Clinton threatened to 'ring China with missile defense' in leaked emails

(Image credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

last updated 14 October 2016

Hillary Clinton took a hawkish stance on China in leaked excerpts of speeches she gave to Wall Street audiences, the Associated Press reports.

Clinton framed her comments with concern that neighboring North Korea, which has long looked to China — in name if increasingly not in practice a fellow communist regime — for aid and trade relationships, could develop the capacity to launch a nuclear missile that "could actually reach Hawaii and the West Coast theoretically."

If that happens and China does not control the situation, she said in a 2013 speech, "We're going to ring China with missile defense. We're going to put more of our fleet in the area. So China, come on. You either control them or we're going to have to defend against them." Clinton's expression of willingness to use U.S. military presence to force Chinese compliance with American demands could offer a preview of the foreign policy of a Clinton White House.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.