Next week, a pair of Australian Anzac Class frigates will wind up live fire drills with the Chinese Navy and then head off through the South China Sea.

On the way, they will carefully avoid any route that takes them close to the so-called "Great Wall of Sand" that China has been building on contested reefs to assert its control over the strategic waters.

But on the other side of the world this week, US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter was being grilled by the hawkish and irascible former presidential candidate John McCain as to why he wouldn't confirm widespread press reports that the US had just sailed a guided-missile destroyer provocatively within a few kilometres of one of China's man-made islands.

Eager to avoid rubbing Beijing's nose in the affair, risking further escalation, Carter obfuscated for several minutes before making a telling remark that "these are operations that we should be conducting normally".

With that one comment, Carter, who was brought in eight months ago to put a more assertive stamp on US defence policy, gave voice to the frustration about past inaction by Washington while also providing an insight into future US strategy in what has ballooned into a test of wills between the great powers of the 21st century.

For the past two years, the initiative has all been China's. In what the Australian National University's Rory Medcalf described this week as "a very sophisticated game of risk", China began redrawing the maritime map in a concerted program of land reclamation that forced the US either to accept a new geographic – and therefore strategic – reality, or go on the offensive by deliberately grazing the edges of these new islands with powerful warships to assert freedom of navigation in the contested area.

If left unchecked, the People's Liberation Army Navy would become the gatekeepers of the 30 per cent of global trade – including 60 per cent of Australia's exports – that passes through the vital shipping channel.

By sending the USS Lassen close to man-made land built upon Subi Reef on Tuesday – the first such "freedom of navigation" patrol since 2012 – Washington was finally calling Beijing's bluff, saying that its defacto territorial claims to these waters are a fiction and the US Navy would treat them as such.

The more dire predictions about the possibility of a naval clash between great powers – with the danger of rapid escalation – didn't eventuate. China's oft-repeated threats that confrontation was inevitable if the US went ahead with such patrols evaporated.

But the question now is whether it will be enough to return the situation to Carter's "normality", in which naval ships can pass through these waters – which are international waters by any reasonable interpretation of the law – without causing the world's heart to skip a beat. Part of that question is whether other countries including Australia need to back the US up with their own patrols.

China wants to be the dominant power in its maritime neighbourhood, supplanting the US whose mighty Pacific Fleet has ruled the waves off Asia for six decades, in the process providing the security and stability that has helped fuel China's remarkable rise.

In May, Beijing released a defence white paper that canvassed the addition of what it calls "open-seas protection" to the PLA Navy's "offshore-waters defence" role, representing a shift in strategy which emphasises China's expanding economic and diplomatic influence.

A core theme of what President Xi Jinping calls as the "great rejuvenation" of the Chinese nation is to transform its corruption-riddled armed forces into a military power befitting its economic and political clout.

Medcalf, who heads ANU's National Security College, says China is highly unlikely to use the islands to do anything so crazily against its own economic interests as to block commercial shipping.

But as well as giving China a (largely fictitious) basis to claim sovereignty over the surrounding waters, the islands are also platforms from which to project its authority in the form of military power – like permanent aircraft carriers.

"The islands can protect China's submarine operations, help anchor its underwater sonar systems, be used to base military aircraft and generally complicate the activities of foreign navies. Those are real, material benefits," Medcalf says.

The US gesture this week – even if it continues through further patrols – isn't going to stop such reclamation, nor the potential militarisation of the islands, he says.

Andrew Chubb, a China expert at the University of Western Australia agrees.

"They'll put whatever military facilities they see fit on those islands and they're not going to stop reclaiming. There's more work to be done especially around Mischief Reef," Chubb says.

Chubb says the patrol by the Lassen will have "forestalled any potential illegal Chinese claim that might have emerged over the coming years" while also reassuring nervous US allies and partners in Asia.

"The regional reaction has been generally positive," Chubb said. "The countries that have watched China make such rapid progress were probably keen to see a bit of reassurance that it's not simply going to be China all the way from now on."

For now, Australia has no plans to carry out its own patrols. While the issue has been discussed within Defence, no proposals have been formalised at the senior levels, let alone put to the government.

Certainly, it would be destructively embarrassing to Beijing if the two frigates, HMAS Stuart and HMAS Arunta, were to carry out such an operation on their way home from drilling with the Chinese. As one official put it to Fairfax Media this week, that would be "like going to someone's home for dinner then taking a crap on their front porch on the way out".

But influential experts are already urging the Turnbull government to follow up on the US gesture, including members of the government's own external advisory panel on the forthcoming Defence White Paper.

Panel member Peter Jennings, who is also executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said that a swift naval patrol or an RAAF flyover would dash any suggestion by Beijing that this was just "US bullying".

Similarly, James Goldrick, a retired Navy admiral who also sits on the panel, said Australia should "demonstrate our commitment to the rules-based global order" through a patrol.

Medcalf, who sits on the same panel, cautioned against rushing in "gratuitously".

"We ought to bide our time but reserve our right to do something in the future, without fanfare … and as a part of our normal operation."

Patrols will need to continue in one form or another to restore the principle of freedom of navigation, experts agree. But they will need to be done quietly from now on, giving Beijing a face-saving way to avoid escalation. This tactic is already evident in Ashton Carter's reticence before the Senate hearing and the Obama administration's deliberate ploy of not promoting Tuesday's patrol, even despite the massive media coverage.

Much can also be read into Beijing's response, which was predictably heated but well short of the "head-on blow" that retired PLA Navy admiral Yang Yi predicted just last week.

The Chinese foreign ministry accused the US of "deliberate provocation" and summoned the American ambassador to China, Max Baucus​, to protest. Foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said the Lassen entered the waters "illegally" and without the approval of the Chinese government, "threatening China's sovereignty and security interests".

"China will firmly react to this deliberate provocation," he added later at a regularly scheduled news conference.

How exactly it will react was not explained. The view among analysts is that for all its bluff and bluster, Beijing is not going to risk a military confrontation with the superpower whose defence spending still outmatches its own by about four to one.

"I think it will reach a kind of stalemate or an equilibrium because China isn't going to escalate the challenge to these US operations because it would be obviously illegal," says Chubb. "It would be making itself an international outcast and violating a treaty [the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea] that it has signed and ratified."

Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Beijing's Renmin University, says the situation is likely to remain at a deadlock with neither the US nor China willing to change their positions.

"The next step depends on the American side, where and when and in what kind of form the US repeats its challenge by their warships or airplanes," he says. "China will make their response according to the situation but China in any case, like the US, will not do anything which explicitly results in military conflict."

Shi said the US action would change little.

"China declared already that it had suspended the enlargement of the reefs but the Chinese continue to build air runways."

So who won this round? The islands are still there and they're not going away. On the other hand, China baulked when it came to asserting its authority over the waters – and it is the water, not the land that matters here.

It's a small victory for Washington. But there will be many more rounds before the match is decided.

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