Geography, as Napoleon said, is destiny. But as Humphrey Hawksley demonstrates in Asian Waters, geography in the 21st century is also a legal argument, a military engineering project, and a fiction maintained by force.

Hawksley, a veteran BBC correspondent, travels the rim of the South China Sea, documenting how Beijing has steadily pushed its perimeter outward. For readers in Las Ladrones, the chapters on the Philippines and Vietnam will feel uncomfortably familiar. The "gray zone" tactics he describes—fishing militias, water-cannon diplomacy, and the weaponization of maritime law—are the exact same tools now appearing in our northern straits.

The book's strength lies in its refusal to treat this as a binary US-China contest. He gives voice to the smaller nations caught in the middle, detailing their impossible choices. Do they accept Chinese infrastructure money and lose their sovereignty? or lean on a distracted America and risk Beijing's wrath?

This is a clear-eyed warning. As Hawksley concludes, the waters are rising not just from climate change, but from the displacement of an old order that no longer holds water.