Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Sunday said the Biden administration should stop “pursuing” Chinese officials “like teenagers in love.”
“Officials in the Biden administration need to stop going after their Chinese communist counterparts like loved-up teenagers. It’s shameful and deplorable,” Cotton said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“In fact, it shows China’s weakness. It encourages them to do things like buzz our planes or come within a few hundred yards of our ships. It encourages them to send of spy balloons floating across America,” the senator said, adding that reducing tariffs “will send the same message.”
Cotton commented on US-China relations amid Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s visit to Singapore, where his Chinese counterpart, Li Shangfu, also attended the Shangri-La Dialogue, a security conference.
Beijing refused to meet, which Austin called “unfortunate.” The two later spoke briefly on the sidelines of the conference – and Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said the pair “had no substantive exchange.”
Cotton’s comments also come after the US military said on Saturday that a Chinese ship had maneuvered in an “unsafe manner” near a US Navy destroyer in the Taiwan Strait.
China-US tensions have been exacerbated by many factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, an incident with a Chinese surveillance balloon earlier this year. China’s stance on Russia’s war in Ukraine and Beijing’s aggression in the Indo-Pacific, especially regarding Taiwan.
Cotton said that “the best way for us to deter China and Iran and Russia is to have a military capable of deterring them.”
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