A power play before heads of two great powers sit down for a cordial dinner? The U.S. Navy has certainly not been shy to advertise the maneuver.
Just days away from when Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to meet his US counterpart Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Argentina at the end of the week, Taiwan and its territorial waters are again a source of friction as for the third time this year the US Navy sailed two vessels through the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday.
According to Taiwan’s defense ministry a US warship and accompanying supply ship sailed through international waters, and in the same statement noted Taiwan will defend its maritime territory and airspace security.
The Pentagon also confirmed Wednesday’s passage, with a spokesman telling the South China Morning Post that it was the USS Stockdale, a guided-missile destroyer, and the USNS Pecos, a replenishment oiler, that “conducted a routine Taiwan Strait transit November 28 in accordance with international law”.
“The ships’ transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” he said, “The US Navy will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows.” The Navy made similarly provocative passages of the strait in July and October.
Currently, what the Pentagon called a “routine” operation has again sparked fury with Beijing, with the two countries already in the midst of a trade war. Beijing had condemned the last such incident in October, with the foreign ministry staying at the time, “The Taiwan issue concerns China’s sovereignty and territory, and is the most important, most sensitive issue in China-U.S. relations.”
Beijing considers Taiwan a breakaway province that it claims as rightfully under Chinese authority. The Pentagon, for its part, has constantly reiterated its position of a “U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific” when bumping up against Chinese claims in the South Pacific, which have gotten increasingly dangerous as the Chinese Navy has been more closely shadowing US maneuvers, resulting in escalatory intercepts.
Last month, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen said the island will increase its defense budget every year to ensure it can defend its sovereignty, including resuming domestic development of advanced training aircraft and submarines. Not that any of that will help it defend against the world’s largest army.
All of this will certainly make the Trump-Xi meeting potentially tense as the two sides compete to see which country will blink first. Meanwhile the Taiwan Strait continues to get hot, hot, hot…
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