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 China claims virtually all the South China Sea and rejects the
authority of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague hearing
the dispute, even though Beijing has ratified the U.N. Convention on
the Law of the Sea on which the case is based.
Amy Searight, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for South
and Southeast Asia, said the United States, the European Union, and
allies like Australia, Japan and South Korea must be ready to make
clear that the court's ruling must be binding and that there would
be costs to China for not respecting it if it lost the case.
"We need to be ready to be very loud and vocal, in harmony together,
standing behind the Philippines and the rest of the ASEAN claimants
to say that this is international law, this is incredibly important,
it is binding on all parties," she told a seminar at Washington's
Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Searight said the message to China, if it did not respect a negative
ruling, should be, "we will hold you accountable."
 "Certainly, reputational cost is at stake, but we can think of other
creative ways to perhaps impose costs as well," she said without
elaborating.
The Hague tribunal has no powers of enforcement and its rulings have
been ignored before. Manila has said the court may hand down a
ruling before May.
China disputes South China Sea territory with several other members
of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as well as the
Philippines.
Klaus Botzet, head of the political section of the EU Delegation in
Washington, said it was difficult to oppose world opinion.
"A joint Western, a joint world opinion, matters also for Beijing,"
he said.
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"If we unanimously support that international law as formulated by
the international tribunal in the Hague ... needs to be upheld,
that's a very strong message and will be very difficult to ignore,"
he said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said he had "noted" the
comments, and repeated China's opposition to the arbitration case
and refusal to participate.
The Philippines' "scheme would never succeed", he told a daily news
briefing in Beijing.
In unusually forthright language, Botzet said China's policy of
military buildup was not in its interest.
"It's investing much more in its military relative to its economic
growth; it's forcing its neighbors into alliances against itself;
positions its neighbors otherwise wouldn't take and the return on
investment on this policy is negative," he said.
The United States had exceptional military capabilities in the
Asia-Pacific, Botzet said, adding that the European Union "strongly
supports the American guarantee of international law in Asia."
(Additional reporting by Michael Martina in BEIJING; Editing by
Bernard Orr and Clarence Fernandez)
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