US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Saturday that recent expansive Chinese military operations near Taiwan recalled” practices”and he reaffirmed Washington’s strong support for Taipei.
President Joe Biden’s Pentagon chief said the United States remained married to supporting”Taiwan’s capability to defend itself.”
In a speech devoted largely to an array of challenges posed by an decreasingly confident China, he underscored Washington’s” real differences”with Beijing.
Austin was speaking at a public defense forum at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.
In recent months, the Chinese service has mounted an decreasingly aggressive series of ocean and air service operations near Taiwan, which it claims as its own.
“It looks a lot like them exploring their true capabilities,”Austin said.”It looks a lot like practices.”
Some judges have suggested Beijing may be testing Biden during his first time in office.
China was the only power now able of using its” profitable, politic, military and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open transnational system,”Austin said.
The world’s two largest profitable powers, he went on, have” real differences both over interests and values. But the way that you manage them counts.”
He said Chinese leaders had been decreasingly oral about their” dissatisfaction with the prevailing order– and about their end of displacing America from its global leadership part.”
But, Austin said”We seek neither battle nor conflict. We are not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs.”
In the face of the Chinese challenge, the retired four- star army general said, the US would be heightening its ties to friendly countries in the region, including through common exercises.
“We remain loyal to our One-China policy,”Austin said, but also to”our commitments of the Taiwan Relations Act to support Taiwan’s capability to defend itself while also maintaining our capacity to repel any resort to force that would peril the security of the people of Taiwan.”