Scarborough Shoal consists of coral reefs enclosing a large lagoon about 135 nautical miles (250km) west of Manila Bay, within the Philippines' exclusive economic zone. It is the only maritime feature for a good distance.
In 2012 China pushed Philippine vessels away from Scarborough Shoal and has controlled the area since with a constant presence of coastguard and fishing vessels. Between 2013 and 2015 China built seven military bases in the South China Sea by reclaiming the sea around specks of land farther south, three of them large air bases. It has so far stopped short of terraforming Scarborough Shoal itself. In 2016 Barack Obama reportedly told Xi Jinping that building a base on the shoal would cross an American red line.
China announced a national marine reserve at the shoal in September 2025. On September 16th 2025 Chinese patrol ships swarmed around it, blasting water cannon and injuring a Philippine coastguard sailor.
On August 11th 2025, while pursuing a Philippine coastguard vessel near Scarborough Shoal, a Chinese coastguard vessel accidentally rammed one of its own naval ships. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think-tank, reports that two Chinese coastguards probably lost their lives. Philippine coastguards captured the incident on video, greatly embarrassing China. Aggressive vessel handling by China has persisted since, raising the risk of Filipino lives being lost.
America is bound by treaty to defend Philippine forces in the South China Sea. The Trump administration has repeated this commitment. Throughout October 2025 American and Philippine forces exercised in the sea, alongside ships from allies including Australia, France and Japan. The USS Nimitz, America's oldest aircraft-carrier, was deployed to the area; satellite photographs showed it just over 100 nautical miles south-east of Scarborough Shoal in early November 2025. CBS reported that the Pentagon was considering launching HIMARS rockets towards the shoal—not as part of routine exercises but aimed at Scarborough specifically. The Pentagon did not deny the report.
On October 26th 2025 a helicopter and an F-18 fighter jet launched from the Nimitz both went down in the South China Sea within half an hour of each other. Donald Trump blamed "bad fuel".
On November 1st 2025 Pete Hegseth, America's defence secretary, met his Chinese counterpart, Admiral Dong Jun, on the sidelines of a security conference in Malaysia—their first meeting. They spoke again by phone the following day.
In its national defence strategy released in January 2026, the Pentagon said its future focus would be the "first island chain", stretching from Japan through Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia. The Paracel Islands, in the northern part of the South China Sea, fall just outside that line. America's silence on new Chinese activity in the Paracels may be among the first signs that beyond this defensive perimeter the White House intends to give China a free hand.
Since October 2025 China has turned Antelope Reef, a once-desolate sandbar in the Paracel Islands, into a 600-hectare atoll—beginning to rival the large military air base at Mischief Reef, one of three airbases built during China's 2013-2015 reclamation spree in the Spratlys. Satellite photographs show a long strip inside Antelope's lagoon that could accommodate a 2,700-metre runway. China has controlled all of the Paracels since 1974; the islands are claimed only by China and Vietnam. The new base sits closer than China's existing Paracel airstrip to suspected oil and gas deposits and rich fishing grounds plied by both Chinese and Vietnamese fishers.
Over the past four years Vietnam has embarked on its own reclamation campaign on islets it controls in the Spratly chain, creating enough new land that analysts say it was on track to surpass China in total land area at some point in 2026. China's construction at Antelope Reef is in part a response: "any reclamations you can do, we can do better."
May a hundred thousand midgets invade your home singing cheesy lounge-lizard versions of songs from The Wizard of Oz.