Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) slammed the Biden administration on Sunday, saying officials in the U.S. government are acting like “lovestruck teenagers” in dealing with their counterparts in communist China.

Cotton made the remarks during an interview on Fox News’ “Fox News Sunday” with host Shannon Bream.

“Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is over in Singapore, Chinese counterparts don’t want to meet with him there, they refuse that,” Bream said. “We’ve had these incursions with a jet, a Chinese jet and now with warships and the Taiwan Strait, some aggressive behavior there.”

“But there’s talk that this administration is looking at potentially lifting some tariffs and saying, ‘We have to do better with communication between these two countries,'” she continued. “I mean, how are we doing managing that relationship?”

Cotton responded, “Well, Biden administration officials should stop chasing after their Chinese communist counterparts like lovestruck teenagers.”

“It’s embarrassing, and it’s pathetic,” he continued. “In fact, it projects weakness to China, it encourages them to do things like buzz our aircraft, or come within a few hundred yards of our ships, encourages them to send spy balloons floating all across America. Reducing those tariffs would send the same message.”

“And to get back to this bill that we just voted on, the single best way we can deter China and Iran and Russia is to have a military capable of deterring them,” he continued. “That’s one of the core lessons of history. If you look at say World War I and World War II, there were a lot of misguided diplomatic decisions that led to those wars. But fundamentally, it was disarmament by countries like Great Britain and the United States that encouraged German ambitions and then ultimately aggression.”

WATCH:

A loud sonic boom that was felt throughout the Washington, D.C., area on Sunday reportedly came from a fighter jet that was scrambled to respond to a small aircraft that entered a no-fly zone and later crashed in Virginia.

The trespassing Cessna Citation did not respond to authorities who tried to contact the plane and is believed to have been on autopilot, a source told Reuters.

The City of Annapolis Office of Emergency Management said the “explosion” that many people online reported hearing came from the fighter jet sent to intercept the plane.

“The loud boom that was heard across the DMV area was caused by an authorized DOD flight,” said the office, using the acronym for the Department of Defense. “This flight caused a sonic boom. That is all the information available at this time.”

Fox News correspondent Lucas Tomlinson said the F-16 that responded to the Cessna Citation was “cleared supersonic to respond,” meaning the jet was cleared to fly at faster than the speed of sound. The sonic boom that people heard was caused when the jet broke the sound barrier.

UPDATE: F-16 fighter jet from DC National Guard was “cleared supersonic to respond” to unknown Cessna ignoring radio queries flying on “strange flight path” outside nation’s capital, officials say. FAA says Cessna crashed near Staunton, Virginia.

— Lucas Tomlinson (@LucasFoxNews) June 4, 2023

The F-16 deployed flares in an attempt to get the attention of the pilot, but did not appear successful, according to a statement from NORAD.

The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement the Cessna plane later crashed into a mountainous area in Virginia. There was no word about the status of anyone who was onboard the aircraft.

“A Cessna Citation crashed into mountainous terrain in a sparsely populated area of southwest Virginia around 3 p.m. local time on June 4,” the FAA said. “The aircraft took off from Elizabethton Municipal Airport in Elizabethton, Tenn., and was bound for Long Island MacArthur Airport in New York. The FAA and NTSB will investigate. The NTSB will be in charge of the investigation and provide all further updates.”