I don’t know if or when China will invade Taiwan. No one really knows, other than Xi Jinping, and whatever his current plans are, he may well change his mind.
But I figure that when someone like four-star Air Force general Mike Minihan, who leads the Air Mobility Command, writes in a memo that he believes the U.S. will be at war with China by 2025, we should probably sit up and take notice.
“I hope I am wrong,” General Mike Minihan, who leads the Air Mobility Command (AMC), said in a memo to AMC personnel obtained by NBC News.
“My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,” he added. “[Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] secured his third term and set his war council in October 2022. Taiwan’s presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a reason. United States’ presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a distracted America. Xi’s team, reason, and opportunity are all aligned for 2025.”
He went on to tell personnel to accept increased risk in training in preparation for a “China fight.” Minihan also says during the month of February, all personnel should “fire a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most. Aim for the head.”
The beginning of the year 2025 is less than two years away. For perspective, two years before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in February 2020, the world wasn’t thinking too much about a possible all-out Russian war of conquest. (At that time, the world was about to have its hands full with a different kind of deadly global crisis.) Most Western observers believed that Putin was satisfied with his small-scale harassment of Ukraine’s eastern territory. Then-candidate Joe Biden had recently boasted that “Putin knows that when I am president of the United States his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over.”
Once in office, Biden and his team did not treat Putin and his regime as a lawless, aggressive, untrustworthy threat. “Stability” was the priority invoked over and over. Biden almost immediately accepted Putin’s offer to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty for five years, dropped U.S. opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline making Europe more dependent upon Russian energy exports, declined to pursue Putin’s personal wealth through sanctions, increased U.S. imports of Russian oil, and canceled the Keystone Pipeline. Biden held a summit with Putin and acted as if the Russian dictator’s bark was worse than his bite.
The U.S. foreign policy consensus almost right up until the invasion was that Vladimir Putin was ruthless but rational, and that he wouldn’t risk the whole Russian relationship with the West over some historical grievances. In the eyes of the West, a Russian invasion of Ukraine offered too much risk for too little reward. Respected, serious institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Institute for the Study of War, Lexington Institute, and publications like Foreign Policy laid out detailed assessments concluding that Putin was not going to invade Ukraine.
Well, we all know how that turned out. Sometimes all that saber-rattling communicates an intention to use that saber.
China is not Russia, and Xi Jinping is not Vladimir Putin. But sometimes, those options that seem reckless, dangerous, self-destructive, or catastrophic in the eyes of the West look pretty tempting from the opulent office of a foreign dictator. Those unthinkable scenarios can turn out to be very “thinkable” in the mind of a man convinced he will win a great victory and alter the world’s balance of power.