US general: Big mistake if China attacks Taiwan
WASHINGTON, D.C.: The Pentagon’s top general warned on Wednesday (Thursday in Manila) that any Chinese attack on Taiwan would be a strategic mistake as bad as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I think it would be unwise. It would be a political mistake, a geopolitical mistake, a strategic mistake, similar to what the strategic mistake is that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has made in Ukraine,” United States Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said.
Milley did not say any attack on the self-governed island was imminent, but he said he believed that Chinese President Xi Jinping — who won last month an unprecedented third term as the East Asian country’s leader and has declared uniting Taiwan with the mainland a high priority — was a “rational actor.”
“I think he evaluates things on cost, benefit and risk, and I think that he would conclude that an attack on Taiwan in the near future would be an excessive amount of risk, and would end in a strategic debacle for the Chinese military,” he told reporters.
That would stall China’s push toward becoming the world’s top economic and military power, according to the military chief.
Milley also said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has stalled in the face of unexpectedly strong resistance from Kyiv fortified by weapons from the West, offered vivid lessons.
“One of the things people are learning is that war on paper is a whole lot different than real war,” he said. “When blood is spilled, and people die, and real tanks are being blown up, things are a little bit different. There’s a lot of friction and fog and death in combat.”
Milley noted that the Chinese military — formally called the People’s Liberation Army — had not been involved in combat since fighting the Vietnamese in 1979.
And he said that while China’s armed forces could easily open an assault on Taiwan with bombs and missiles, physically capturing the mountainous, heavily populated island would be a “very difficult military task.”
“They would be playing a very, very dangerous game to cross the straits and invade …Taiwan. They don’t have the experience, the background to do it. They haven’t trained to do it yet,” he said.