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InterAksyon.com
The online news portal of TV5
WASHINGTON - A US senator on Monday urged Congress to condemn China over a growing number of maritime rifts, saying that Washington has been too weak-kneed over rising tensions in the South China Sea.
Jim Webb, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asia, said he was introducing a bill that would denounce China for the use of force and urge it to seek a peaceful resolution to disputes.
China has a host of territorial disputes with its neighbors, which have reported a series of incidents at sea. Vietnam on Monday carried out live-fire drills in the South China Sea in a show of force.
"I think we in our government have taken too weak of a position on this," Webb, a member of President Barack Obama's Democratic Party from Virginia, said at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"When we say the United States government doesn't have a position on sovereignty issues, not taking a position is taking a position."
Webb did not call for the United States to take an explicit stand on territorial disputes, but said: "We should be working in a multilateral forum to solve these problems."
The United States generally does not take positions on territorial disputes in which it is not directly involved.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in remarks in July 2010 in Vietnam, said that the United States had a national interest in freedom of navigation but did not take a position on the South China Sea disputes.
China and Vietnam each claim the strategic Paracel Islands and Spratly archipelago.
Tensions have also risen this year between China and the Philippines, another claimant to the Spratlys, which said Monday that it would from now on refer to the South China Sea as the "West Philippine Sea."
China and Japan, Asia's two largest economies, have a longstanding dispute over the islands known as the Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese. Japan last year briefly detained a Chinese captain after a clash at sea.
During the crisis, Clinton said that the islands fell under the scope of the 1960 security treaty that requires the United States to defend Japan from aggression, remarks that angered China.
