KEVIN RUDD has warned escalating territorial disputes between China and its neighbours are a ''tinderbox on water'', and compared the situation to tensions in the Balkans a century ago that sparked the First World War.
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Writing in the US journal Foreign Policy this week, Mr Rudd said nationalism and conflicting claims in the East China and South China seas were bringing six countries - three of them close strategic partners of the US - into dispute with China.
''The region increasingly resembles a 21st-century maritime redux of the Balkans a century ago - a tinderbox on water,'' he said. ''Nationalist sentiment is surging across the region, reducing the domestic political space for less confrontational approaches. Like the Balkans a century ago, riven by overlapping alliances, loyalties, and hatreds, the strategic environment in East Asia is complex.''
His remarks echo concerns held by many strategic experts. Most worrying were relations between China and Japan, and China and Vietnam, Mr Rudd said. China and Japan, which are in dispute over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea - known as the Diaoyu Islands in Chinese - had reached their prickliest since the countries normalised relations in 1972, he said.
While stressing a pan-Asian war was ''extremely unlikely'', Mr Rudd said ''the idea of armed conflict … has now become a terrifying, almost normal part of the regional conversation''.
Things were even more complicated in the South China Sea, whose oil and gas reserves, and fish stocks, are intensifying claims particularly between China and Vietnam. The two fought a border war in 1979 as well as skirmishes in 1974 and 1988.
''Vietnam and China appear to have set themselves on a collision course, and those who monitor this relationship closely fear a repeat of those earlier armed conflicts,'' Mr Rudd said.
He urged the two countries to accelerate the long-awaited code of conduct between ASEAN and China on the territorial disputes - a set of rules that would aim to prevent any miscalculation sparking armed conflict.
World War I began because of a build-up of tension between Britain, Italy, France, Germany, the Austria-Hungarian Empire and Russia. But the spark was territorial disputes in the Balkans.
