Jim Webb, a Democratic presidential candidate and former U.S. senator from Virginia, is urging the Obama administration to confront China about its military expansion in the South China Sea amid concerns raised by U.S. allies.
Webb said on Thursday that "we have to draw a line with China" in response to its aggressive efforts to seize disputed territories in the Asia-Pacific. U.S. officials say China has now constructed more than 3,000 acres of manmade islands in the Spratlys, which were previously just a chain of submerged reefs and rocks. U.S. allies in the region, including Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam, all claim parts of the Spratlys.
Beijing is also adding military barracks, airfields, and artillery pieces to the artificial islands, raising the risk of conflict in waters that serve as an important transit area for international trade.
The Obama administration has previously failed to deter China from expanding its military ambitions in the region, Webb said.
"[The Chinese military] will create issues of sovereignty, mark their spots, and the United States would kind of defer and sort of call them tactical spats rather than clearly strategic sovereignty issues," he said at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"And now is the time. We have to draw a line with China in terms of the Spratlys and keep a hold of the positive relationships that have come out of this."
Webb, who is also a former secretary of the Navy and assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, noted that China first declared its intentions in 2012 when it established a prefecture-level government in Sansha, an island city in the South China Sea. The Obama administration has said it does not take a position on sovereignty disputes in the region.
"To take no position on an issue that relates to these sovereignty issues is to take a position," Webb said. "It is to accede, because China insists on bilateral solutions to these problems and they will always intimidate the smaller countries."
Failing to challenge China in the South China Sea would also threaten other significant territories in the Asia-Pacific, Webb said. Beijing and U.S. ally Japan remain embroiled in a territorial dispute over the Senkaku islands, located in the East China Sea near U.S. military bases on Okinawa.
"To yield on the Senkakus eventually would be to call into question the sovereignty of Okinawa," he said. "That’s just the way that it works."
"When you have an expansionist nation that is not accepting international law in these things, you have to do something about it, and we’re the country that does," he added.
Defense officials are considering the option of sailing U.S. warships within 12 nautical miles of China’s artificial islands to demonstrate that the United States does not support Beijing’s territorial claims. Under international law, only natural landforms are guaranteed the 12-mile zone of sovereignty.
Webb said he would send the ships into the 12-mile zone "in a heartbeat."
He also called China’s cyber attacks against the United States "an act of aggression." U.S. officials announced this summer that hackers working for Beijing had obtained personnel records or security-clearance files for more than 22 million Americans, including federal employees, their families and friends, and Webb himself, he said.
Additionally, Webb expressed opposition to the recently completed nuclear deal with Iran. The agreement means that the United States has "acquiesced to the idea that Iran could acquire … the materials to construct and use nuclear weapons" in a decade, he said, and it has reinforced perceptions that America is siding with Tehran against other regional powers.
"The lifting of sanctions, all these other things—is a very bad timing in the region with all of the instability that we are seeing because of other policies," he said. "So the way—in my view, the way that this agreement is being viewed in the region is that we are acquiescing to Iran having a larger role in terms of the traditional balance of power."