The US military’s top general said Wednesday that Chinese President Xi Jingping reneged on promises not to militarize the South China Sea and called for “collective action” to hold Beijing responsible.
General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was not calling for military action, but stressed that there was a need to enforce international laws.
“The fall of 2016, President Xi Jinping promised President Obama that they would not militarize the islands. So what we see today are 10,000-foot runways, ammunition storage facilities, routine deployment of missile defense capabilities, aviation capabilities, and so forth,” he said in a talk on US security and defense at the Brooking institution.
“So clearly they have walked away from that committment.”
Source: Guardian Newspaper.