Secretary of Defense Mark Esper completed his Pacific tour yesterday with a speech aboard the battleship USS Missouri during a socially-distanced ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of Japan’s official surrender at the end of World War II. Aside from honoring the few surviving veterans of that conflict, Esper’s speech was a veiled attack on China as being the threat to the “rules-based order” that the U.S. constructed in the decades following World War II.
Esper never actually named China, but the man who preceded him to the microphone, Adm. Philip Davidson, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, didn’t hesitate. “An emboldened Communist Party of China seeks to change the world to one in which Chinese national power is more important than international law,” Davidson said, sounding very much like he was channeling Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “Beijing is using a whole-of-party approach to coerce, to corrupt, and to contest the rules-based international order,” he continued. “As we address the strategic threat of China and the other security challenges throughout the Indo-Pacific region, the memory of our greatest generation lives on.”
The PLA meanwhile, has panned the Pentagon’s China military report. The Ministry of National Defense said in a statement that the report is chockful of Cold War and zero-sum game mentalities to hype the so-called “Chinese military threat.” The report has also “misunderstood China’s defense policy and military strategy, and smeared the PLA’s modernization effort, defense spending, nuclear policies and other issues.”
