Former Undersecretary of Defense Robert Wilkie told Newsmax on Tuesday that weakening the Russians, as the Ukrainians did over the weekend with a drone strike on Kremlin airbases and aircraft, weakens the Chinese and is a “great threat” to the United States.
“This is the most complicated national security environment in the post-World War II era, because we’re not just looking at the old sclerotic Soviet Union,” Wilkie said on “Wake Up America.” “They were pretty one-dimensional. They were brute force and nothing else.
“Behind all of this, behind the Iranians, behind the Russians, behind the North Koreans is China. China’s designs to replace the United States as the most important power on the planet, not just in military, but in economic terms, is there. The Russians are joined at the hip with the Chinese. The Iranians are joined at the hip with the Chinese.”
Wilkie cited a report published Monday that detailed the amount of material China is sending to support Russia as Moscow continues its long-running fight against Ukraine.
“They’re knee-deep into this,” Wilkie said of China. “But I would also say that Russia’s ability to menace the rest of the world, if they can’t handle Ukraine, there’s no way that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin can handle Finland, Poland, or any of our neighbors in Eastern Europe.”
Putin hosted a parade last month to mark the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, but Wilkie said that “shells of tanks” had to be manufactured to appear in the procession “because he has no more tanks.”
“That was what [Putin] used in his parade,” he said. “A bunch of theater props, because all of his tanks are gone. And so, I think weakening the Russians, as the Ukrainians have done, actually weakens the Chinese and that’s the great threat for the United States.”
As for Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb, which reportedly destroyed more than 40 Russian strategic bombers Sunday, Wilkie said that the daring attack would have made the Mossad and all Israelis “proud.”
“This is right up with the Israeli attack on the 1,500 Hezbollah leaders and fighters with the cell phones last year,” he said. “This is a remarkable feat, regardless of who helped them in terms of mapping out where they should go.”
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