With the eyes of the world fixed on the Middle East and Ukraine, a crisis with potentially devastating effects is unfolding in the South China Sea. For the time being, ships from China and the Philippines are settling their differences with bow blows, but the tension over the sovereignty of a handful of reefs in the Pacific is bringing together the ingredients of a global war conflict. The protagonists are China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei with the United States watching. The reason for the dispute is the Paracel and Spratly islands, currently in international waters and which China wants to incorporate into its maritime territory.
The key is who controls the transit of the oil that Asia consumes and of 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 delimiting its territorial waters, are not only rejected by the other contenders but also by the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which ruled against the communist regime in 2016 .
Despite everything, China continues to artificially expand the atolls, where it installs military bases and surveillance posts, which has multiplied the incidents between the military and fishermen who fish in those fishing grounds. Apart from strategic and commercial reasons, the Chinese interest is also explained because the South China Sea hides a treasure of 100 billion barrels of hydrocarbons, an energy that its industry does not have, which is already the second world consumer of oil.
The United States has given itself the role of guarantor of the free movement of ships in the area, aware that in order to maintain hegemony in the Pacific they cannot abandon their allies in Southeast Asia nor renounce the threat of a hypothetical economic blockade in China, the rival with whom they are vying for world control. Both for the countries involved and for its consequences, the South China Sea is a great scene of instability about to explode.
