(NewsNation) —Top U.S. Gen. Mark Milley is doubling down on his warning that China remains a threat to the nation.
“China is the greatest geopolitical challenge to the United States, and China is not shy about their goal. They want to be the number one power in the globe by mid-century,” Milley said Wednesday.
Despite Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the threat from Beijing, China has grown its influence regionally in the Asia Pacific region.
Julia Manchester, a national political reporter for The Hill, said that threatens a lot of American allies like Taiwan and Japan, for example. So this is something the U.S. is very much keeping an eye on.
“There’s also obviously the economic threat. Once China, and it is projected to do this, surpasses the United States as the biggest, or as one of the bigger economies in the world, that’s going to be a threat to the United States as well, because we know that there is going to be leverage there,” she said.
Milley called Chinese President Xi Jinping “a rational actor,” and said he didn’t believe Beijing would attempt to invade Taiwan soon, as President Joe Biden has signaled the U.S. would come to the island nation’s aid should its self-governance be threatened.
“I think he evaluates things on cost-benefit 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,” the general said of Xi. “It would throw off their ‘China Dream’ of being the number one economic and military power.”