Pentagon Report Says China Feared U.S. Would Start War Ahead of 2020 Election
The Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on China’s military capabilities put out Wednesday details how China believed the U.S. posed a serious military threat in the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
The report, which also raises concerns about China’s increasing nuclear and ballistic missile build-up, also confirms that then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper directed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley to call his Chinese military counterpart and reassure him the U.S. would not attack.
In later October of 2020, the Chinese Ministry of National Defense also confirmed that Esper used official channels to reassure China that the U.S. “had no intention of instigating a military crisis against China.”
Miley’s calls to China, first made public in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book Peril resulted in angry condemnation from critics who saw Miley as undermining then-President Donald Trump.
A fact sheet of the report says that “widespread speculation” in the Chinese media that the U.S. would “deliberately instigate a conflict” in the final days before the election resulted in a large-scale military drill, an increase in readiness by the Chinese military, and additional deployments.
The report, titled “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” warns that China could have 700 nuclear warheads by 2027 – a significant increase from the 2020 report that said China had a nuclear stockpile of about 200 warheads, which could double over the next decade.
Milley spoke briefly at the Aspen Security Forum ahead of the report’s release saying, “We are witnessing one of the largest shifts in global and geostrategic power that the world has witnessed.” Miley noted that China’s recent hypersonic missile test and other military advancements must be taken seriously by the rest of the world.
The report is based on information collected through December 2020 and includes a section on China’s biological weapons, but did not look at the origins of Covid-19.
U.S. intelligence agencies released last week a report on their review of the source of Covid-19, which noted they may never be able to determine the origins of the pandemic.
