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US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter called for a diplomatic settlement of rival territorial claims in the South China Sea, saying China and its neighbours should agree on a long-delayed code of conduct for the waters before year's end.
"There is no military solution to the South China Sea disputes," Carter told a conference of regional defence ministers and military chiefs on Saturday in Singapore. "Right now, at this critical juncture, is the time for renewed diplomacy, focused on finding a lasting solution that protects the rights and interests of all."
China and some Asian nations have used dredging to expand reefs and shoals in the South China Sea, an area that carries some of the world's busiest shipping lanes. In the Spratly Islands, a collection of several hundred reefs, atolls and islands named for a 19th-century British whaling captain, Vietnam has 48 outposts; the Philippines, eight; Malaysia, five; and Taiwan, one.
But Carter singled out China as a source of instability, saying its reclamation dwarfs what others have done. As China's economic success translates into greater military power it has created 2,000 acres of new land over the past 18 months, in some cases hundreds of miles from its mainland, according to Pentagon estimates.
Carter was speaking at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. At last year's forum, Chinese and US officials traded sharp words over the South China Sea, sparked by a speech by then-defence secretary Chuck Hagel.
Still, Carter struck a more conciliatory note than in his speech earlier this week in Honolulu, where he vowed the US would remain the dominant Asian power "for decades" and would continue to send warships and military aircraft through the disputed areas.
"His speech was more balanced compared with Hagel's speech last year," People's Liberation Army Senior Colonel Zhao Xiaozhuo said on the sidelines of the Singapore forum. "America often uses a critical approach, it's very unyielding," he said. "It's not solving the problem, it's becoming part of the problem."
Carter in his Singapore remarks "embedded his message in a much bigger regional picture - the argument that everybody rises, everybody wins is smart because it is a parallel to the China argument of a common destiny," Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University in Canberra, said on the forum's sidelines. "He's almost using China's rhetoric against it."
Chinese officials describe their construction as largely aimed at civilian objectives such as search-and-rescue operations. In April, a foreign ministry spokeswoman said the new installations would also help the country's defence in unspecified ways.
The US recently detected two mobile artillery pieces on one of China's reclaimed reefs in the Spratlys, Brent Colburn, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters on May 28 in Singapore.
"One country has gone much further and much faster than any other," Carter said. "And that's China."
The defence secretary said the island-building raises the risk of conflict in the fast-growing region. The US had "deep concerns about any party that attempts to undermine the status quo and generate instability there, whether by force, coercion, or simply by creating irreversible facts on the ground, in the air, or in the water," he said.
