The guided-missile destroyer USS John Finn steams somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, Jan. 11, 2024. (Justin Stack/U.S. Navy)
YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — A Navy guided-missile destroyer made a trip through the Taiwan Strait this week, the first reported transit by a U.S. warship this year and one China immediately labeled provocative.
The USS John Finn steamed southwest from the East China Sea to the South China Sea over about 13 hours Wednesday, U.S. 7th Fleet spokeswoman Cmdr. Megan Greene told Stars and Stripes by email a day after the transit.
A Chinese military spokesman said the John Finn’s passage was monitored.
“Recently, the U.S. military has frequently carried out provocative actions and maliciously undermined regional peace and stability,” an unnamed spokesman for China’s Eastern Theater Command said in a Wednesday post on social media website Weibo.
Chinese troops “remain on high alert at all times,” according to the post.
U.S. ships and aircraft routinely interact with foreign military forces, Greene said, but all interactions during the John Finn’s transit were “consistent with international norms” and didn’t impact the trip.
U.S. warships, and less frequently, aircraft, routinely pass through the strait in what the Navy says is an exercise of navigational freedom. China routinely criticizes those transits as provocative.
U.S. military ships and aircraft transited the strait at least 11 times last year, a slight increase over the nine made in 2022
The John Finn’s passage was meant to demonstrate the United States’ “commitment to upholding the lawful use of international waters for all nations as a principle” and to “oppose any attempt to unilaterally change the status quo and undermine the rules-based international order” in the region, Greene added.
“No member of the international community should be intimidated or coerced into giving up their rights and freedoms,” she said. “The United States military flies, sails, and operates anywhere international law allows.”
Beijing considers democratic Taiwan a breakaway province that must be reunified with the mainland by force, if necessary.
The John Finn’s voyage comes 11 days after Taiwan’s presidential elections on Jan. 13. Lai Ching-Te, vice president and member of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, is scheduled to be sworn in as president on May 20.
It also comes two days after Taiwan reported tracking six Chinese balloons that flew over, or near, the island, according to Sunday posts by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense Ministry on X, formerly Twitter.
The last Navy transit of the strait, a P-8 Poseidon patrol and reconnaissance aircraft on Dec. 7, drew a similar response from Beijing.
