Pompeo talks about US reposturing troops, mentions India, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia

[TamilNet, Thursday, 25 June 2020, 23:53 GMT]
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, responding a question on the recent decision by US President Donald Trump concerning the reduction of the US forces present in Germany, said the judgement was about how the US was going to posture its resources around the world. “[I]n certain places there will be fewer American resources. There’ll be other places – I just talked about the threat from the Chinese Communist Party, so now threats to India, threats to Vietnam, threats to Malaysia, Indonesia, South China Sea challenges, the Philippines. We’re going to make sure we’re postured appropriately to counter the PLA. The remarks of the US State Secretary and former CIA Director in an online meeting with German Marshall Fund’s Brussels Forum came on Thursday, a day before US Defence Secretary Mark Esper was set to visit London and Brussels.

Excerpts from Pompeo’s response to a question posed by Bojan Pancevski, the Germany Correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, follow:

“It’s been a long time since there has been a strategic review of our force posture all across the world. We undertook that starting about two and a half years ago, whether that was our forces in Africa, our forces in Asia, the forces we have in the Middle East, and in Europe. We began to say these are often decisions that were made in a different time; should we reallocate those in a different way; should we have a different composition of those forces? Everyone always wants to talk about ground troops. I get it. I was a young tank officer – you described that – and there’s nothing I like as much as a good M1 tank. But it’s often the case that the capacity to deter Russia or other adversaries isn’t determined any longer by just having a bunch of folks garrisoned someplace.

“And so we really want back, fundamentally relook – what is the nature of the conflict? What’s the nature of the threat and how should we allocate our resources, whether that’s our resources in the Intelligence Community, our resources from the Air Force and the Marines and Army? Our broad set of allocation of security apparatus, our ability to counter cyber threats – how do we allocate them? What’s the best way to do this? And the decision that you see the President made with respect to Germany is an outcome from a collective set of decisions about how we’re going to posture our resources around the world.

“I’ll close with this last thought on – in answer to your question. This is going to dictate that in certain places there will be fewer American resources. There’ll be other places – I just talked about the threat from the Chinese Communist Party, so now threats to India, threats to Vietnam, threats to Malaysia, Indonesia, South China Sea challenges, the Philippines. We’re going to make sure we’re postured appropriately to counter the PLA. We think that’s the challenge of our time, and we’re going to make sure we have resources in place to do that.

“To the extent that that change, the difference in what the United States decides to do, impacts adversely a threat someplace, it may be that other nations need to step up and take responsibility for their own defense in ways that they hadn’t done previously. So we want to do this in full consultation with all of our partners all around the world, and certainly our friends in Europe.”

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US Department of State :

A New Transatlantic Dialogue

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