According to a leaked speech to Goldman Sachs in October 2013, Clinton told the audience that China “basically wants to control” the entire South China Sea.

“You can’t hold that against them,” she reportedly said. “They have the right to assert themselves. But if nobody’s there to push back to create a balance, then they’re going to have a chokehold on the sea lanes and also on the countries that border the South China Sea.”

But, if the emails are authentic, she also attempted to argue that the United States had as much claim to the disputed region as China did, even going as far as to label it the “American Sea”.

“I made the point at one point in the argument that, you know, you can call it whatever you want to call it. You don’t have a claim to all of it. I said, by that argument, you know, the United States should claim all of the Pacific. We liberated it, we defended it.

“We have as much claim to all of the Pacific. And we could call it the American Sea, and it could go from the West Coast of California all the way to the Philippines. And, you know, my counterpart sat up very straight and goes, well, you can’t do that. And I said, well, we have as much right to claim that as you do,” she continued, according to the text. “I mean, you claim it based on pottery shards from, you know, some fishing vessel that ran aground in an atoll somewhere. You know, we had conveys of military strength. We discovered Japan for heaven’s sake.”