TAIWAN-UNITED STATES-CHINA US Marines ready to be deployed in the Taiwan Strait

In the event of a Chinese attack on Taipei, Corps Commander Patrick Berger stated. A new regiment will operate from Japan’s southern islands in 2025. Possible use of killer drones to block Beijing’s naval maneuvers. The British prime minister, pressured to consider China “a threat”.

Taipei () – US marines could be deployed in the Taiwan Strait in the event of a Chinese attack on Taipei. This was stated yesterday Nikkei Asia Patrick Berger, Commander of the US Army Corps.

In a change of strategy to curb China’s geopolitical rise in the western Pacific, the Pentagon announced last month the creation of a new marine regiment by 2025: 2,000 troops to be dispersed to the Ryūkyū islands in Japan’s far south. .

They will be equipped with light weapons to be able to move quickly from one island to another. With anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles, drones and intelligence-gathering sensors, they must keep Chinese naval forces at a distance, preventing them from leaving the East China Sea.

The Ryūkyū extend 125 km off the eastern coast of Taiwan. In response to Nancy Pelosi’s (then Speaker of the US House of Representatives) visit to Taipei in August, the Chinese conducted missile “exercises” northeast of Taiwan, in an area that overlaps with Japan’s exclusive economic zone, in the vicinity of the Sakishima Islands. In two of them, Yonaguni and Miyako, there are bases of the Japanese Armed Forces; in a third, Ishigaki, an outpost with surface-to-air and anti-ship missile systems is being built.

Berger highlighted the possible use of killer drones along with anti-ship missiles to block any naval operations by Chinese forces between Taiwan and the Japanese islands to the north and the Philippine islands to the south.

According to the Chinese government, Taiwan is a rogue province that must be retaken even through the use of force. For its part, under the Taiwan Relations Act, the United States is committed to defending the island. The act, adopted in 1979 after communist China’s formal diplomatic recognition, does not specify the actual nature of Washington’s commitment to Taipei: a “strategic ambiguity” that produces ongoing tensions with Beijing.

Meanwhile, the debate over what response to make in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is also raging in Britain. In Tokyo today, in her first speech since she lost her prime ministerial job, Liz Truss called on her successor, Rishi Sunak, to take a tougher approach to China, especially regarding her threat to Taipei. The British prime minister is under pressure to consider Beijing a “threat” and not simply a “systemic challenge”.