Asked whether he was in favor of Washington taking a tougher stance toward China, the former ExxonMobil CEO replied: “ We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.”
Tillerson did not elaborate on how exactly Beijing might be blocked from the artificial islands but said he considered its South China Sea activity ” extremely worrisome. ” It would be a threat to the ” entire global economy” if Beijing were able to dictate access to the waterway, he added.
Tillerson branded as “illegal” the Chinese declaration of an air defense zone in the East China Sea, which Beijing contests with Japan.
“They’re taking territory or control, or declaring control of territories that are not rightfully China’s, ” he said.
The former CEO, 64, blamed the situation on what he called an inadequate response from the outgoing Obama administration.
“The failure of a response has allowed them [China] just to keep pushing the envelope on this,” he said.
“The way we’ve got to deal with this is we’ve got to show back up in the region with our traditional allies in Southeast Asia,” Tillerson noted.
A bid to blockade China’s man-made islands would be a significant step that Washington has up to now not raised even as an option.
“This is the sort of off-the-cuff remark akin to a tweet that pours fuel on the fire and maybe makes things worse,” Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra, told Bloomberg. “Short of going to war with China, there is nothing the Americans can do, ” he added.
The Center for International and Strategic Studies, a US think tank, said in a report released in mid-December that recent satellite images appear to show that China has installed anti-aircraft and anti-missile weapons on all seven of China’s newly-created islands.
