FT: US and Japanese military step up cooperation amid potential conflict with China

MOSCOW, January 9 – RIA Novosti. US and Japanese armies step up cooperation amid potential conflict with China over Taiwan, the newspaper reported. Finance Times It refers to Lieutenant General James Bierman, commander of the United States Marine Corps 3rd Expeditionary Force (based in Japan).

The publication writes that U.S. and Japanese forces “quickly integrated their command structures and increased joint operations as Washington and its Asian allies prepare for a possible conflict with China, such as a war for Taiwan,” according to Birman.

According to Birman, it is noted that the USA and its allies in Asia act on the same principles as in the case of Ukraine. “In 2014 and 2015, we were busy preparing seriously for a future conflict,” Birman said, noting that, among other things, the training of Ukrainian military personnel.

“We call it theatrical organization (war operations – ed.) and we organize theater in Japan, the Philippines, and elsewhere,” Birman said.

The situation around Taiwan escalated significantly in early August last year following a visit to the island by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives at the time. Seeing the island as one of its own provinces, China saw the US support for Taiwanese separatism in this move, condemned Pelosi’s visit and held large-scale military exercises.

Official relations between the PRC central government and the island province were interrupted in 1949 after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in a civil war with the Chinese Communist Party, moved to Taiwan. Commercial and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. From the early 1990s, the parties began to establish contacts through non-governmental organizations – the Beijing Association for the Advancement of Relations across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation.