United States determination to keep its South China Sea territorial disputes with China going rests heavily on having nations with active claims in the sea as US client states, particularly those with claims that conflict with China’s. That used to be, with several nations having such claims.
But the US is struggling to keep those nations exclusively buying US arms. Today’s big loss was from Malaysia, which has announced they intend to buy littoral mission ships from China, instead of the United States. Details on the decision-making process are unclear, but the US problems with their own littoral combat ships breaking down, so that might’ve hurt their chances.
It’s a comparatively small deal, but part of a growing trend. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has been making headlines for weeks with his interest in ending long-standing reliance on the US. While this has grown into complaints about general US-Philippines relations, one of the early grievances was his not liking the US dictating arms sales, and expressing interest in buying from China and Russia instead.
If these countries start buying their arms from China, they’ll have a strong incentive to resolve maritime disputes with China diplomatically, which could severely limit their interest in having warships patrolling through the area to “confront” China.
You mean we would sell naval warships to MUSLIMS?
Why not Hillary authorized the US to fund Al Nusra AKA Al Qaeda in IraQ in Syria and give them TOW missiles and launchers!
Long and good tradition in the US…
Carter and Reagan armed Mujahideen, and later Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, from 1978 – 1990..
Thats how they do it, even admitting so is rare..
I give it two weeks before Mossa… um, I mean ISIS springs up, suddenly, inexplicably, in Malaysia.
Since Malaysia is a horrid, repressive, murderous dictatorship, thank Heavens that the U.S. will not be the enabler that further arms those Malaysian despots!
The nation that lives by weapons of war will die by those weapons of war.
The US often offers old ships, already retired from our service and badly worn. When it offers new ships, they are too expensive and generally cost over runs compete with late delivery as the biggest problems. Lately, they’ve been defective too. The big amphibs have been failures, and the small Littoral Combat ships too. The destroyers and cruisers use an old hull design from the 1970’s that is cracking from overloading of new ships.
China’s ships are new, cheaper, and delivered promptly. We say they have quality issues. Perhaps they do. It is likely those are less now than they were 20 years ago, when our information was obtained. China’s ships have become a major part of the world merchant fleet since then. China also has developed since then a much more active warship building industry.
Their naval shipbuilding industry has been building steadily at a fast pace, and so improving, while ours has stagnated except for a handful of big ships we won’t export, and that are also plagued with problems.
This is not only a problem of alliances. It goes deeper than that too.