The United States is aware “as a matter of intelligence” that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be prepared to invade Taiwan by 2027, CIA Director William Burns said on Thursday.
Burns said that Xi’s order to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military may not represent his timeline for the CCP’s invasion of Taiwan, but it demonstrates his “seriousness” in pursuing this goal.
“Our assessment at CIA is that I wouldn’t underestimate President Xi’s ambitions with regard to Taiwan,” Burns said at an event at Georgetown University in Washington.
Burns said he believes that Xi was likely “unsettled” by the Russian military’s performance in the Ukraine war and that he likely tried to evaluate the effectiveness of Russia’s weapons systems in Ukraine for his ambition toward Taiwan.
The CIA chief also warned against underestimating the motivation behind the China-Russia “no limits partnership” declared last year.
“I think it’s a mistake to underestimate the mutual commitment to that partnership, but it’s not a friendship totally without limits,” Burns noted.
China has refrained from condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, citing Russia’s “legitimate concerns on security issues” as justification. In February 2022, the two nations declared a “no limits” partnership.
According to their joint statement, Russia said it recognized Taiwan as “an inalienable part of China” and rejected Taiwan’s independence “in any form,” while the CCP backed Russia’s opposition to the enlargement of NATO.
Taiwan’s Independence
Taiwan has been a self-governing democracy since the Chinese civil war ended in 1949. Still, the CCP regards Taiwan as a breakaway province that must be united with mainland China by any means necessary.
Chinese incursions into Taiwan have occurred almost daily as the CCP has increased military pressure on the self-ruled island. Taiwan’s military detected 23 Chinese aircraft and four vessels on Feb. 2, with 17 of the aircraft crossing the Taiwan Strait’s median line.
Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said on Jan. 18 that China is “more likely” to make a move against Taiwan in 2027 as he believed that Xi might see aggression against Taiwan as a way to leave a legacy from his third term in office.
“In 2027, Xi Jinping is likely to go into his fourth term. And if in his previous three terms, he cannot claim any achievement during his office, he might need to think about something else for him to claim as his achievement or his legacy,” Wu said in an interview with Sky News.
Suspected CCP Spy Balloon
Burns said that China represents the “biggest geopolitical challenge” to the United States, and that global competition with the CCP could be “more intense” than it was with the Soviet Union.
“Competition with China is unique in its scale, and that it really, you know, unfolds over just about every domain, not just military, and ideological, but economic, technological, everything from cyberspace, to space itself as well,” he said.
Separately, the U.S. Department of Defense announced on Thursday that it had been monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that had been hovering over the continental United States.
The balloon was detected over Montana on Wednesday. Pentagon press secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said the U.S. authorities “acted immediately” to protect against the collection of sensitive information, but he did not elaborate.
A senior defense official said the U.S. government has communicated with the CCP regime about the issue “with urgency.” It also appears that this is not the first time such a balloon has been seen above the United States.
“Currently, we assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collective collection perspective,” the official said, according to the DOD. “But we are taking steps, nevertheless, to protect against foreign intelligence collection of sensitive information.”
The U.S. authorities decided not to shoot down the balloon and instead allowed it to keep floating over the country following recommendations from defense officials.
“We did assess that it was large enough to cause damage from the debris field if we downed it over an area,” the official said. “I can’t really go into the dimension—but there have been reports of pilots seeing this thing, even though it’s pretty high up in the sky. So … it’s sizable.”
Reuters contributed to this report. Article cross-posted from The Epoch Times.
Alternative Video Sources:
CIA Chief Warns of China’s ‘Serious’ Intent to Invade Taiwan by 2027 https://t.co/SJ6q5mOfeb
— JD Rucker (@JDRucker) February 3, 2023
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
I think this is going to be a moot point very soon. Last I heard, the reunification party in Taiwan is only a few votes short of taking over their parliament or whatever they have. Point was, China has been making huge gains in Taiwan’s government in the last decade and is on the verge of peaceful reunification. Why would they invade when Taiwan’s government is very close to giving everything back to them without destroying the place? I think anyone that engages in scare mongering about imminent invasion without discussing the political side of the issue is a very poor analyst and should be mocked. As for the balloon, speaking as a US citizen, I think the Pentagon officials that are making excuses not to shoot down a foreign adversary’s spy balloon are using their positions to the advantage of a foreign enemy, which is treason, and they should immediately be arrested and tried. And shoot down the freaking balloons!