Chinese President Xi Jinping is “unsettled” by the West’s reaction to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, and is looking “carefully at what lessons [he] should draw” and apply to a potential invasion of Taiwan, CIA Director William Burns told a conference on Saturday.
Speaking at a Financial Times conference in Washington DC on Saturday, Burns told his audience that his agency figures that Russia’s advance through Eastern Ukraine and the scale of the West’s response may be influencing Beijing’s plans for Taiwan.
“It strikes us . . . that Xi Jinping is a little bit unsettled by the reputational damage that can come to China by the association with the brutishness of Russia’s aggression against Ukrainians [and] unsettled certainly by the economic uncertainty that’s been produced by the war,” Burns claimed.
The spy chief added that China is taken aback by “the fact that what Putin has done is driving Europeans and Americans closer together” and is looking “carefully at what lessons they should draw” for a potential takeover of Taiwan.
