The US could
surround China with missiles if Beijing doesn’t agree to
Washington's requests to use its influence to disrupt North Korea’s
nuclear program, Hillary Clinton apparently said, according to
recently leaked emails.
A document
featuring Hillary Clinton's private speech transcripts is among
leaked emails belonging to her campaign manager, John Podesta.
WikiLeaks has been releasing the emails since last week, with over
10,000 hacked documents published so far.
Some of them
are believed to reveal the Democratic presidential candidate's stance
on relations with China.
"We're
going to ring China with missile defense. We're going to put more of
our fleet in the area," Clinton apparently said privately in
a 2013 speech, when she was head of the US State Department, as
quoted by AP.
The then
secretary of state was seemingly not pleased with China's opposition
to US and South Korean plans to deploy a missile defense system in
the region, said to be a measure against North Korea's nuclear tests.
Saying that
Pyongyang's potential missiles "could actually reach Hawaii
and the West Coast theoretically," Clinton told her private
audience that she had confronted Chinese officials on the issue. “So
China, come on. You either control them [North Korea] or we're going
to have to defend against them," Clinton was quoted as
saying.
The
Democratic candidate's views on another sensitive issue in the
region, the South China Sea dispute, have also been revealed in the
hacked emails. In private remarks, she apparently criticized
Beijing's position and said that after World War Two the US had "as
much right" to call the Pacific Ocean the "American Sea."
"I
said, by that argument, you know, the United States should claim all
of the Pacific. We liberated it, we defended it. We have as much
claim to all of the Pacific. And we could call it the American Sea,
and it could go from the West Coast of California all the way to the
Philippines," Clinton was quoted as telling her audience in
2013.
"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," she
apparently told her Chinese counterparts while confronting them on
the issue during her tenure as the State Department head.
China's
Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not immediately commented on
Clinton's remarks, AP reported. Clinton's team has neither confirmed
nor denied the validity of the hacked emails.
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