US general worries about potential war with China in 2025

DAY

A US general has spoken out against the high risk of war with China in 2025 — most likely around Taiwan — urging his officers to be combat-ready as early as this year. 

“I hope I am wrong. My instinct tells me that we will fight in 2025,” wrote Air Force General Michael Minihan in an internal memo, the authenticity of which was confirmed by the Pentagon to AFP on Friday.

President Xi Jinping “has both a team, a motive and an opportunity for 2025”, says the military, assuring that the Taiwanese elections of 2024 will give the Chinese leader a “reason” to act.

The race for the White House, scheduled for the same year, will offer a “distracted America” ​​to China, he still judges.

This note calls on its troops to train in combat by going, among other things, to stands to shoot at targets. The general invites to “aim for the heads”.

In August, China had carried out very important military exercises around Taiwan, an unprecedented show of force, in retaliation for a visit by Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

China believes the island, with a population of 24 million, is one of its provinces it has yet to reunite with the rest of its territory since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.

It sees with dissatisfaction the rapprochement, at work in recent years, between the Taiwanese authorities and the United States, which have been providing the island with military support against Beijing for several decades.