HANOI: Vice President Kamala Harris called on Vietnam to join the US in challenging China’s bullying in the South China Sea, continuing her sharp rhetoric against Beijing as she met with Vietnamese leaders on Wednesday.

“We need to find ways to pressure and raise the pressure, frankly, on Beijing to abide by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and to challenge its bullying and excessive maritime claims,” she said in remarks at the opening of a meeting with Vietnamese President Nguyen Xuan Phuc.

Harris also expressed support for sending an additional US Coast Guard cutter to Vietnam to help defend its security interests in the disputed waterway, and pledged that the US would maintain a strong presence in the South China Sea to challenge China.

During remarks in Singapore on Tuesday, Harris said Beijing’s actions to press its territorial claims in the South China Sea amount to coercion and intimidation.

The vice president’s rebuke of China comes in the middle of her weeklong tour of Southeast Asia, a trip that brought her to Singapore and Vietnam in a bid to strengthen US ties to the Indo-Pacific region to counter China’s growing military and economic influence there.

In addition to her commitment to defend the South China Sea against Beijing advances, Harris unveiled an array of new partnerships and support for Vietnam in areas including climate change, trade and the coronavirus pandemic. She announced that the US will send 1 million additional doses of the Pfizer vaccine to Vietnam, bringing the total US vaccine donation to Vietnam to 6 million doses.

Published in Dawn, August 26th, 2021