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‘‘Ihope I am wrong. My gut tells me we will fight (with China) in 2025,’’ declared US Air Force General Mike Minihan last weekend. He didn’t mention what his crotch* told him, or if he ever consulted his head on the matter.
(‘‘China’s President Xi Jinping) secured his third term and set his war council in October 2022,’’ Minihan explained. ‘‘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.’’
Just why China would attack in 2025 if all that stuff is happening in 2024 is left a bit unclear – maybe the Chinese are just chronically slow off the mark – but it’s always a mistake to engage too closely with this sort of guff. However, it is definitely getting harder to avoid.
Last October, for example, Admiral Michael M. Gilday, the Chief of Naval Operations, said that the US should prepare to fight China in 2022 or 2023. (Only eleven months left!)
In the previous year Admiral Phil Davidson, then the head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, predicted that China would invade Taiwan by 2027. A relative optimist, then – but that period is now known in the trade as ‘‘the Davidson window.’’
As for the think-tank analysts writing in the foreign policy journals, they are producing articles about the coming war with China at the rate of at least two a week. (I read them so you don’t have to.) Some of them also supply blood-curdling predictions of war to the mass media whenever required – and ‘if it bleeds, it leads’.
This is fostering a fatalistic belief that a war between China and America is inevitable not only in the United States, but to a lesser extent also in China. It is not inevitable, although it is certainly possible.
War is possible because the great powers are always measuring their potential military power against each other. It doesn’t have to be linked to any particular threat or interest: the US military, for example, justify their focus on China simply because it is a ‘peer