The United States sailed a Navy destroyer through the Taiwan Strait on Tuesday in what it called a “routine” transit of an international waterway.
The maneuver was announced by the U.S. Navy‘s Seventh Fleet, headquartered in Japan, and elicited a response from Beijing, which in recent years has challenged the American military’s right to operate near China’s shores, as it has done for decades.
Accompanying images published by the Seventh Fleet showed the USS John Finn, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, traversing one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, through which goods flow not only to and from China and Taiwan but also further north to Japan and South Korea, two U.S. treaty allies.
“U.S. ships transit between the South China Sea and the East China Sea via the Taiwan Strait and have done so for many years. The transit occurred through a corridor in the Taiwan Strait that is beyond any coastal state’s territorial seas,” the Navy said.
“Within this corridor all nations enjoy high-seas freedoms of navigation, overflight, and other internationally lawful uses of the sea related to these freedoms,” its statement read.
Taiwan‘s Defense Ministry confirmed that an American warship transited the strait from south to north, a detail also included for the first time by the Seventh Fleet itself.
