A top US Air Force general has predicted the US and China will likely go to war in 2025, in the most dramatic warning ever from a senior military officer about the likelihood of war. conflict over Taiwan.
General Mike Minihan, head of the US Air Mobility Command, said the two military powers risked finding themselves at war due to a series of circumstances that would embolden Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,” Minihan wrote in a private note to his top commanders obtained by NBC News and seen by the Financial Times.
“Xi got his third term [as Communist party general secretary] And put [sic] his council of war in October 2022. Taiwan’s presidential elections will be held in 2024 and will offer Xi a reason,” Minihan wrote. Minihan added that the 2024 presidential elections in the United States would create a “distracted America” that would benefit the Chinese president.
“Xi’s team, reason and opportunity are all lined up for 2025,” he concluded.
The memo comes as tensions remain high over Taiwan, a democratically governed country over which China has long claimed sovereignty. Minihan’s comments are the starkest prediction from a senior military commander and a rare example of a senior officer suggesting so clearly that the United States would respond to a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
The comments come a week before Secretary of State Antony Blinken will become the first cabinet secretary in President Joe Biden’s administration to visit China.
In the past two years, China has conducted larger warplane sorties near Taiwan. Last August, the Chinese military conducted large-scale drills that included firing missiles over Taiwan in response to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei.
Underscoring the tension, Biden has said four times that he would order the US military to intervene if China attacks Taiwan. His warnings appeared to change a long-standing policy known as “strategic ambiguity” under which Washington does not say whether the US military would intervene in a conflict over Taiwan.
Over the past two years, several US military commanders have given approximate timelines for possible Chinese military action against Taiwan. In March 2021, Admiral Philip Davidson, then head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, said China could attack Taiwan by 2027, in comments that sparked concern in the US and around of the Indo-Pacific regarding a threat to Taiwan.
Last October, Admiral Michael Gilday, the head of the US Navy, said the Pentagon must be ready for military action at all times.
“When we talk about the 2027 window, in my mind it has to be a 2022 window or potentially a 2023 window,” Gilday told the Atlantic Council, in comments dismissed by some as a clumsy effort to remind the military that he always had to be ready to fight at all times.
As head of Air Mobility Command, Minihan oversees air-related logistics in the U.S. military. The four-star general was previously deputy chief of the Indo-Pacific Command, which would be directly responsible for commanding US forces in any conflict with China.
Eric Sayers, a former Indo-Pacific Command adviser, said Minihan had been at the “tip of the spear” in the Pacific for more than a decade and understood the Chinese threat “better than almost anyone. in uniform”.
“The language used in the memo is stark and will make some uncomfortable, but memos of this type are neither written for public consumption nor as a sophisticated intelligence assessment of conflict potential,” said Sayers.
He said people should interpret the document as “controlled correspondence to Minihan’s subordinates that he expects them to act with a sense of urgency to improve command readiness.”
The Pentagon and the White House had no comment.
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