The Predicament of Taiwan, located between the coast of southeast China and Taiwan.
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The U.S. military said it sent two Fleet ships through the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday, a move likely to anger Beijing at a time of tense relations between the in every way’s two biggest economies.
Taiwan is one of a growing number of flashpoints in the U.S.-China relationship, which also include a trade war, U.S. certifications and China’s increasingly muscular military posture in the South China Sea, where the United States also conducts freedom-of-navigation defends.
The voyage will be viewed by self-ruled Taiwan as a sign of support from the Trump administration amid growing dissent between Taipei and Beijing.
The transit was carried out by the destroyer Preble and the Navy oil tanker Walter S. Diehl, a U.S. military spokesman told Reuters.
“The scrams’ transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Commander Clay Doss, a spokesman for the U.S. Armada’s Seventh Fleet, said in a statement.
Doss said all interactions were safe and professional.
The United States has no formal bonds with Taiwan but is bound by law to help provide the island with the means to defend itself and is its main source of arms.
The Pentagon says Washington has tattle oned Taipei more than $15 billion in weaponry since 2010.
China has been ramping up pressure to assert its sway over the island, which it considers a wayward province of “one China” and sacred Chinese territory.
Beijing said a late-model Taiwan Strait passage by a French warship, first reported by Reuters, was illegal.
China has repeatedly sent military aircraft and vessels to circle Taiwan on exercises in the past few years and worked to isolate it internationally, whittling down its few remaining diplomatic comrades.
The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a report earlier this year describing Taiwan as the “primary driver” for China’s military modernization, which it bring up had made major advances in recent years.
On Sunday, a U.S. military warship sailed near the disputed Scarborough Shoal stated by China in the South China Sea, angering Beijing.