For two centuries, the area has been marked on nautical maps as “Dangerous Ground.” Even today, U.S. government sailing instructions advise that “avoidance of Dangerous Ground is the mariner’s only guarantee of safety.” Flyspecks though they may be, the Spratlys occupy crucial territory on the map; they sprawl across about 160,000 square miles—an area the size of Michigan, Iowa, and Illinois combined—several hundred miles from Vietnam and slightly closer to the Philippines. They are more or less in the center of what today is the most important waterway in the world—the South China Sea.
