Marcos: Pelosi visit to Taiwan doesn't fire up US-China tension

President Bongbong Marcos said Saturday that the controversial visit of United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan may not have aggravated the strained US-China relations, but only demonstrated the brewing tension between the two superpowers. 

During US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's courtesy call in Malacañang on Saturday, Marcos said: “I do not think, to be perfectly candid, I did not think it raised the intensity [of the tension], it just demonstrated it — how the intensity of that conflict has been.”

“It actually has been at that level for a good while, but we got used to it and put it aside,” the President said.

Pelosi, the highest-profile elected US official to visit the Taiwan in 25 years, ended her visit on Wednesday and pledged solidarity and hailed the self-ruled island nation’s democracy.  

Her visit angered China, which has been claiming Taiwan as a breakaway province. Beijing has vowed to seize the island-nation one day, by force if necessary.

China announced it would hold live-fire military drills in the Taiwan Strait in response to Pelosi's visit, the US Navy's Seventh Fleet said the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan was operating in the Philippine Sea, south of Taiwan.

Likewise, Marcos said the recent events resulting from Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan “just demonstrates how volatile the international diplomatic scene is, not only in the region.”

“Obviously the events in the Ukraine have been of significant, significant importance to even countries like the Philippines which if we imagine is very far away,” the President said.

“So again, this just points to the fact of the importance of the relationship between the United States and the Philippines. I hope that we will continue to evolve that relationship in the face of all the changes we have been seeing and the changes that are between our bilateral relationship with the United States,” he said.

Blinken, likewise, said that the relationship between the US and the Philippines “is quite extraordinary because it is really founded in friendship, it’s forged as well in partnership.” —LBG, GMA News