In a visit that seems destined to get lost in the media shadow cast by the presence in Beijing of India’s prime minister, US military officials are set to fly to China to deal with a souring of the cross-Pacific military mood in the wake of last year’s Thanksgiving incident with a US warship in Hong Kong. From the Christian Science Monitor:
Adm. Timothy Keating, commander of US Pacific Command, and James Shinn, a newly minted assistant secretary of Defense for the region, left Saturday for a week-long trip to China. Their visit will include high-level meetings in which the US aims to better understand the PLA’s decisionmaking process and to try to answer the Pentagon’s broader questions about China’s rapid military buildup and its intentions toward neighboring Taiwan.
But the elephant in the room may be a series of incidents last fall after the PLA refused to allow the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk and its accompanying ships into the Hong Kong port for a planned Thanksgiving visit. The PLA said it was a “misunderstanding,” and a day later agreed to allow the ships in. But the Kitty Hawk had already departed, US officials say, disappointing more than 300 family members of American sailors who had flown there to celebrate the holiday with their loved ones.
[Image: AP file photo of the U.S. Navy’s Adm. Timothy Keating, via the Christian Science Monitor]
