Freedom of Navigation:
A Fundamental American
Policy
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The first and most obvious light in which the sea presents itself . . . is that of a great highway; or better, perhaps, of a wide common, over which all men may pass in all directions . . .
Alfred
Thayer Mahan
The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1890
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Japan, Australia and the Southeast Asia nations are dependent on the SLOCs for 40 percent of their trade. U.S. Navy and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force P-3 Orion aircraft patrol the Pacific together during an exercise. |
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In the mid-1980s, for example, a dispute over navigational rights with Libya in the Gulf of Sidra resulted in the destruction of Libyan fighter jets which threatened U.S. aircraft from a carrier battle group operating in the international waters of the Gulf. Similarly, a disagreement with the then Soviet Union over innocent passage rights in Soviet territorial seas resulted in a tense incident, often now referred to as "the Black Sea Bumping," in which Soviet warships attempted to force American warships out of territorial seas on the Black Sea coast by physically pushing them.
Why does the United States take such a strong stand on freedom of navigation, and why might other nations adopt similar policies? The answer, in a word, is trade.
We live today in an economically and politically interdependent world, in which information, capital, raw materials and manufactured goods must flow freely across borders and oceans. As an illustration, consider the amount of trade crossing through the waters surrounding the nations of the East Asia and Pacific region. In their superb 1996 analysis of the matter, entitled "Choke points: Maritime Economic Concerns in Southeast Asia," John H. Noer and David Gregory note that the peculiar geography of the Southeast Asia region "ensures that much of the region’s domestic trade and virtually all coastal and intraregional trade moves by sea."
Using 1993 as a typical example, Noer and Gregory point out that in that year, over half a trillion dollars of long haul intraregional seaborne trade–over 15 percent of all the world’s cross border trade – passed through three key choke points: the Straits of Malacca, Sunda and Lombok. Vessel traffic through the South China Sea, near the Spratly Islands, produced a significant additional amount. According to Noer and Gregory, Japan, Australia and the Southeast Asian nations send over 40 percent of their trade through these sea lanes, and Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Republic of Korea more than one quarter of their imports and exports. That the economic health of these States, and that of their trading partners, depends upon unrestricted, secure, and free access to these Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs) cannot be sufficiently emphasized.
Consider the potential consequences of SLOC closure. If countries making maritime claims that purport to limit freedom of navigation seek to impose those claims by force, or if conflict over the competing claims by at least six nations to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea were to erupt into hostilities, commercial shipping would be the first to suffer.
