TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — In a video interview on the U.K.’s GB News filmed on Thursday (Dec. 28), Erik Prince, a military contractor known for founding the Blackwater organization, said he expects China to target Taiwan militarily in the spring of 2024.
Prince, a military strategist and former U.S. Navy Seal, was being interviewed by Jacob Rees-Mogg about U.S. foreign policy setbacks under the Biden administration and the pressures faced by the U.S. military around the world. Prince said that amid declining U.S. credibility abroad, Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) may try to “bluster his way” into a takeover of Taiwan, saying that “it must feel like the door is wide open for them to do whatever it is they want to do.”
Prince’s comments came one day after Xi Jinping, speaking at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, resolutely vowed to stop anyone from “making Taiwan secede from China,” calling unification an “inevitable trend.”
In Prince’s remarks, he criticized the U.S. “inability to finish properly in Iraq and Afghanistan,” which he credits for the increase of military threats across the world that have taken shape under the Biden administration. In addition to ongoing conflicts involving Ukraine and Israel, Prince also mentioned escalating conflicts in the wider Middle East, which now include attacks by Houthi rebels targeting shipping vessels in the Red Sea.
Speaking about a timeline for a potential attack by China on Taiwan, Prince said May or June 2024 is a likely window for Beijing to begin cross-strait naval operations. “If they are going to take Taiwan by force, I would predict that they are going to do something this spring,” Prince said, as reported by GB News.
The day after Prince made his prediction on GB News, China announced a shakeup in its military command. With only two weeks before Taiwan’s elections, Beijing appointed PLAN Admiral Dong Jun as its newest Minister of National Defense.
After leaving Blackwater and selling the company in 2010, Erik Prince’s connections to CIA training programs were revealed in 2013. Around 2014, Prince became the chairman of a private security and logistics firm called the Frontier Services Group, a Chinese-owned company based in Hong Kong and involved in private security contract work in Africa.
Prince stepped down as chairman of the Frontier Services Group in April 2021 but is still the head of a similar organization called the Frontier Resource Group, which has almost no online footprint as of publication.
