President Joe Biden is planning to ask Chinese President Xi Jinping to restore military-to-military contacts.
The contacts ended last year after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan.
China viewed the visit to Taiwan as the United States recognizing the country as self-governing, as China views Taiwan as part of its country.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on CBS’ Face the Nation that having military-to-military contacts “has been a priority” for Biden.
Sullivan explained that communication is “necessary to manage competition responsibly, and to ensure that competition does not turn into conflict. And we need those lines of communication so that there aren’t mistakes or miscalculations or miscommunication. And so that could take place at every level from the senior leadership of our defense department and their defense ministry, all the way down to the tactical operational level, on the water and in the air in the Indo-Pacific.”
“I’m not going to get ahead of any announcements that the President might make coming out of the meeting,” he stated. “But I will say the President is determined to see the re-establishment of military-to-military ties because he believes it’s in the US national security interest.”
Reporting from The Gateway Pundit:
The AP noted that since 2021, China has rebuffed Department of Defense outreach on multiple occasions. China has said it is miffed because of sanctions imposed on now-former Defense Minister Li Shangfu after China bought fighter jets and missile defense components from Russia. “The U.S. side is surely aware of why there is difficulty in military-to-military exchanges,” Yang Tao, a Chinese Foreign Ministry official overseeing North American affairs, said in June after Blinken walked away from a visit to Beijing empty-handed, according to the AP.
