A senior Pentagon official will visit Taiwan in the coming days, according to media

17 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –

The United States will send its top defense officer in China, Undersecretary Michael Chase, to Taiwan in the coming days, as reported by the newspaper ‘Financial Times’.

Chase would be the first senior Pentagon official to visit the island since four years, when Assistant Secretary for East Asia Heino Klinck traveled in 2019, making it the most senior official to visit Taiwan in four decades.

The visit of the undersecretary of the US Department of Defense in China will take place when relations between Washington and Beijing are under strain due to the incidents of Chinese balloons located in US airspace, as well as those of other countries such as Costa Rica or Canada.

In fact, the Secretary of the Department of State, Antony Blinken, canceled at the last minute a planned trip to China, where he should have met with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, due to the incident of the balloon, which was shot down by US troops. off the coast of South Carolina.

In addition, relations between the two powers have been complicated for several months by the relationship with Taiwan, especially since in August 2022 the then Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, visited the island despite the repeated warnings from the Chinese authorities.

Since then, Chinese troops have stepped up military training exercises near Taiwan, which has repeatedly denounced the incursion of Chinese-flagged fighters into its airspace.