In Washington last week, US President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met to finalize new bilateral defense guidelines that would involve, among others, joint US-Japan maritime air patrols in the South China/West Philippine Sea. This development is expected to rile China, which has had a bitter sovereignty dispute with Japan in the East China Sea over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands chain.

Can this unfolding scenario of probable military confrontation between China and the US-Japan tandem be averted?

Maybe. But that can happen only if the US adopts a softer, wiser tack in its approach - by taking a "less confrontational stand toward China," by mediating or facilitating a "negotiated settlement" among the claimants of the contested areas, using the international law doctrine called uti possidetis (meaning "what you have you may continue to hold"). The doctrine recommends peaceful coexistence in settling quarrels and controversies. Such an approach was broached by Charles W. Freeman Jr., a former defense official and retired US ambassador, speaking in a seminar at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University April 10.

"The transformation of claims between the South China Sea's littoral states into a test of wills between Washington and Beijing has added an unhelpful overlay of great-power rivalry to an already complex mix of impassioned disputes," Freeman observed. He described as "a historical, disingenuous and unpersuasive" America's 2010 assertion at a regional meet in Hanoi that it had "a mandate to prevent violent changes in the status-quo" - at the same time declaring that it took no position on the conflicting claims.

Long before it decided to "pivot to Asia" 60 percent of its maritime and other military assets, Freeman pointed out, the US Navy facilitated China's replacement of Japan's military presence in both the Spratly and Paracel island groups (Nansha and Xisha Islands) in 1945, after the latter's defeat in WWII. From 1969 to 1971 the US operated a radar station in the Spratlys under the flag of the Republic of China (Taiwan).

Neither the Paracels nor the Spratlys mattered to the US at all "until they became symbols of Washington's determination to curtail the rise of China's power along its periphery," Freeman noted, adding that more than the US, China and other countries on the South China Sea have a far greater stake in assuring freedom of navigation in and through it.

"It is not in the US interest to perpetuate the antagonisms that now inflame relations between claimants in sections of the South China Sea," he averred. Such antagonisms, he stressed, "poison Sino-American relations as well as other littoral states' relations with China. China's neighbors have to live with China, and China has to live with them."

The Cold War may have taught the US that "safety lay in deterring conflict rather than in attempting to address its (root) causes," Freeman said. But applying this approach to the dynamic situation in the South China Sea today, he warned, "perpetuates rather than controls risk and escalates rather than subdues tensions."

US interests would be far better served by a bold attempt to eliminate the causes of conflict than by continuing the futile pursuit of mechanisms for managing tensions, he emphasized, adding: "Having taken sides against China, the (US) cannot now hope to mediate between the parties. But it can make it clear that it would welcome, accept, and support the negotiated settlement of their differences."

Given its multiplying geopolitical-military entanglements in Europe (with Russia in Ukraine), the Middle East and North Africa, can the US change tack in Asia? Will its military-industrial complex allow it to do so?

The author is a columnist for the Philippine Star. This is an abridgement of his article first published in the Philippine Star. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn