Underdeveloped Law of the Sea regime is encouraging countries to enforce their excessive maritime claims with military force

Maritime disputes of this sort, also involving the use or threatened use of military force, have surfaced in other parts of the world, including the Sea of Japan, the Celebes Sea, the South Atlantic, and the Eastern Mediterranean. In these and other such cases, adjacent states have announced claims to large swaths of ocean (and the seabed below) that are also claimed in whole or in part by other nearby countries. The countries involved cite various provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to justify their claims—provisions that in some cases seem to contradict one another.

Because the legal machinery for adjudicating offshore boundary disputes remains underdeveloped, and because many states are reluctant to cede authority over these matters to as-yet untested international courts and agencies, most dispu- tants have refused to abandon any of their claims. This makes resolution of the quarrels especially difficult.

What makes these disputes so dangerous, however, is the apparent willingness of many claimants to employ military means in demarking their offshore ter- ritories and demonstrating their resolve to keep them. This is evident, for example, in both the East and South China Seas, where China has repeatedly deployed its naval vessels in an aggressive fashion to assert its claims to the contested islands and chase off ships from all the other claimants. In response, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines have also employed their navies in a muscular manner, clearly aiming to show that they will not be intimidated by Bei- jing. Although shots have rarely been fired in these encounters, the ships often sail very close to each other and engage in menacing maneuvers of one sort or another, compounding the risk of accidental escalation.