AKIPRESS.COM - U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper is in Ulaanbaatar as part of his first international tour since accepting the Cabinet post last month, Voice of America reports.

Mongolia is not a traditional destination of U.S. defense secretaries. Chuck Hagel was the last defense secretary to visit in 2014.

The nation, sandwiched between China and Russia, is located in a “neighborhood that has a lot of mischief going on around its perimeter,” Rudy deLeon, a defense policy expert with the Center for American Progress and a former deputy secretary of defense, told VOA.

That is, in part, a major reason why Mongolia has had a “pretty consistently upward” trajectory of importance to the United States in recent years, according to a senior U.S. defense official.

“Given its location, given its interest in working more with us…all those things are a reason why I want to go there and engage,” Defense Secretary Esper told reporters traveling with him this week.

Since January 2018, the Pentagon has been implementing a National Defense Strategy (NDS) which prioritizes U.S. protection from near-peer competitors China and Russia.

One of the key action items of the NDS is to cultivate more robust partnerships to expand the United States’ network of allies. Esper said Mongolia is among the “key countries in the Indo-Pacific” where he hopes to build military relationships at a “more senior level.”

He grouped Mongolia with emerging U.S. partners Vietnam and Indonesia, whom he called “like-minded countries who believe in a free and open Indo-Pacific, who share the values we do and who believe in respecting one another’s sovereignty,” an apparent criticism of regional giant China.

While touring the Asia-Pacific this week, Esper has repeatedly criticized China for “destabilizing” the Indo-Pacific through military aggression in the South China Sea, state-sponsored theft of intellectual property and “predatory economics.”

“The United States will not stand by idly while any one nation attempts to reshape the region to its favor at the expense of others,” Esper said during a stop this week in Sydney.