Nations do not expand their sovereignty based on legal merit (particularly when what is legal or illegal is largely established by their opponents). Nations expand their sovereignty when they believe it to be in their interest to do so, and believe they have the power to do so.

China has built a navy designed to seriously hurt the US Navy, and thereby deter the US from employing it to curb their long-stated ambitions. The US Navy keeps buying ever bigger, more vulnerable, more expensive carriers of aircraft too few and too expensive to put at risk. Where is our asymmetric counter to China's??

So far, phase 0 goes to the Chinese...as our Navy is stuck in WWII, and our Air Force is stuck in the Cold War. We must first change the way we think, not blame our competitors for refusing to play our game indefinitely.

Our carrier-centered navy may well be as obsolete as our battleship-centered navy was in 1940. Do we really have to wait for a more agile opponent to sink half of it to refocus for the world we live in today?