Contributing to the Center for New American Security's Flashpoints: Security in the East and South China Seas, Michael Auslin writes on increasing tensions in the East China Sea and offers policy considerations.

Outer space has become the next frontier for American national security and business. But instead of advancing American primacy in this realm, the Obama administration has wrongly decided not only to follow a European Union draft “code of conduct” regulating outer space, but also to circumvent the Senate’s central constitutional role in making treaties.

Only by continuing to act on the high seas as it always has can the United States hope to maintain a system of international rules that serves its own interests. Ratifying UNCLOS could very well have the opposite effect.

We need India to have peaceful borders in order to compete with China, and we need to diminish China's influence in the Middle East. And finally, the Obama Administration needs to resource its stated Asia strategy, which it so far shows little sign of doing. 

American policy makers need to recognize they're playing a different game from the Chinese and adjust their strategy. While shifting to billiards is too provocative for Washington, if trends continue, it may soon find itself behind the eight ball with few options for maintaining its stabilizing role in the region.

A good way out of strategic insolvency--a condition a country enters when it is not funding the commitments it has made--would be to properly resource the plans already put out by DOD. But troublingly, the Obama administration is not funding the capabilities the military says it needs to fulfill the missions assigned to it by its civilian masters.

Has Japan finally been mugged by reality? Several policy moves in the past month suggest Tokyo has been rudely awakened to the dangers of an increasingly volatile region and is actually doing something about it.

Walter Russell Mead’s column in the Wall Street Journal last week praises America’s bipartisan policy in Asia, claiming that it may be as influential as NATO or the Marshall Plan. I’m a bit less optimistic than Mead on the depth of strength our policy has. It’s not a Potemkin village, but I think it falls short of the informally cohesive structure he sees.