Singapore warns of ‘escalatory spiral’ amid eroding trust between US and China
- Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said there’s a lack of strategic trust between the superpowers due to tensions over Taiwan, which is the ‘reddest of red lines for Beijing’
- He also said as ‘China’s strategic and economic influence has grown, so has their sense of vulnerability’
“The key missing ingredient in this relationship, from the perspective of a dispassionate third country, is that there is a lack of strategic trust between the United States and China,” Vivian Balakrishnan said on Friday in New York at an event hosted by the Asia Society, according to prepared remarks.
“I think the ultimate focal point for this is the Taiwan Strait, which is the reddest of red lines for Beijing.”
Balakrishnan said he’s observed on four separate trips to China in the past year that “attitudes have become more assertive” there, with a strong and growing nationalism and more “muscular” actions to defend international interests.
“As China’s strategic and economic influence has grown, so has their sense of vulnerability,” given that Communist regimes must respond to “the anxieties and the zeitgeist of their own societies,” he said.