A US general has spoken out against the high risk of war with China in 2025 – most likely around Taiwan – and urged his officers to be combat ready as early as this year.
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“I hope I’m wrong. My gut tells me we’re going to fight in 2025,” Air Force Gen. Michael Minihan wrote in an internal memo authenticated by the Pentagon to AFP on Friday.
President Xi Jinping “has both a team and a motive and an opportunity for 2025,” the military said, assuring that Taiwan’s 2024 election would give the Chinese leader a “reason” for action.
The race for the White House scheduled for the same year will offer China a “scattered America,” he says.
This note tells his troops to train in combat, including going to the stands to shoot at targets. The general urges “aim for the heads.”
In August, China held major military exercises around Taiwan in an unprecedented show of force in retaliation for a visit by Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the US House of Representatives.
China believes the island, with a population of 24 million, is one of its provinces that it has not successfully reunited with the rest of its territory since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
She is dissatisfied with the rapprochement that has been underway in recent years between the Taiwanese authorities and the United States, which has provided the island with military support against Beijing for several decades.