The former senior intelligence officer argued that such actions would be impossible to miss
To prepare for a military operation against Taiwan, the Chinese government would have to take certain steps that simply cannot be kept secret from the West – and there is currently no sign of them, former CIA official John Culver argued on Monday.
“If China decides to fight a war of choice over Taiwan, strategic surprise would be a casualty of the sheer scale of the undertaking,” he wrote in an article published by the think-tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Culver retired from the CIA in 2020 and has written extensively about China as a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Taiwan has been ruled by nationalists who fled the mainland in 1949 after losing the civil war. According to Culver, going to war over the island – which China considers its sovereign territory – would require shifting the basis for the Communist…
