President Biden is working with China on Climate issues….
The United States and China continue trade activity even with tariff’s….
And?
China and the US warship’s are crowding the waters close to Taiwan and country that Chinese leaders have aways felt was their’s….
Remember?
Those Chinese leaders took over control of Hong Kong and have made sure they own it….
One would think a Democratic Taiwan could be at stake….
As with Iran and Russia ?
President Biden IS being tested….
(He seems to NOT be uncomfortable with projecting American military power oversea’s)
China is slowly in plain sight encircling something it wants 8,000 miles from the US mainland….
Remember the Ukraine and Crimea?
Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait
The highest regional priority for the Chinese military is ensuring it can exercise sea control and power projection in the waters around Taiwan. President Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership have sworn to bring the “renegade province” to heel. While they still hope to do so through patience — and by strangling Taipei’s international support — they will be willing to use military force if necessary. In recent congressional testimony, Admiral Phil Davidson, head of the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific Command, said that he saw the possibility of military action “within six years.”
The Taiwanese are carefully watching as China violates the agreement negotiated with the British in 1997 to follow a “one country, two systems” system with Hong Kong. They recognize their future within greater China would include a loss of democracy and human rights.
With Taiwan over 8,000 miles from Hawaii but around 100 miles from the Chinese mainland, the challenges for the U.S. Navy are profound. U.S. support for Taiwan’s security is bipartisan — but the longstanding U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity,” supporting Taiwan militarily without a formal commitment to defending it, is dangerously fuzzy. It could lead to a miscalculation by the Chinese (or the Taiwanese) and set off a larger conflict.
Were China to try to end the question of Taiwanese independence militarily, its prime objective would be to make the U.S. incapable of defending the island. This strategy would center on anti-access/area-denial — using defensive measures to keep the already extended U.S. Navy at a distance. (The Pentagon has made Congress well aware of this in its latest report on Chinese military capabilities.)…
US/China Naval posturing…
“The Pentagon is considering establishing a permanent naval task force in the Pacific region as a counter to China’s growing military might,” our colleague Lara Seligman reports for Pros.
The proposal, which is not finalized, also calls for giving the operation a name to allow the defense secretary to allocate more resources, she reports, citing people with knowledge of the deliberations.
“The task force and the named operation suggest to me that they are going to elevate the oomph and the power of the Western Pacific oriented force,” said Elbridge Colby, a former Trump Pentagon official, contending it would allow commanders to compete better for resources with counterparts in the Middle East.
If the task force “is focused on the Western Pacific, whether it’s focused on China explicitly or implicitly, it’s got bureaucratic oomph to say ‘hey, no [Central Command], just because you have a knee-jerk reaction to something happening you can’t steal our assets,” he said.
“We are looking at a number of proposals in the Indo-Pacific and across the Department, to better synchronize and coordinate our activities,” said a defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “However, as the Secretary said, now is the time to get to work, there are many details and specifics still to be finalized.”
The planning takes place as the Biden administration is facing criticism in Congress that it’s not doing enough to confront Beijing’s military aggression in the region.
More…