US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel yesterday vowed the US would stand by its security commitments to Tokyo, after Russia’s intervention in Ukraine raised concerns in a region plagued by its own territorial disputes.
Hagel, on a two-day visit to Japan as part of a tour of Asia, acknowledged Russia’s annexation of Crimea had sparked worries among allies in the Pacific and elsewhere.
Japan is locked in a bitter dispute with China over islands in the East China Sea, and some analysts have warned that Russia’s move in Ukraine could embolden Beijing or other powers to take unilateral action to settle territorial claims.
Photo: Reuters
“It’s a pretty predictable ... reaction, not just of nations in this area, in this region, but all over the world. It has to concern nations,” Hagel told reporters before landing at Yokota Air Base in Japan.
Although his trip was planned long before Russia’s incursion, Hagel said: “Another reason I’m here is to reassure our allies of our commitments to their security.”
He said US defense ties with Tokyo had strengthened in recent years with the deployment of advanced surveillance aircraft to the country and plans to station a second early warning radar in the country later this year.
“I don’t think there’s any indication or any evidence that we’re doing anything but strengthening our commitment to the security of Japan,” he said.
Hagel later reinforced the message speaking to a group of US and Japanese troops in a hangar at Yokota Air Base, saying he had come to reaffirm “our continued commitment to our partnership, our friendships and our treaty obligations.”
“We are serious about that,” he said, standing in front of giant US and Japanese flags. Soaring tensions in the East China Sea have prompted the US to explicitly state its mutual defense treaty with Tokyo applies to the islets, which are currently administered by Japan.
Washington has warned China against trying to resolve the disagreement through force.
The crisis over Ukraine came up at a gathering of ASEAN defense ministers hosted by Hagel earlier this week in Hawaii, a US defense official said.
The topic was raised only “tangentially” and “there wasn’t a lot of hand wringing over Ukraine and what will happen in their part of the world,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
At the end of the ASEAN session, Hagel on Thursday voiced “increasing concern” over separate territorial disputes between several nations in the South China Sea, which Beijing claims almost in its entirety.
The Philippines and some other Southeast Asian states have accused China of aggressively asserting its claims and Hagel — without openly referring to Beijing — said there was no place for “bullying.”
“You always have concerns when these issues continue to play out and drag out. And you always have concerns when there’s any indication of coercion, intimidation or bullying,” he told reporters traveling on his plane.
He said the US did not take a position on the specific territorial arguments and favored resolving them peacefully.
He added: “That said, we will honor all of our treaty commitments to our treaty partners.”
Hagel also said one of the top themes on his agenda was promoting stronger ties between Japan and South Korea, which have been severely strained in recent months as controversies have flared over the legacy of Japan’s 1910 to 1945 colonial rule.
Hagel was due to meet Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe yesterday before holding talks today with his counterpart, Itsunori Onodera, and Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs Fumio Kishida.
In an article published by Japan’s Nikkei daily, Hagel said he supported the Japanese prime minister’s plan to review Japan’s self-imposed ban on defending allies under armed attack.
Japan’s conservative premier has spoken repeatedly of his desire to revise the US-imposed pacifist constitution and is pushing to broaden the role of the military to permit “collective self-defense,” allowing Japanese troops to come to the aid of allies.
Hagel’s tour, which is scheduled to take him next to China and Mongolia, comes ahead of a trip to Asia by US President Barack Obama later this month.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the