WASHINGTON—The U.S. military said it sent two Navy ships through the Taiwan Strait on May 22, its latest transit through the sensitive waterway, angering China at a time of tense relations between the world’s two largest economies.
Taiwan is one of a growing number of flash points in the U.S.–China relationship, which also include a bitter trade war, U.S. sanctions, and China’s increasingly muscular military posture in the South China Sea, where the United States also conducts freedom-of-navigation patrols.
The voyage will be viewed by self-ruled Taiwan as a sign of support from the Trump administration amid growing friction between Taipei and Beijing, which views the island as a breakaway province.
The transit was carried out by the destroyer Preble and the Navy oil tanker Walter S. Diehl, a U.S. military spokesman told Reuters.
“The ships’ transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Cmdr. Clay Doss, a spokesman for the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet, said in a statement.
Doss said all interactions were safe and professional.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Beijing had lodged “stern representations” with the United States.
“The Taiwan issue is the most sensitive in China–U.S. relations,” he told a daily news briefing in Beijing.
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said the two U.S. ships had sailed north through the Taiwan Strait and that they had monitored the mission.
Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said there was no cause for alarm.
“Nothing abnormal happened during it, please everyone rest assured,” she wrote on her Facebook page.
U.S. warships have sailed through the Taiwan Strait at least once a month since the start of 2019. The United States restarted such missions on a regular basis in July 2018.
The United States has no formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan, but is bound by law to help provide the island with the means to defend itself and is its main source of arms.
The Pentagon says Washington has sold Taipei more than $15 billion in weaponry since 2010.
China has been ramping up pressure to assert its sovereignty over the island, which it considers part of “One China” and sacred Chinese territory, to be brought under Beijing’s control by force if needed.
China has repeatedly sent military aircraft and ships to circle Taiwan on exercises in the past few years and worked to isolate it internationally, whittling down its few remaining diplomatic allies.
On May 19, the Preble sailed near the disputed Scarborough Shoal claimed by China in the South China Sea, angering Beijing.
