American President Joe Biden said his Chinese counterpart on Wednesday Xi Jinping knows that Washington is not looking for a conflict with Beijing.
What happened: Biden, at a meeting with his senior military advisers, said the US would continue to take the lead on a range of issues, from Russia’s war in Ukraine to climate change to the Indo-Pacific.
“And as I said, we must maintain our military advantage, but we make it clear that we do not seek conflict. I told him we were looking for competition. There will be fierce – fierce competition, but not – there need not be conflict. But we will compete,” Biden said of Xi.
Blink’s warning: US Secretary of State State Antony Blinking warned Beijing is trying to “accelerate” its seizure of Taiwan in a (n interview with Bloomberg. “What changed is this — a decision by the government in Beijing that this status quo was no longer acceptable, that they wanted to speed up the process by which they would go ahead with reunification,” Blinken said.
“They also made decisions about how they would do that, including putting more pressure on Taiwan, coercion — and made life difficult for Taiwan in various ways, hoping it would speed up reunification,” he added.
Why it matters: The statements come immediately after China said it is closer to achieving “full reunification” with Taiwan.
president Biden has vowed to intervene militarily to defend Taiwan when “there was an unprecedented attack” by the Chinese amid escalating cross-strait tensions.
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