ation exercises, and I’m not sure, again, that the military confrontation approach . . . Some seem quite reckless in their prescriptions: “Well, why didn’t you answer?” How would that play itself out? You have to stand up for what’s right and stand up for the rule of law, but it’s not as if potential consequences have no bearing on that calculus.…

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