The South China Sea is shaping up as an arena of military posturing reminiscent of a Cold War siege, with the United States and major European countries on one side and China on the other.

One Western power after another has been sending warships to the region since at least August 2018, in a show of unity and military strength, although commentators believe the risk of war is slim.

So far this year, the South China Sea has seen the arrival of Canadian and French ships. France’s SNA Emeraude and BSAM Seine visited in February, with Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly saying the country would cooperate in the long run with the navies of Australia, the U.S. and Japan.

The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, patrols the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait on a fairly regular basis. In fact, its forces passed through the Taiwan Strait 13 times in 2020, the most in the last 14 years.

Earlier, Britain deployed the HMS Albion in August 2018, then the HMS Argyll in January 2019. It has also announced plans to assign the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the lead ship in the Queen Elizabeth class of aircraft carriers, to be stationed in the South China Sea. This will be followed by a German frigate in August.

The trend of Western warships focusing on the South China Sea was a display of not only military strength, but also unity in protest against China, Macao-based military expert Wong Dong told Apple Daily.

It was merely symbolic to send such a small number of ships to the sea, yet China could still be hopping like mad as a result, Wong added. The maneuvers, taken together, could be seen as contributing to an atmosphere akin to the Cold War, with the entire Western world in a state of solidarity against China, whether in diplomacy, technology, the economy or the military, he said.

China’s territorial rows with its neighbors were not helping, either. The Southeast Asian countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam all had outstanding disputes with the Chinese over the Spratly Islands or the Paracel Islands.

Being economically highly dependent on China, these nations did not want to upset Beijing, so they were holding a wait-and-see attitude, Wong said. Once China was perceived to be losing ground in the siege, these countries would join in as well, he said.

A Hong Kong commentator, Hui Ching, observed that Germany and France were giving China a very strong signal, by the sheer fact of them spending tremendous resources to cross thousands of miles all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.

At the same time, the two European countries were making use of the opportunity to maintain their international status, and to show the world that despite their arguments with Britain and the U.S., the North Atlantic Treaty Organization remained highly united, said Hui, director of the Hong Kong Zhi Ming institute.

He added that the chances of an actual war breaking out in the South China Sea were low.

The closest that both sides came to clashing was on Sept. 30, 2018, when the missile destroyer USS Decatur sailed within 12 kilometers of the Gaven Reef in the Spratlys area. The People’s Liberation Army of China sent its own destroyer, the Lanzhou, to as near as 41 meters of  the Decatur, raising the possibility that the two warships could have been just seconds away from a collision.

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