The US military is confident that it would win a war against China if a conflict broke out in the Taiwan Strait, US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Charles Q. Brown said at a forum on Saturday.
During an interview at the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado, on Saturday, CNN reporter Jennifer Griffin asked Brown about the possible outcome of a US-China war in the Taiwan Strait.
“Can the US win a war against China if Beijing tries to take Taiwan, from your military perspective?” Griffin asked.
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“I’m fully confident in our forces. You should be too. We are the most lethal, most respected combat force in the world, and every nation I go to wants to be like us,” Brown said.
“We have to be an example. If we have a conflict with China, it has to be dealt with as a nation. If we are challenged by the PRC [People’s Republic of China], we will be there,” he said.
Commenting on how a US-China war would play out, he said it would be as brutal as World War II.
Brown said he believes that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is focused on the logistics of a potential invasion before sending troops across the Taiwan Strait.
Also speaking at the forum, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that war in the Taiwan Strait would be “calamitous for everyone,” and that it remained “of paramount importance to US policy” that peace and stability in the Strait be maintained.
Asked by a reporter whether the US should ramp up its military presence in the Indo-Pacific region, Sullivan said that the US had already been strengthening multinational partnerships with allies in the region.
Citing partnerships with Australia, the Philippines and Japan, Sullivan said that “the combination of these activities will have a material impact on the physical presence and distribution of force of the United States” in the region, “not to start a war, but to prevent a war.”
Separately, while speaking with US National Public Radio’s Louise Kelly during the forum, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said a Taiwan crisis is a world crisis.
“If there were to be a crisis over Taiwan, it would be a crisis that affects quite literally everyone in the world, not just the immediate neighbors,” Blinken said.
The US was “impressing upon China the imperative of not having a crisis, not stirring the pot, not disturbing the status quo, preserving peace and stability,” he said. “The more you have that collective weight on China, I think, the more they’re likely to not lead us in that direction.”
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