PRESS RELEASE

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U.S. Defense Department to China: You’ll have to Accept our THAADs in South Korea—But Trust Us

March 30, 2016 (EIRNS)—Tony Blinken, Deputy Secretary of Defense, told the Brookings Institution yesterday that China should stop complaining about the deployment of THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missiles to South Korea.

“If China is looking to assure that we are not required to take additional steps for our own security and that of our partners and allies that it won’t like, the best thing it can do is to engage with us in dealing with North Korea,”

Blinken said. China, of course, is dealing with North Korea—it is Obama who refuses to engage in any talks with North Korea or measures to solve the problem, since the crisis provides yet another excuse to deploy huge military forces along China’s border.

Blinken also retailed the same line used on the Russians for years about US BMD systems on their western border, which, Obama said, are not aimed at Russia but at Iran. (They no longer bother with that lie, since they are now openly preparing for war on Russia.) "We realize China may not believe us," Blinken said,

"and also proposed to go through the technology and specifications with them ... and prepared to explain to them what the technology does and what it doesn’t do, and hopefully they will take us up on that proposal,"

he said.

This "Trust Us" approach was immediately rejected by China.

"The deployment of a THAAD system in South Korea pursued by the United States is not a simple technical issue, but it is a strategic one related to peace and stability in Northeast Asia,"

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told reporters today. The deployment of a THAAD battery in South Korea would

"go far beyond the actual defense requirement of the Korean Peninsula and will cause a direct impact on China’s strategic and security interests,"

Hong said.