US: The European Union has not understood the United States' deep concerns about the EU's plans to lift an arms embargo on China, EU ambassador to the US John Bruton has said.
Speaking in Washington, the former taoiseach said the US equally fails to understand that EU arms exports would be heavily regulated if the ban is lifted.
The US fears that sophisticated EU weaponry could be used against Taiwan, which the US has pledged to protect.
"From an American point of view, the lifting of the arms embargo is seen as a symbolic gesture, a gesture of approval of China that is, in their minds, both premature and ill-timed - ill-timed, in particular, because of the recent law passed by the People's Congress about Taiwan, so there are a lot of misunderstandings of one another's positions here," Mr Bruton told The Irish Times.
The EU believes, he said, that the arms embargo, which was imposed in 1989, should be lifted because relations with China should be "normalised".
The EU currently bans arms sales to only four countries (Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma and China), he commented.
"It isn't treating China as a normal country emerging and making gradual progress towards the sort of involvement in world affairs that we would all want to see," he said.
"It is anomalous, for instance, that we don't have an arms embargo on Syria. The EU doesn't have an arms embargo on Iran. It doesn't have an embargo on Turkmenistan, or it hasn't an arms embargo on Liberia, but it does have one on China."
