AIR DEFENSE ZONE FULL

As one famous court opinion put it:Įnjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. administering) over it for a “reasonable” period of time and especially having other states acquiesce to its administration. As I explained elsewhere this week, in international law a major way by which states acquire sovereignty over an area is by actually exercising sovereignty (i.e. There is a clear unambiguous purpose to all this - namely, China is seeking to bolster its claims to sovereignty over these areas in terms of international law. Get briefed on the story of the week, and developing stories to watch across the Asia-Pacific. It has also sought to challenge Japan’s administrative control over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands by increasing its maritime patrols and air flights over them. Specifically, as is well known, it has sought to increase its maritime patrols over the entire South China Sea through the creation of Sansha City garrison, and has basically seized control over the Scarborough Shoal and, increasingly, the Second Thomas Shoal.

Taylor Fravel called creating “new facts on the water,” China’s approach to the South and East China Seas has been to try to establish its sovereignty over contested areas through the use of a combination of military power and international law. “Lawfare,” as used in the context of international warfare, is often attributed to retired Air Force General Charles Dunlap, who defined it in a famous 2001 essay as “the use of law as a weapon of war.” Interestingly, according to the spectacular Lawfare blog, Dunlap was preempted by two PLA officers who wrote in a 1999 book, Unrestricted Warfare, that lawfare “is a nation’s use of legalized international institutions to achieve strategic ends.” In essence, the East China Sea ADIZ is part of China’s “lawfare” strategy toward its maritime disputes. Indeed, creating the East China Sea ADIZ was much more sophisticated and part of a larger strategy China has been pursuing long before last weekend. But foreign policy is rarely based solely on vengeance. To be sure, Beijing probably took some joy in seeing the anger the move sparked in Tokyo, particularly given that it perceives its creation of the East China Sea ADIZ as little different from Japan purchase of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands last year. Yet, I’ve yet to see any reports explaining in precise details what China was hoping to accomplish by creating the ADIZ. Many reports have surfaced claiming that the move might have been a strategic blunder for China. The tension surrounding the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) is being covered in the kind of exhaustive detail that is rarely given to Asia’s maritime disputes.

Air defense zone