Lyle Goldstein, a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, said the US Navy was overstretched now, “especially the surface forces”.
He said: “The US-Iran war has already proven to be a tremendous drain on these forces, so it is not a surprise that the US Navy and Pentagon strategists are trying to offload some missions to the US Coast Guard.”
Goldstein, who is also the director of the Asia programme at Defence Priorities, a Washington-based security think tank, said Washington was copying Beijing’s strategy of using the coastguard to avoid escalating tensions.
But Goldstein said that while China was unlikely to see the deployment of cutters in Southeast Asia as a challenge to its dominant maritime position in the western Pacific, cooperation between Washington and Taipei could be seen differently.
Read at South China Morning Post
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