China Warns U.S. Over Nuclear Treaty ‘Blackmail’

Date: 23 October 2018 - 21:45

News ID: ۵۸۸۸۲

BEIJING/WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- China warned Tuesday it would "never accept any form of blackmail" after U.S. President Donald Trump said his decision to withdraw from a nuclear pact with Russia was also linked to Beijing's arsenal.
China is not a signatory to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which the United States signed with the then-Soviet Union in the 1980s, but Trump said Monday that Beijing should be included in the accord.
"Now that the United States want to unilaterally withdraw from the treaty, they start to inappropriately speak about other countries," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular press briefing.
"This approach of shifting the blame on others is utterly unjustifiable and unreasonable," Hua said.
She said China had always pursued a defensive national defense policy. "We will never accept any form of blackmail," Hua said.
The landmark treaty was signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev and led to nearly 2,700 short- and medium-range missiles being eliminated.
It put an end to a mini-arms race in the 1980s triggered by the Soviet Union's deployment of SS-20 nuclear missiles targeting Western European capitals.
"Until people come to their senses, we will build it up," Trump told reporters Monday at the White House, referring to the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
"It's a threat to whoever you want. And it includes China. And it includes Russia. And it includes anybody else that wants to play that game," he said, adding that China "should be included in the agreement."
The U.S. withdrawal from the Cold War-era nuclear arms treaty with Russia could give the Pentagon new options to counter Chinese missile advances but experts warn the ensuing arms race could greatly escalate tensions in the Asia-Pacific.
U.S. officials have been warning for years that the United States was being put at a disadvantage by China's development of increasingly sophisticated land-based missile forces, which the Pentagon could not match thanks to the U.S. treaty with Russia.
Trump has signaled he may soon give the Pentagon a freer hand to confront those advances, if he makes good on threats to pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which required elimination of short- and intermediate-range nuclear and conventional missiles.
Dan Blumenthal, a former Pentagon official now at the American Enterprise Institute, said a treaty pullout could pave the way for the United States to field easier-to-hide, road-mobile conventional missiles in places like Guam and Japan.
That would make it harder for China to consider a conventional first strike against U.S. ships and bases in the region. It could also force Beijing into a costly arms race, forcing China to spend more on missile defenses.
"It will change the picture fundamentally," Blumenthal said.
Kelly Magsamen, who helped craft the Pentagon's Asian policy under the Obama administration, said mismanagement of expectations surrounding a U.S. treaty pullout could also unsettle security in the Asia-Pacific, she cautioned.
"It's potentially destabilizing," she said.
Experts warn that China would put pressure on countries in the region to refuse U.S. requests to position missiles there.
Abraham Denmark, a former senior Pentagon official under Obama, said Guam, Japan and even Australia were possible locations for U.S. missile deployments.
"But there are a lot of alliance questions that appear at first glance to be very tricky," he cautioned.