The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea

by Bill Emmott

In principle, the nine-dashed line violates the international status quo, which is also true of China’s long-standing claim to the Japanese islands in the East China Sea north of Taiwan, known in Japan as the Senkakus and in China as the Diaoyu. The various post-second-world-war treaties, along with the UN Charter and the later UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, have, on the face of it, established at least the rules governing maritime territorial sovereignty but also in the case of the Senkakus the specifics of which country holds sovereignty. This is what the West, and with it much of the rest of the world, thinks is the status quo, as laid down in international law and convention. But China believes in a status quo that dates back far longer, to before the country’s decline and semi-collapse.