Asia

U.S. To Make Announcement On South China Sea Tensions

In news from the U.S. late Friday it was reported that the administration of President Donald Trump is planning an announcement relating to the ongoing tensions in the South China Sea area near Taiwan.

Played as a U.S. VS Beijing issue with both superpowers “vying for military supremacy” according to an overnight Bloomberg report, the region is home to hundreds of millions with more immediate concerns.

Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and other nations all have their own territorial claims in the region, and in recent years have been watching Chinese build-ups in the region turn to outright aggression in some areas – frequent intrusions into Taiwanese airspace by Chinese warplanes arguably the most obvious example of this.

U.S. RC-135U

In response, a number of U.S. Air Force aircraft flew over the same area in late June, although it is believed by some military experts that the timing could have been coincidental in that they were possibly tracking Chinese nuclear submarines passing through the same area.

According to the Bloomberg report, the U.S. Department of Defense just last week termed Chinese moves near the Paracel Islands as “unlawful”.

China has also recently been embroiled in landlocked territorial issues with India over a mid-June fistfight between troops from the two nations in the Himalayas, in response to Chinese intrusions into Indian territory, which might be one reason the Trump White House is choosing now to raise their South China Sea concerns.

Beijing, meanwhile, continues to largely ignore American, and other nation’s South China Sea claims, while maintaining any opposition to its territorial ambitions run counter to it “indisputable sovereignty over the (region).”

Mark Buckton

Mark is a journalism vet of 20 years with most of those years spent in Tokyo, Japan, as a columnist for The Japan Times and numerous other publications. His work has appeared on CNN, in the BBC, NPR, and in several dozen other media forms and publications across five continents.