Why risk wars or economic embargos on almost worthless lands or uninhabited islands.
Wouldn’t be better to give up claims and start a good relations that could benefit both countries ?
In: Other
The land that’s being claimed might be a worthless pile of sand and rocks. By giving up a claim, you potentially set a precedent for appeasement, history has shown that policy doesn’t work.
Second, land gives you access to resources, such as fresh water, minerals underground, including oil and gas. Plus as others have noted the seas around the land include fish and potentially more undersea oil and gas. And there might be strategic value to controlling the waters and land.
For example, in Israel, the Golan heights are relatively unimportant land that they seized from Syria during the six day war. The land itself was relatively unimportant, at the time of the war, it’s only value was the altitude advantage it gave for artillery into major Israeli cities. And the fresh water that feeds into the river Jordan. Today, it’s home to a lot of Israeli and Syrian people, and there is potential for oil underground.
In China, the Scarborough shoals barely qualified as a pile of sand that occasionally didn’t even go above sea level. But by controlling it, and adding concrete and dirt, it’s now an artificial island that’s been militarized. By controlling a pile sand, they get a stronger claim to shipping lanes, fishing and potentially oil in an area where multiple countries have overlapping claims to the waters.
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