Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) arrives for an all-senators briefing with Biden administration officials on Wednesday, February 15, 2023 to discuss unidentified objects recently shot down over the past week.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Sunday said the Biden administration should stop “chasing after” Chinese officials “like lovestruck teenagers.”
“Biden administration officials should stop chasing after their Chinese communist counterparts like lovestruck teenagers. It’s embarrassing and it’s pathetic,” Cotton said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“In fact, it projects weakness to China. It encourages them to do things like buzz our aircrafts or come within a few hundred yards of our ships. It encourages them to send spy balloons floating all across America,” the senator said, adding that reducing tariffs “would send the same message.”
Cotton was commenting on the U.S.-China relationship amid Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s visit to Singapore, where his Chinese counterpart, Li Shangfu, is also in attendance at the Shangri-La Dialogue, a security conference.
Beijing refused to meet, which Austin called “unfortunate.” The two later spoke briefly on the sidelines of the conference — and Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said the pair “did not have a substantive exchange.”
Cotton’s comments also come after the U.S. military said on Saturday that a Chinese ship maneuvered in an “unsafe manner” near a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Taiwan Strait.
China-U.S. tensions have been strained by a number of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, an incident with a Chinese surveillance balloon earlier this year. China’s stance on Russia’s war on Ukraine and Beijing’s aggression in the Indo-Pacific, particularly with regard to Taiwan.
Cotton said that “the single best way we can deter China and Iran and Russia is to have a military capable of deterring them.”
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