Mike Pompeo Reacts To Air Force General Predicting War With China In 2025

 Former Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo said that Chinese President Xi Jinping is “watching for American weakness” during an interview Monday after an Air Force general warned in a memo that the U.S. is on a collision course with communist China.

Four-star Air Force General Mike Minihan said in a memo last week that believes that the U.S. will be in an all-out war with China in the next couple of years.

“I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,” he wrote. “Xi secured his third term and set his war council in October 2022. Taiwan’s presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a reason. United States’ presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a distracted America. Xi’s team, reason, and opportunity are all aligned for 2025.”

Minihan said that his top priority was ingraining the fact that “unrepentant lethality matters most” in the minds of the 50,000 service members that he leads.

Pompeo addressed Minihan’s remarks during an appearance on Fox News’ “Special Report,” saying: “I take General Minihan to be serious, in the sense of he’s clearly very concerned that we’re not doing enough to prepare to deter the Chinese Communist Party.”

“I think that’s what he was really getting at – it’s hard to put timelines on any of these things: he says 2025,” Pompeo said. “But make no mistake about it, Xi Jinping is watching for American weakness. He’s watching for an absence of resolve. And if he sees opportunity, he will seize that very opportunity.”

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) said Sunday that the odds of a conflict with China by 2025 “are very high.”

“I hope he’s wrong …” McCaul said. “I think he’s right, though, unfortunately.”

“We have to be prepared for this,” McCaul said. “And it could happen … as long as Biden is in office — projecting weakness as he did with Afghanistan that led to Putin invading Ukraine — that the odds are very high we could see a conflict with China and Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific.”

Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, claimed that the possibility that the U.S. would end up in a war with China was “highly unlikely.”

“We have a very dangerous situation in China, but I think generals need to be very cautious about saying, ‘We’re going to war. It’s inevitable,’” he claimed.