Email Leak Shows Clinton Wanted To Ring China With Missile Defense

In the latest email leak involving the Hillary Clinton campaign her private views on China have been revealed and it is nothing surprising though I do like her comment about calling the Pacific Ocean the “American Sea”:

Hillary Clinton privately said the U.S. would “ring China with missile defense” if the Chinese government failed to curb North Korea’s nuclear program, a potential hint at how the former secretary of state would act if elected president.

Clinton’s remarks were revealed by WikiLeaks in a hack of the Clinton campaign chairman’s personal account. The emails include a document excerpting Clinton’s private speech transcripts, which she has refused to release.

A section on China features several issues in which Clinton said she confronted the Chinese while leading the U.S. State Department.

China has harshly criticized the U.S. and South Korea’s planned deployment of a missile-defense system against North Korea, which conducted its fifth nuclear test this year. But Clinton said she told Chinese officials that the U.S. might deploy additional ships to the region to contain the North Korean missile threat.

If North Korea successfully obtains a ballistic missile, it could threaten not just American allies in the Pacific, “but they could actually reach Hawaii and the west coast theoretically,” Clinton said.

“We’re going to ring China with missile defense. We’re going to put more of our fleet in the area,” Clinton said in a 2013 speech. “So China, come on. You either control them or we’re going to have to defend against them.”

China is North Korea’s economic lifeline and the closest thing it has to a diplomatic ally, and has been criticized by the U.S. and others for not doing enough to rein in Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions. Chinese officials and state media have responded by saying that North Korea is not solely China’s responsibility, and that Beijing has limited influence with secretive leader Kim Jong Un’s hard-line communist regime.

Clinton also privately criticized China’s position on another sensitive issue, the South China Sea. China claims almost the entirety of the strategically vital waterbody and has lashed out at an international tribunal’s July ruling rejecting its claims.

Clinton told a different audience in 2013 that by China’s logic, the U.S. after World War II could have labeled the Pacific Ocean the “American Sea.”

“My counterpart sat up very straight and goes, ‘Well, you can’t do that,'” she said. “And I said, ‘Well, we have as much right to claim that as you do. I mean, you claim (the South China Sea) based on pottery shards from, you know, some fishing vessel that ran aground in an atoll somewhere.”  [Stars & Stripes]

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