Washington: US President Donald Trump has been tough on Russia, the White House has said amid criticism from his rivals of not been tough on Kremlin.
Trump’s opponents have alleged that the president in his remarks was not as tough as the National Security Strategy (NSS) which has identified Russia and China as a rival power.
“President has weighed in on Russia and his feelings on that a number of times. The policy and the strategy put forth in that very detailed paper was that of the President and it reflects his views,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters.
In his address, a day earlier, Sanders said Trump didn’t read every single page of it word-for-word.
“The President has been clear what his position is,” said.
“We’ve been tough on Russia, we’ve put sanctions on Russia, we’ve imported energy, and impacted them in a big way. The President has not been soft in this process. He chose to focus on different things in this speech, but those things were included in the NSS because they’re important, and they’re part of the administration’s viewpoints,” Sanders said.
Meanwhile, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert replied lightly to the reaction of China on the NSS.
Nauert said the US has a broad relationship with China and the two countries have differences.
“China will never seek development at the price of sacrificing other countries’ interests,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters at a news conference in Beijing.
“We urge the US to stop deliberately distorting China’s strategic intentions and discard outdated Cold War zero-sum mentalities, or risk harming others and itself,” she said.
Responding to the Chinese comments, Nauert said, “It is not what they called it out to be. We have a broad relationship with China, as we do with many nations around the world, where we have areas where we have mutual cooperation and get along great. The president has a very warm relationship with (Chinese) President Xi (Jinping)”.
“But we also have areas of disagreement. And some of the areas of disagreement include human rights, some trade issues and all that. So we can have that kind of broad-based relationship,” Nauert said.