On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Early Start,” author, Washington Post columnist, and CNN political analyst Josh Rogin stated that China isn’t pausing its plans to invade Taiwan, and Xi is “actually speeding up his plans” and is learning from the mistakes Russia has made and will do a better job of invading Taiwan than Russia did.
Rogin said, “Vladimir Putin denied that he had any plans to attack Ukraine until he attacked Ukraine. And we’re seeing a very similar scenario play out in China, where the leader is preaching to his people about historical grievances with the west and using that to menace his democratic neighbor, Taiwan.”
He continued, “And the terrible part for the Taiwanese is that Vladimir Putin had to go first. So, he made a lot of mistakes. And Xi Jinping is learning from those mistakes. And according to U.S. officials I talked to, Xi Jinping…if he does invade Taiwan, he’s going to be much better at it. In other words, he’s going to go quicker and he’s going to be even more brutal and more devastating and he’s going to make sure that he gets that capital city before they have a chance to rally the international community to defend them and he’s going to know what our economic playbook is and he’s going to fight the information war better than Putin did. And what that should tell us, in the view of a lot of U.S. officials that I talked to, is that we should probably learn from the Ukraine war as well when we think about how to defend Taiwan. We should give them the things that they’re going to need to fight a Ukraine-style insurgency, a Ukraine-style pushback against an invasion. The problem, of course, is that all of those things are right now being poured into Ukraine, which makes it really hard for the Taiwanese to really get their hands on them.”
Rogin added that the sanctions that have been implemented against Russia have caused Xi “to think about how to insulate China from [those types] of sanctions, and that’s what he’s doing. He’s not pausing. He’s actually speeding up his plans. What we see now is the head of the Chinese government meeting with all of the international banks to make sure that they know that if China attacks Taiwan, they’re not going to stand for those kinds of sanctions. And it’s going to be a lot more difficult, the Chinese economy is a lot bigger than the Russian economy. It’s more intertwined with our economy than Russia’s is. It’s going to be a lot harder to bring sanctions on China than it would be on Russia. So, no, I don’t think it gives him pause. I think it makes him speed up his plans actually.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.