- Burns has indicated that the further into this decade we go, the greater the risks of military conflict.
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| Chinese President Xi Jinping in a file image |
CIA chief claims China could attack Taiwan 'within years to come'
The head of the CIA, William Burns, affirmed this Saturday that China could attack Taiwan in the coming years, alleging the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, "is preparing for a war" in his ambition to unify the island to the territory.
Asked in an interview with the PBG network, Burns has highlighted that, despite the fact that China has publicly insisted on its intention to control Taiwan by peaceful means, it would also have instructed its military leadership to be prepared in 2027 to launch an eventual war.
"I'm not sure I measure it in terms of months or a year. The honest answer is that the further into this decade we go, the greater the risks of a military conflict will be," the CIA chief said. Meanwhile, he stressed that the Agency's priority is not only how a conflict could affect Taiwan, but also how it would influence "the long-term geopolitical challenge posed by Xi's China."
"Over the course of the two years I've been director, we've established a new mission center, which is sort of an organizational bloc of the CIA. It's the only single-country mission center we have, centered in China. We've allocated resources, personnel, and priorities in that direction because it is a global competition", he added.
However, he recalled that Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin have formed a "quite close" association in recent years. "A few weeks before Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine when they met at the Winter Olympics in Beijing, they proclaimed a boundless friendship," Burns said.
In this sense, he has maintained that no foreign leader would have paid more attention than Xi Jinping to the war in Ukraine as well as "Russia's poor military performance", since it would serve as inspiration for his own ambitions in Taiwan.
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Politics