China is in the process of “destroying our alliances” on the Pacific Rim, a prominent Republican lawmaker warned Wednesday.
“They are on the verge of achieving their goal of destroying our alliances in the Indo-Pacific by making keeping our defense commitments too costly to keep,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tweeted Wednesday.
Rubio was responding to reports that China “has shifted the balance of power in the Pacific” by assembling and modernizing a fleet capable of going toe-to-toe with the United States the Indo-Pacific. China’s emergence as a major naval power punctuates the growing U.S. consensus that the Communist regime poses a worldwide strategic threat to the United States.
“It’s not just trade the[y] threaten us with,” Rubio also said.
China has taken a more aggressive tone while maintaining its claims to sovereignty over Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a breakaway province, as well as new claims to sovereignty over the most of the South China Sea. At the same time, Chinese officials accuse the U.S. of stoking international tension.
“It has been nearly three decades since the Cold War ended, but certain persons in the U.S. seem still obsessed with the monologue of seeking rivals and even making enemies,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Tuesday. “To maintain regional and world peace and stability concerns the common interests of all countries and our shared future. We hope these persons will not get so deeply lost in their own drama.”
China has developed an array of “asymmetrical weaponry” designed to offset U.S. military superiority, while building traditional power platforms such as aircraft carriers.
“Competition is the American way of seeing it,” Li Jie, an analyst with the Chinese Naval Research Institute in Beijing, told the New York Times. “China is simply protecting its rights and its interests in the Pacific.”
The deployment of military assets to artificial islands in the South China Sea, one of the world’s most valuable shipping corridors, represents one of most destabilizing and controversial aspects of China’s military modernization.
“There has to be a point here where it’s too far,” Rubio, who sits on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees, told the Washington Examiner in June. “We’re not unnecessarily seeking conflict, and there’s a way to avoid it, and that is to respect the rules. But at some point, we’re going to have to either enforce these rules, or we’re going to live in a world that they dominate. And that’s what they’re counting on is that we don’t have the stomach for it. And, in fact, if they conclude we don’t have the stomach for it, they’re likelier to do it.”
