Secretary of State Antony Blinken's trip to Beijing "may portray a bit of weakness" amid heightened tensions between China and the United States, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster told CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.
"I think China's sending a message 'hey, we're in charge now, you're finished' to the West and to the United States," said McMaster, who served in the Trump administration. "And ... I think it's indicative of what they hope to achieve, which is to create kind of an exclusionary area of primacy across the Indo-Pacific region.
"This really calls for us to have a strong response, I think ... With Secretary Blinken's visit there, it may portray a bit of weakness."
McMaster said, "We've been so anxious to have this discussion with the Chinese, and the Chinese have been really playing hard to get in terms of ... the discussion."
The former national security adviser said with Blinken's trip, the first by a U.S. secretary of state since 2018, Beijing hopes to "create a perception that we're going there to pay homage to the Chinese Communist Party, because they want to use that kind of perception of China's strength relative the United States to bludgeon countries in the region and say 'hey, time to bandwagon with us, this is our era,' what they call the 'new era of international relations.'"
McMaster said, "It's important to have diplomacy with China. But let's have also diplomacy with countries that might be sitting on the fence to say, 'Hey, your choice really, at this moment, is not between Washington and Beijing. It's between sovereignty and servitude.”"
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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