“China for 30 years has been assiduously gathering economic power in all regions of the planet, using this economic power to gather political networks, and is…today convincing those political networks to begin military cooperation to proto-alliance cooperation with China,” he said.
For example, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization started in 1996 as an economic cooperation body, but “all it produces are military exercises,” Fisher said.
He said in July, China announced the China Africa Defense and Security Forum, which includes every country on the African continent but is “controlled by the People’s Liberation Army.”
“So this is the beginning of a second proto-alliance, and they make no bones publicly [that they are] working to form a similar forum in all the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean,” he said.
Experts on the panel said China is the largest source of support outside the region for the Cuban communist regime, the Venezuelan dictatorship, and other left-wing regimes.
Retired Navy Captain Jim Fanell, a former intelligence officer and current fellow at the Geneva Center for Security, said more and more Chinese navy vessels have been going to the Caribbean.
“I expect at some point in the near future, you’re going to start seeing Chinese intelligence collection vessels operating in the Caribbean and more closely to each of our coasts, because they’ve been very frustrated that we’ve been operating inside the first island chain in the Western Pacific,” he said.
Fisher said on top of these “proto-alliances,” China is working on a power-projection military, with a navy that will have anywhere from 10 to 15 aircraft carriers by 2050, hundreds of large transport aircraft, and medium and lightweight army forces that can be deployed around the world.
“And this is the challenge that your children and your grandchildren are facing, and the reason why some of the things President Trump has done … are so very important, and why they must be continued,” he said.
Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, said he has also seen increasingly aggressive rhetoric from senior Chinese military officers.
“Increasingly there have been now remarks by senior Chinese Peoples Liberation Army officers calling for military action against the United States,” he said.
Gaffney said he would not put a “high probability” on making it through the next decade without a war on China. “It’s a function not of us starting it, but of us preventing the Chinese thinking they can benefit from doing so.”
Originally Posted by Jsp10477
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