With the world's eyes fixed on the Middle East and Ukraine, a crisis with potentially devastating effects is unfolding in the South China Sea. At the moment, ships from China and the Philippines are settling their differences by hitting their bows, but the tension over the sovereignty of a handful of reefs in the Pacific brings together the ingredients of a global war conflict. The protagonists are China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei with the surveillance of the United States. The reason for the dispute is the Paracelsus and Spratly islands, currently in international waters and which China wants to incorporate into its maritime territory.
The key is who controls the oil traffic consumed by Asia and world trade, half of which passes through these waters which, if left in Chinese hands, would give Beijing the key to the planet's economy. China's arguments based on the "nine-dash line", 1947 maps where its territorial waters were delimited, are not only rejected by the other contenders but also by the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which in 2016 ruled against the regime. communist.
Despite this, China continues to artificially expand the atolls, where it installs military bases and surveillance posts, which has multiplied incidents between the military and fishermen who fish in these fishing grounds. Apart from the strategic and commercial reasons, Chinese interest is also explained because the South China Sea hides a treasure of 100,000 million barrels of hydrocarbons, an energy that its industry, which is already the second largest consumer of oil in the world, lacks.
The United States has given itself the role of guarantor of the free movement of ships in the area, aware that to maintain its hegemony in the Pacific it cannot abandon its allies in Southeast Asia or renounce the threat of a hypothetical economic blockade to China, the rival with which it settles control of the world. Both for the countries involved and for its consequences, the South China Sea is a great scene of instability ready to explode.
