This is stupid. Obama will end up creating an incident over a bunch of islands that are largely irrelevant to US interests.
(And China does after all have a claim to those islands.)
We will end up with another shot-down plane, a zillion Chinese in the streets demonstrating against us, and a closer Russo-Chinese relationship.
If we are going to challenge the Chinese and Russians, we better do it in masse, and not in the manner we are doing it right now.
Ahem. Actually, this is something to us.
The Chinese have decreed, on their own motion, that they own not only the entire continental shelf underlying the South and East China Seas (the Nine-Dash Line), but also the water column above it. This claim sweeps in fantastic mineral resources (oil, for one thing) and it closely circumscribes the territorial waters and economic zones of several of China's neighbors.
Japan, for instance, would be (won't be) reduced to the 3-mile limit around the islands of the Nansei Shoto (the Ryukyus but not the Senkakus), and China would appropriate to herself as part of her own economic exclusive zone, the Japanese shelf and slope, all the way down to the bottom of the Japan Trench, quite some distance east of the Ryukyus and the Home Islands of Kyushu and Honshu.
So yeah, it's something to us.
But wait, there's more. China has semiofficially promulgated, in a CPC newspaper, a new doctrine in the Pacific Ocean, under which the United States Fleet will be excluded from the western Pacific (WESTPAC to three generations of U.S. sailors and Marines), but China in her native generosity and goodwill toward others will be willing to "share" the central Pacific with America. The Central Pacific includes Midway, Hawaii, and the Aleutians.
Just the other day, moreover, the Chinese made an official reference to this policy as well, so that is is alive and kicking, not a deflated trial balloon. This Chinese conception of the Law of Nations would supplant Admiralty Law completely, and overwrite 500 years of international sea law. Moreover, it would establish a new "rule about rules": China makes the rules. So yes, that's something to us.
Oh, and did I mention that the Chinese are running the Panama Canal these days? And yes, that's something to us, too.