With the bridge of America’s best-known carrier looming in the background, Defense Secretary Ash Carter defended the Navy’s pivot to “the most consequential region for America’s future” — the Pacific.
“We’re managing historic change in the Asia-Pacific…where China is rising, which is fine, but behaving aggressively, which is not,” he said.
Carter spoke aboard the USS Carl Vinson, the carrier from which Osama Bin Laden’s body was buried at sea, and described steps being taken to upgrade U.S. military capability across the region.
“The rebalance to the Asia-Pacific, which President Obama announced five years ago, is a critical national commitment,” Carter said.
Carter said the United States is now in the third phase of a program to commit 60 percent of its naval and overseas air assets to the Asia-Pacific region by 2020. That region is getting the most advanced F-22 and F-35 stealth jets, all of the new Zumwalt-class stealth destroyers and new Marine bases in Australia, Hawaii and Guam.
He said U.S.-assured security in the Pacific has allowed the rule of international law and enabled an economic boom, first in Japan, then Taiwan and South Korea, other nations in Southeast Asia, and finally China and India.
But he noted that China “sometimes appears to want to pick and choose which principles it wants to benefit from and which it prefers to try to undercut.”
Key to continuing security, he said, are nonmilitary initiatives such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal negotiated under the Obama administration but widely criticized by both parties during campaigning for the 2016 presidential election.
“One of the most important nonmilitary initiatives of the rebalance is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, which will bind the United States more closely together with 11 other economies, guarantee a high-standard trade system, and support more U.S. exports and higher-paying American jobs,” he said.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has criticized the cost of U.S. defense of Japan, but Carter said “the U.S.-Japan alliance remains the cornerstone of Asia-Pacific security.” He noted, however, that there are strong and growing military relationships with Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Thailand Vietnam, Singapore and India.
“We’re finding more and more every day that nations in the Asia-Pacific see future opportunities to improve their militaries and their security, and they’re increasingly coming to us to partner,” he said.
Carter began a four-state swing Monday by calling for billions of dollars of upgrades to U.S. nuclear weapons and facilities. He visited Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota — home to B-52H Stratofortress bombers and Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles — and noted that the U.S. hasn’t built a nuclear weapon in 25 years, while other nations have.
Carter later visited New Mexico and toured the Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, where nuclear weapons are designed and built.
Carter headed to Hawaii after the speech to host a meeting with defense ministers of Asian and Pacific countries.
Among those he’ll meet is Delfin Lorenzana, the defense secretary of the Philippines.
Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’ maverick new president, said Wednesday his country would no longer take part in military exercises with U.S. forces, following war games scheduled for next week.
Carter, in his speech, said U.S. relations with the Philippines were ironclad, Stars & Stripes reported.
