“We are probably not going to be able to do anything to stop, slow down, disrupt, interdict, or destroy the Chinese nuclear development program that they have projected out over the next 10 to 20 years,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley on March 29 at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. “They’re going to do that in accordance with their own plan.”
Milley is wrong about China’s nuclear weapons ambitions. He is, unfortunately, expressing the same pessimism that pervaded the Nixon, Ford and Carter years, when the American foreign policy establishment took the Soviet Union as a given and therefore promoted détente.
America can stop China’s nuclear weapons development and other monumental programs.
The Chinese Communist Party needs America for, among other things, money, and the U.S. does not have to provide it.
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“The one resource which Xi Jinping’s ambition has overreached is cash,” Gregory Copley, the president of the International Strategic Studies Association and editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, told Gatestone. “Beijing cannot, in the short term, provide the cash needed to dominate the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and other places.”
The fundamental problem for the audacious Chinese ruler is that China’s economic growth is stumbling. China’s official National Bureau of Statistics reported that gross domestic product last year grew 3.0%, well below the regime’s announced target of “around 5.5%.”
Read more: Gatestone Institute
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