If anything Trump’s Press Secretary says can be believed, this is very bad news:

The new U.S. administration of President Donald Trump vowed on Monday that the United States would prevent China from taking over territory in international waters in the South China Sea, something Chinese state media has said would require Washington to “wage war.”

“I think the U.S. is going to make sure that we protect our interests there,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer told a news briefing.

“It’s a question of if those islands are in fact in international waters and not part of China proper, then yeah, we’re going to make sure that we defend international territories from being taken over by one country.”

That suggests that Tillerson’s provocative remarks earlier this month on this issue weren’t a fluke, but were a statement of administration policy. This is very dangerous rhetoric, and the administration would be wise to put a stop to it at once. If Trump follows through on this bluster, the U.S. would be risking a war with a major power that would destabilize the region and could easily be avoided without sacrificing any real American interests.

The only way that the U.S. is going to stop Chinese activities in the South China Sea is by threatening to use force to stop them and being willing to back up those threats, but it strains credulity that the U.S. would actually go to war to block China from its claims there. Confrontational rhetoric like this doesn’t make the U.S. more secure, and it is more likely to alarm regional allies rather than reassure them. This is exactly the sort of careless line-drawing that no administration should engage in, because it either sets the U.S. up for a humiliating climbdown or it risks committing our country to a war that we don’t need and shouldn’t want to fight.