WASHINGTON: Secretary of State Antony Blinken will urge open communication to “responsibly manage” high tensions with China when he pays a rare visit to Beijing this weekend, US officials said. The State Department confirmed that Blinken will travel this weekend to Beijing on the first trip by a top USContinue Reading
OIL DEALS In March, state oil giant Saudi Aramco announced two major deals to raise its multi-billion dollar investment in China and bolster its rank as China’s top provider of crude. They were the biggest announced since Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Saudi Arabia in December where he calledContinue Reading
WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to travel to Beijing for talks in the coming weeks, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday (Jun 6), amid simmering tensions months after he cancelled a planned trip over a suspected Chinese spy balloon. Blinken cancelled a trip to Beijing in FebruaryContinue Reading
Inter-city trains are likely to be only “slightly disrupted”, the SNCF railway company said, while the metro network in Paris will run a normal service. One-third of flights out of Paris-Orly airports have been cancelled, however. “I’m not sure there’ll be other protests afterwards,” Jean-Claude Mailly, the former leader ofContinue Reading
Kirby said if China wanted to deliver the message that the US was not welcome in the area or that it wanted American aircraft and vessels to stop flying and sailing in support of international law, that would not succeed. “It’s not gonna happen,” Kirby said. US SEEKS “PREDICTABLE RELATIONSHIP”Continue Reading
China has not commented directly on the US criticism of the encounter, and its foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. On Saturday night, China’s military rebuked the US and Canada for “deliberately provoking risk” with the rare joint sailing. Chinese military commentator SongContinue Reading
After several months of non-direct senior-level communication between the forces of the two sides, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Chinese equivalent Li Shangfu spoke quickly at the & nbsp, Shangri-La Dialogue security conference in Singapore earlier on Friday. Beijing had turned down the Pentagon’s offer to a formalContinue Reading
They were speaking to CNA on the first day of this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue, which takes place from June 2 to 4 in Singapore. It involves 41 countries, with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese delivering the keynote address on Friday.
Mr Ankit Panda, Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said an upward trend in military capabilities has been observed in recent years in Asia and Southeast Asia.
“With the war in Ukraine, in particular, policymakers and defence chiefs are simply more attuned to the fact that inter-state conflict is not a thing of the past. It can very much happen in the 21st century and it can happen in Asia,” he told CNA’s Asia Now.
“So this, I think, is primarily driving continuing investments in advanced capabilities.”
He added that countries in the region, especially maritime states, are looking to strengthen themselves in the maritime domain, in order to patrol their territorial waters and protect their exclusive economic zones.
The United States has called for a UN Security Council meeting on Friday (Jun 2) to discuss North Korea’s attempted satellite launch this week, the spokesperson for the US mission to the United Nations said. The launch on Wednesday was an attempt by North Korea to put its first spyContinue Reading
“You’ve heard me talk a number of times about the importance of countries with large, with significant capabilities, being able to talk to each other so you can you can manage crises and prevent things from spiralling out of control unnecessarily,” Austin said. Recent “provocative intercepts of our aircraft andContinue Reading