With a million square kilometres ^{more than the Mediterranean (2.5 million} km2), the South China Sea is undoubtedly the geopolitical heir to the Mare Nostrum, which we have today become a massive tomb, not only in the future, but now.

Without major risks of burns, it can be predicted that by the East, Taiwan, the Philippines and Brune Islands, by the South, some of the major islands of Indonesia, and by the West, where the whole of Southeast Asia is extended, many of the major events of the 21st century will take place. Because there are some of the world's most important commercial roads. For centuries, as happened in the Mediterranean.

Submarine natural goods are minimal compared to the strategic importance of their location in the environment. It is not surprising, therefore, that the islands, reefs, sandy shores of the South China Sea are the most disputed in the world. Legally or diligently. No shooting, for the moment. But like the “insults” launched by China in the past decade, with initiatives that make it difficult to predict what may happen in the future.

That is why we should focus a little more on what has happened recently in the Scarborough Shoal / Huangyan Dao / Bajo de Masinloc (and, apparently, what may be about to happen). The torrent, as prosperous as the name, seems not to be of the other world: some rocky tips that barely appear on the sea at the mouth of the tide, but a large structure of atolls under the water, a few meters deep, with a perimeter of 55 kilometers, with a central lagoon of greater depth.

Despite being within 200 miles of the EHEA of the Philippines, China and Taiwan are on the ground that they also claim, and in view of its structure, the first question that comes to everybody is why the government of Beijing had not preferred it much further south to build the island of Mischief Reef / Meiji Jao / Paganreia in.

Responses can be diverse (and technical difficulties should not be the most pejorative). But there's one that the damn map makes you get in your eyes: Scarborough is an atoll just 180 miles from Manila Bay. And less than 150 miles from Subic Bay.

Today, officially, although there are no US bases of the Subic, the older ones remember that the war in Vietnam developed greatly from there. And with Marcos Jr.'s march, it wouldn't be surprising if he went back to ten.

In this case, the incidences of the Scarborough Atoll will be included in a new phase. Because its real value will look then.