There's an old Cold War game called a freedom of navigation exercise, in which one party steams or flies within sight of another party's coast, within eyesight but outside of territorial waters, perhaps within the Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ) of the other party, which is legal but provocative. This has traditionally been done with military aircraft and warships, but sometimes "commercial" vessels are roped into such duty. These exercises can be a good opportunity for intelligence-gathering, too; back in the Cold War, U.S. Navy task groups at sea were often shadowed by Soviet "fishing trawlers" that were oddly festooned with antennae.
China, in a new version of this old game, is using what it is calling "research vessels" to probe around the approaches to the Arctic, including passing into the Alaska EEZ and poking around in the Barents Sea. The United States Coast Guard has been keeping an eye on them.
The U.S. Coast Guard is actively engaged in Arctic defense, monitoring and dealing with potential national security threats posed by Chinese ships. Last summer, the Coast Guard chased away Chinese vessels.
This week, a USCG Arctic cutter crew monitored two Chinese research ships that entered U.S. waters. The Chinese-flagged Xue Long transited north through the U.S. exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and over the U.S. extended continental shelf in the Bering Sea with a declared destination of the Arctic. The Xue Long 2, another China-flagged vessel, also transited to the Arctic, the USCG announced late Friday.
“For the first time this year, Chinese vessels were tracked transiting through the U.S. EEZ and over the U.S. extended continental shelf (continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles of shore) in the Bering Sea,” the USCG said. In response, the USCG Cutter Munro (WMSL 755) executed Operation Frontier Sentinel to actively monitor the vessels as they transited north. The cutter’s operation was “designed to protect American sovereign rights, ensure consistency with international law, and position the Coast Guard to rapidly respond to any detected malign activity,” the USCG said.
China isn't breaking any of the rules of the sea here. It's perfectly legal for Chinese ships to transit our EEZ and the outer continental shelf. It's also perfectly legal for our Coast Guard to shadow them, just to make sure they suffer no unfortunate mishaps in an area that is, at present, undergoing some significant development in natural resources.
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And China, as we learned again in President Trump's recent speech, isn't a friendly nation. They bear watching, and it's a fair bet that these "research" vessels are watching us.
Interesting, isn't it, how the old Cold War games that the United States was playing with the Soviet Union in the Cold War are now being played again with China. You can always tell who the two biggest kids on the block are, and the thing about those two biggest kids is that they will always try to test each other. And, the Arctic is a region of rapidly increasing strategic importance.
The United States has a big advantage here in holding Alaska, the crown of the Pacific. But China seems determined to test us, here and elsewhere.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
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