LAUREN C. WILLIAMS
The U.S. and China are not having much-needed military discussions about risks in space, cyber, and nuclear defense—even as the relationship between the countries has thawed in the past year, a defense official said Wednesday.
“The expansion of China's nuclear program raises the question of: what are all these nuclear weapons for, exactly, given that they have had this more limited doctrine in the past. And they haven't answered that question,” Ely Ratner, the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said during a Center for Strategic and International Strategy event Wednesday.
Bilateral engagement with the PRC has improved since President Joe Biden and China’s President Xi Jinping met in November 2023. But China has thwarted U.S. attempts to have high-level discussions about certain topics in the past year, Ratner said.
“In terms of defense diplomacy, the State Department, others at the [defense] secretary's level have been trying to better understand and engage in substantive discussions with the [People’s Republic of China] and the [People’s Liberation Army] about their military modernization. And the answer so far has been no, we are not going to talk about that. Explicit refusal to talk about that. And that's a continued problem,” he said. “That's also true in some of the other emerging domains—space and cyber. We are not having the level of strategic conversations that we need to be having about risk reduction, and that is absolutely something, looking forward, that will need to mature in the military-to-military relationship.”
No comments:
Post a Comment