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.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to