America’s Korea Commander, Upsetting Beijing, Calls South Korea a ‘Dagger’ Aimed at Its Enemies

The top American general in South Korea has struck a sensitive nerve in Communist China by calling South Korea a “dagger” aimed right at the Chinese.In remarks widely quoted in the South Korean press, the commander of U.S. Forces Korea, General Xavier Brunson, observed that the Chinese, when they “look out from the east coast of China, what they see is there’s Korea, the dagger in the heart of Asia.”General Brunson’s view, carried in a lengthy interview on the website of the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, has upset Beijing just as America’s secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, and other defense ministers are meeting at Singapore for the “Shangri-La dialogue” in which Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific assumes fresh urgency.South Korea’s Yonhap News quoted a Chinese spokesman in Seoul as saying, “We would also like to tell the U.S. Forces Korea commander that “your rhetoric has indeed crossed the line.” The spokesman questioned whether General Brunson’s “hostile and aggressive anti-China comments were authorized or intended to challenge the consensus” of the recent summit at which President Xi Jinping hosted President Trump at Beijing.That same question is coming up at the Shangri-La dialogue at Singapore, where Mr. Hegseth is likely “to reinforce Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy as competition with China intensifies, particularly over Taiwan,” according to Singapore’s Straits Times. American officials, said the paper, “are also pressing allies and partners to increase defense spending and strengthen deterrence capabilities.”Mr. Hegseth, addressing the confab on Saturday, will have to walk a careful line between tough talk about China and President Trump’s desire to get along with President Xi,One sensitive question is what to say about America’s commitment to Free China for which Mr. Trump hesitates to sign off on a $14 billion military aid package. Mr. Xi, at the summit, warned of “clashes and conflicts” that might break out over Taiwan. Beijing persists in calling Taiwan its own.The Communist regime has never ruled the island democracy 90 miles to the west of the Chinese mainland across the Taiwan Straits.General Brunson, however, faced no such inhibitions. In the interview with a professor at the Army War college, Tom Spahr, he saw America and its East Asia Allies, including South Korea, Japan and the Philippines, as forming “a kill chain” or “kill web” against regional enemies. In a remark that was sure to enrage China, he described Japan as “that shield that’s sort of a backstop” against China’s ambitions in the South China Sea, which China claims as its territory.“You look at the technological advances that exist in those countries, in particular in Japan and in Korea, the potential for technology to weigh in heavily and change things,” he said. “ You look at the location of the Philippines where they sit in proximity to, to Taiwan.” The problem, he said, “isn’t an ascendant China.” Rather, “it’s “a more militant or military China that’s the threat.”A leftist South Korean newspaper, Hankyoreh Sinumn, saw cooperation between South Korea, Japan and the Philippines as reaching “the level of an alliance” with “potential and undesired consequences.” Korea, the paper warned, would risk “getting entangled in China’s disputes with Japan” in waters between Korea and Japan and in the South China Sea.General Brunson took quite a different view. “The United States Army is in an enviable position,” he said. American forces in the region, including about 55,000 troops in Japan and 28,500 in Korea, “might act in the theater,” compelling “our adversaries to say, ‘Maybe not today.’’” Then, “When you look across the region, there’s this woven network of land power that exists across the Pacific,” That’s “the glue that holds it all together.”Hankyoreh compared General Brunson’s remarks to a comment by a 19th century Prussian military adviser to Japan, who said that Korea was “a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.” That remark was a warning of the danger of China or Russia taking over the Korean peninsula, both of which Japan defeated before ruling Korea as a colony from 1910 to its surrender at the end of World War II in 1945.

America’s Korea Commander, Upsetting Beijing, Calls South Korea a ‘Dagger’ Aimed at Its Enemies

America’s Korea Commander, Upsetting Beijing, Calls South Korea a ‘Dagger’ Aimed at Its Enemies

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