The United States and its allies must balance sending a clear message to China over Taiwan with the need to avoid escalation as Asia enters a "sinister period” of tensions, Japan’s top envoy to the U.S. said.
"We need to respond, we need to send a clear message,” Ambassador Koji Tomita said in an interview on Tuesday in New York. "We have to act firmly, but wisely, because we have to be careful that we should not go into an escalatory cycle.”
Tomita said China sought to use U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan earlier this month as a "pretext to do something very aggressive” and change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, launching missiles that landed in the waters of Japan’s claimed exclusive economic zone.