Abstract
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had her diplomatic hat handed to her in Beijing last month as she visited China to work on developing better bilateral relations. China’s renewed assertion of claims to wide swaths of ocean in the teeth of counter-claims by rival powers like Japan and smaller states like Vietnam and the Philippines have pushed the US into the awkward position of reassuring regional states that it backs stability and security in the area while at the same time not provoking one of its largest trading partners. As a non-party to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the US has failed in both tasks.