Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a set of thinly veiled warnings to China on Saturday, cautioning that it could risk its share of further gains in Asia's economic prosperity if it bullied its neighbors over natural resources in contested areas like the South China Sea.
Three years ago at the same lectern here, Gates's predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, bluntly criticized China's swift military buildup. Last year Gates struck a more conciliatory tone, saying Beijing and Washington had a chance to "build trust over time."
Gates seemed to take a third approach in his remarks to a major regional Asia security conference here, seeking to lay down clear markers of continued U.S. commitments to the region while also obliquely criticizing China.
He said that in his four trips to Asia since becoming defense secretary 18 months ago, several countries had expressed concern about "the security implications of rising demand for resources" (translation: China's voracious quest for new sources of energy and raw materials) and about "coercive diplomacy" (translation: China's contested claims of resource-rich territorial waters).
Gates said there were rewards for playing by an international set of rules in a transparent way. "We should not forget that globalization has permitted our shared rise in wealth over recent decades," he said. "This achievement rests above all on openness: openness of trade, openness of ideas, and openness of what I would call the 'common areas,' whether in the maritime, space or cyber domains."