Authored by David Zhang and Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The United States is facing the greatest strategic threat in history with the new partnership between Russia and the Chinese regime, warned KT McFarland, former deputy national security adviser under the Trump administration.
“The strategic threat is from China,” McFarland said.
“The greatest strategic threat is China, Russia together; that Chinese technology, Chinese money, Chinese ruthlessness—you know, wolf-warrior diplomacy—married up with Russian natural resources and Russian military capability, that’s a really formidable adversary for the United States.”
McFarland made the remarks in an interview with EpochTV’s “China Insider” program at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando on Feb. 26.
Russia and China now boast a “no limits” partnership after Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Feb. 4. The unprecedented partnership was declared in a 5,000-word joint statement, and the two bordering nations also said that there would be “no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.”
Also in that statement, China sided with Russia to denounce enlargement of NATO, while Russia took up China’s position on Taiwan, calling the self-governing island “an inalienable part of China.”
Also on Feb. 4, Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom inked a 30-year deal with state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). The deal would see Russia sending China natural gas via a new pipeline linking the Russian far east with northeastern China.
The lengthy statement, coupled with China’s recent decision to abstain from voting on a U.N. Security Council Resolution demanding that Moscow stop its attack on Ukraine, showed that Putin and Xi “are in cahoots,” according to McFarland.
Once Xi decided to make a move against Taiwan, she said that it was absolutely certain that Putin would reciprocate by repeating China’s political stance on the self-ruled island.
“I think that may be the mind game they’re playing,” she added.
The Chinese regime has repeatedly refused to denounce Moscow’s military aggression against Ukraine and has also objected to calling Russia’s attack an invasion.
On Feb. 28, China sided with Russia again, when both nations voted against a decision by the U.N. Human Rights Council to hold an urgent debate on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In October last year, Xi vowed that “reunification” of Taiwan with China would “definitely be realized.”
Taiwan, a de facto independent entity, has announced it will impose sanctions on Russia. On March 1, Taiwanese Premier Su Tseng-chang said Taiwan will join moves by the United States and others to block certain Russian banks from the SWIFT international payments system.
“If China controls Taiwan, not only does it give China a strategic military position on the South China Sea, and all the trade that goes through the most important world maritime trade route in the South China Sea, it also puts China in position to control Taiwan’s microprocessing industry,” McFarland said.
Taiwan’s microprocessing industry produces some of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, which are tiny chips that power everything from smartphones, computers, fighter jets, to missile systems. The island is home to the world’s largest contract chipmaker TSMC.
In other words, McFarland said the United States would face a supply chain crisis if China were to get hold of Taiwan’s manufacturing plants producing these chips.
The communist regime’s ambition is not limited to taking over Taiwan.
“China doesn’t want to just be the most important country in the world and the global world order of the post-war period,” she said. “It wants to smash that international order, and recreate an order where China, like the good old days of thousands of years ago, sat in Beijing and all the vassal nations came and offered tribute while they kowtow to the emperor.”
“The Chinese plan is to pick us all off one at a time—pick off Taiwan, and maybe pick off Vietnam, and then work his way around, pick off Australia,” she added.
As such, the Chinese regime’s current partnership with Russia will be short-lived, McFarland added.
“At the end of the day, the Chinese are going to turn on the Russians, too, once they get what they want out of the Russians,” she concluded.