US-China military conflict will lead to ‘nuclear war’

An analyst says the US has an “impetus to express military hostility” toward a rising China and warns that a potential conflict between the two superpowers could lead to a “nuclear war.”

“If the United States and China actually went to war, there is a strong possibility of a nuclear war, either between China and the United States or between Russia and the United States as an ally of China potentially or in the event to protect its own geopolitical interests,” Don DeBar told Press TV on Wednesday.

He made the comments after a Russian expert said China would be able to defeat the United States during a possible conflict in the Asia-Pacific region within the next six years.

“It’s highly probable that China, after the completion of the current cycle of reforming and rearming its armed forces through 2020, will be capable of defeating US forces and its allies in the course of some local conflict in East Asia,” Vassily Kashin wrote in an editorial published by the Voice of Russia last week.

“Today the US is facing an internal crisis and dearth of funds” which will force America to “accept defeat” in a future battle, according to Kashin, a senior research fellow at the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.

DeBar, however, said the possibility of a full-blown military conflict between China and the United States in the Pacific is an “interesting speculation.”

“There is a conflict of interests that exists between these two powers and there is willingness on the part of the United States to use war as one of the parts of its tool box,” he said.

“China is I think more mature in many ways and certainly not hostile power like the United States is and so hopefully that, and just general sanity, means if there is a battle it will not escalate into a greater war,” he added.