Will President Joe Biden’s weakness end up causing World War 3 before the year is out? At least one man very familiar with war very much thinks so.
In an interview last week with British conservative outlet GBNews, Erik Prince — former Navy SEAL and founder of private military-contracting firm Blackwater — said he expected that China would “take Taiwan in spring 2024.”
The prediction came after the host — U.K. Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who also works as a commentator and host for the network — noted that Chinese President Xi Jinping “warned President Biden at the summit in [San Francisco] that China will reunify with Taiwan.”
Xi didn’t set a timetable for this, but Prince argued that China would make a try for Taiwan during the Biden administration because of Biden’s weakness on foreign policy — and that, due to weather conditions, it was most likely going to happen in the spring.
“It seems as an American — it seems like we’re in a second version of the Carter administration, from ’77 through 1980,” Prince said, referencing a miserable period of American history that covered everything from the second oil shock to the Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and subsequent hostage crisis.
“The weather window, if they are going to do something by force in Taiwan, opens around May or June because during most of the months of the year, it’s too windy.
“If they are going to take Taiwan by force I would predict that they are going to do something this spring,” he added, saying he “would be surprised if they didn’t try something under the Biden administration because, for them … it has to feel like the door is wide open for them to do whatever it is they want to do.”
And, indeed, the door was wide open to a move that might start World War 3 on a number of fronts, as Prince pointed out.
“The foreign policy setbacks that we’re experiencing are often and increasing in occurrence,” Prince told Rees-Mogg.
Has the world gotten more chaotic since Joe Biden took office?
“Now, apparently, you can shoot at U.S. Navy warships hundreds of times and shoot at Americans in the Middle East without consequence,” he said, referencing the current unrest caused by Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists.
“Now you have the Houthis that have even blocked one of the busiest waterways in the planet,” the Red Sea, “taking out more than 50 percent of the global container trade,” he added.
“Again, it’s a catastrophic loss of American credibility and deterrence.”
The left — and indeed, some of the libertarian-leaning right — might despise Price for his role as founder and former CEO of Blackwater, which played a critical role in contracting military services during the post-9/11 conflicts and Afghanistan and Iraq.
That said, the man knows his military — and it’s not like there aren’t plenty of sabers being rattled out of Beijing that could end up starting a shooting war.
NBC News first reported on Dec. 20 that “Chinese President Xi Jinping bluntly told President Joe Biden during their recent summit in San Francisco that Beijing will reunify Taiwan with mainland China but that the timing has not yet been decided, according to three current and former U.S. officials.”
“Xi told Biden in a group meeting attended by a dozen American and Chinese officials that China’s preference is to take Taiwan peacefully, not by force, the officials said,” according to NBC.
He had also asked the White House, prior to the summit, to publicly profess that it supported the “peaceful reunification” of the communist nation with its smaller democratic island counterpart, according to NBC. That was something something that, to the president’s very minimal credit, those at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. refused to do, NBC reported.
NBC also reported that Xi told U.S. diplomats that American military predictions he would take the island in 2025 or 2027 were incorrect and that he hadn’t set a time frame.
“The revelations provide previously unreported details about a critical meeting between the two leaders that was intended to reduce tensions between their countries,” the NBC report noted.
“Xi’s private warning to Biden, while not markedly different from his past public comments on reunifying Taiwan, got the attention of U.S. officials because it was delivered at a time when China’s behavior toward Taiwan is seen as increasingly aggressive and ahead of a potentially pivotal presidential election in the self-governing democratic island next month.”
For its part, Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party seems desperate to get Washington’s attention on the matter.
On Wednesday, the party announced that Hsiao Bi-khim — Taiwan’s envoy to the United States, nicknamed the “cat warrior” — is its nominee for vice president, the U.K. Guardian reported.
How that move will affect the election is anyone’s guess, but the fact that the party is betting on a Columbia-educated woman with ties to the U.S. diplomatic community to help it at the ballot box is indicative of just how desperately Taiwan’s leaders want to get Joe Biden’s ear before Beijing does any sort of “peaceful” reunification.
Unfortunately for the Taiwanese, getting Joe Biden’s ear doesn’t seem to be worth much these days. The fact that we’re even talking about such a move by China — which could ultimately predicate World War 3 — is indicative of the state of the world with a diminished octogenarian as the leader of the world’s only free superpower.
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