Global defense chiefs meeting in a plush hotel in Singapore over the weekend were faced with one of Asia's biggest looming security challenges, but left without any tangible sense of how to tackle it.
The elephant in the room at the Shangri-La security forum was a uninhabited shoal about 230 kilometers (143 miles) from the Philippine coast, a triangle of reef and rocks that barely stretches above high tide. Occupied by China since 2012, the Scarborough Shoal threatens to become the biggest flash point in disputes over the South China Sea.
U.S. Adm. John Richardson raised the prospect of China building on the shoal in March and the following month the U.S. sent air force planes into its vicinity. An airstrip there would add to China's network of runways and surveillance sites that U.S. Pacific Command chief Harry Harris said last year would create "a mechanism by which China would have de facto control over the South China Sea in any scenario short of war."