Two US Navy ships transited the Taiwan Strait this week, marking the first US naval passage through the sensitive waterway under the new Trump administration, which drew a rebuke from China.
US Indo-Pacific Command said the guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson and the survey ship USNS Bowditch carried out the transit from February 10 to February 12.
While the presence of US warships in the Taiwan Strait is extremely provocative from the viewpoint of Beijing, the US always frames the transits as “routine.”
China’s People’s Liberation Army said it monitored the US warships as they sailed through the Strait. “The US action sends the wrong signals and increases security risks,” the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command said.
“Troops in the theater are on high alert at all times and are resolute in defending national sovereignty and security as well as regional peace and stability,” the Chinese command added.
Justifying the transit, a spokesman for US INDOPACOM said it ” occurred through a corridor in the Taiwan Strait that is beyond any coastal state’s territorial seas.”
The new Trump administration is stacked with China hawks and is expected to continue the Biden administration’s policies of building up the US military footprint in the Asia Pacific.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Wednesday that one reason why the US wants to wind down its support for the Ukraine proxy war is so more focus can be put on China, which he claimed posed a threat to the US “homeland.”
