WASHINGTON – US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will press the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to come up with a unified position on the South
China Sea controversy when she visits Asia again this week, State Department
spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Tuesday.
At the same time, Nuland
dismissed suggestions that Philippine-US relations may have been damaged by
flag-carrier Philippine Airlines’ signing of a $7-billion deal to buy 54 Airbus
jets, a contract that Boeing had hoped to get.
“We have a very long, deep, broad
relationship with the Philippines. As you know, we are doing more now in the
area of security support than we’ve been able to do in a long time, and I think
that relationship is extremely strong,” she said.
Nuland said the US lobbied for
Boeing “but nations make sovereign decisions and they make them based on their
own set of criteria.”
Asked at a press conference if
Clinton’s latest trip was “another effort to put the squeeze on China,” Nuland
said this was the secretary’s second or perhaps third trip to the region this
year as she was personally very interested in emphasizing the US pivot to Asia.
Clinton is also set to visit the Cook Islands, Indonesia, China, Timor-Leste,
Brunei and Russia.
Referring to the South China Sea
dispute, Nuland said this was likely to come up on the ASEAN stops in Indonesia
and Brunei, as well as China.
“We have been encouraging, as
you’ll recall, ASEAN to have a unified position and to work from a position of
unity with China, and obviously it will come up in China as well,” Nuland said.
“We are continuing to urge a
multilateral conversation about a code of conduct in the South China Sea that
is in keeping with international law and the Law of the Sea Treaty. We continue
to think that that’s the best way to address these disputes. So I think you
will see it come up on many of these stops,” she added.
Asked if the US was worried about
the Chinese naval and military buildup in the area as other countries were, she
said military specifics were usually the purview of the defense department but
added “we don’t want to see the disputes in the South China Sea or anywhere
else settled by intimidation, by force.”
“We want to see them settled at
the negotiating table, and we have also consistently been calling for
increasing transparency in the Chinese military posture.”
China has alarmed many of its
neighbors by ratcheting up the rhetoric over its expansive territorial claims
in the resource-rich South China Sea or West Philippine Sea. Several countries
including the Philippines and Vietnam have overlapping claims to some parts of
the sea.
Meanwhile, US Ambassador Harry
Thomas Jr. reiterated the importance of negotiation in resolving the West
Philippine Sea dispute with China.
“We don’t want to further
escalate tensions. We want a peaceful resolution,” Thomas said in a speech
during yesterday’s joint membership meeting of the Makati Business Club and the
Management Association of the Philippines.
“We want all countries to live up
to their agreements. We support the Code of Conduct between China and ASEAN. We
think this is the best way to resolve this... countries to sit down at the table
and negotiate,” he said.
With Louella Desiderio
Business & Investment Opportunities
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