Donald Trump ‘targets’ China by pulling out of missile deal with Russia
- Exit from Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty will give US freedom to deploy land-based missiles wherever it chooses
- Move likely to spur missile development programmes in China and Russia, experts say
President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of a nuclear weapons treaty with Russia might appear to be an attack on the United States’ former cold war adversary, but experts suggest that China is the more likely target.
Fu Mengzi, deputy director of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations in Beijing, said that Trump’s plan to tear up the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) was a sign that Washington was gearing up for a long-term strategic battle with Beijing.
“After leaving the INF, the US is expected to push ahead with a new round of military development and deployment,” he said.
Aside from the uncertainty caused by a bitter trade war, military tensions between China and the US have been steadily growing, especially in the South China Sea. Beijing claims almost all of the disputed waterway and has transformed several natural and man-made reefs and islands there into military outposts.
The US meanwhile has increasingly asserted its right to conduct freedom of navigation operations in the sea in a clear challenge to China’s strategic ambitions.
China’s foreign ministry on Sunday did not reply to a request for comment on the US decision to leave the INF.
Trump said on Saturday that he intended to leave the INF as Russia had not honoured the agreement, which was signed in 1986 by then US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.