A US senator on Monday urged condemnation of China’s behavior in maritime rifts with its neighbors, saying Washington has been too weak-kneed as tensions rise in the South China Sea.
Jim Webb, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, introduced a bill that would denounce China for the use of force and urge it to seek a peaceful resolution to disputes.
China has a host of territorial disputes with its neighbors and incidents at sea have been on the rise. Vietnam on Monday carried out live-fire drills in the South China Sea in a show of force.
“I think we in our government have taken too weak of a position on this,” Webb, a member of US President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party from Virginia, said at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“When we say the United States government doesn’t have a position on sovereignty issues, not taking a position is taking a position,” Webb said.
The bill introduced by Webb and Senator James Inhofe, the subcommittee’s top Republican, “condemns the use of force” by China and affirms that the US military will “assert and defend freedom of navigation rights” in the South China Sea.
Webb did not call for an explicit stand on territorial disputes, but said that the US needed to send “a clear signal” and to work multilaterally for a solution.
The US generally does not take positions on territorial disputes in which it is not directly involved.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in remarks made in July last year in Vietnam, said that the US had a national interest in freedom of navigation, but that it did not take a position on the South China Sea disputes.
China and Vietnam each claim the strategic Paracel Islands and the Spratly archipelago.
Tensions have also risen this year between China and the Philippines, another claimant to the Spratlys, which said on Monday that it would from now on refer to the South China Sea as the “West Philippine Sea.”
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