Washington stands with countries fighting Chinese “bullying behavior,” US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said yesterday, as he launched bilateral talks in Australia aimed at countering Beijing’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
Austin and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the Australian city of Brisbane late on Thursday ahead of annual bilateral meetings yesterday and today that would focus on a deal to provide Australia, a defense treaty partner, with a fleet of submarines powered by US nuclear technology.
Ahead of a meeting with Australian Minister for Defense Richard Marles, Austin said both countries share concerns about China’s break from international laws and norms that resolve disputes peacefully and without coercion.
Photo: AFP
“We’ve seen troubling PRC coercion from the East China Sea, to the South China Sea, to right here in the Southwest Pacific,” Austin told reporters, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
“We’ll continue to support our allies and partners, as they defend themselves from bullying behavior,” he added.
China has imposed a series of official and unofficial trade barriers in the past few years against Australian exports, including coal, wine, barley, beef, seafood and wood. The barriers are widely seen as a punitive reaction to Australian government policy that has cost Australian exporters as much as US$15 billion a year.
Canberra’s icy relationship with Beijing was thawing since a change of Australian government at elections last year.
Meanwhile, the sharing of US nuclear secrets with Australia takes that bilateral relationship to a new level.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is planning state visits to the US and China before the end of the year.
Under the AUKUS partnership — an acronym for Australia, the UK and the US — Australia is to buy three Virginia-class submarines from the US and build five of a new AUKUS-class submarine in cooperation with Britain.
Australian media have focused on a letter signed by more than 20 Republican lawmakers to US President Joe Biden that warned the deal would “unacceptably weaken the US fleet” without a plan to boost US submarine production.
Albanese said he remained “very confident” that the US would deliver the three submarines.
The prime minister said he had been reassured by discussions he had with Republicans and Democrats earlier this month at a NATO summit in Lithuania.
“What struck me was their unanimous support for AUKUS, their unanimous support for the relationship between the Australia and United States,” Albanese said.
Marles agreed the AUKUS program was on track.
“Congress can be a complicated place as legislation makes its way through it, but actually we’re encouraged by how quickly it is going through it and we are expecting that there will be lots of discussions on the way through,” Marles said.
“Fundamentally, we have reached an agreement with the Biden administration about how Australia acquires the nuclear-powered submarine capability and we’re proceeding along that path with pace,” he added.
Australia understood there was “pressure on the American industrial base” and would contribute to submarine production, Marles said.
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
Taiwan was ranked the fourth-safest country in the world with a score of 82.9, trailing only Andorra, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in Numbeo’s Safety Index by Country report. Taiwan’s score improved by 0.1 points compared with last year’s mid-year report, which had Taiwan fourth with a score of 82.8. However, both scores were lower than in last year’s first review, when Taiwan scored 83.3, and are a long way from when Taiwan was named the second-safest country in the world in 2021, scoring 84.8. Taiwan ranked higher than Singapore in ninth with a score of 77.4 and Japan in 10th with
SECURITY RISK: If there is a conflict between China and Taiwan, ‘there would likely be significant consequences to global economic and security interests,’ it said China remains the top military and cyber threat to the US and continues to make progress on capabilities to seize Taiwan, a report by US intelligence agencies said on Tuesday. The report provides an overview of the “collective insights” of top US intelligence agencies about the security threats to the US posed by foreign nations and criminal organizations. In its Annual Threat Assessment, the agencies divided threats facing the US into two broad categories, “nonstate transnational criminals and terrorists” and “major state actors,” with China, Russia, Iran and North Korea named. Of those countries, “China presents the most comprehensive and robust military threat