Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr believes the Chinese are more of a threat to America than the Russians are.
Barr’s warnings about China came during a Thursday Fox News Digital interview about his memoir, “One Damn Thing After Another”.
“China is the biggest threat that the country faces, not only militarily – because they are building a very capable military — but also technologically,” Barr said, noting the United States has been the world’s technological leader. He added people are accustomed to that but China is working hard to overtake the U.S. lead in critical technologies.
“The Chinese have a comprehensive, highly aggressive plan to take control of all of the key technologies of the future, such as 5G communications, robotics, artificial intelligence – all of the technologies that are going to be pivotal in the years to come,” the former attorney general said. He added that China is getting ahead of American on a lot of those technologies “through thefts of secrets.”
Barr is very knowledgeable about China. After he earned his Masters in Chinese studies from Columbia University, in 1973, he worked as a CIA analyst for four years. He said in his memoir he wanted a career in intelligence and his strategy was to make himself an attractive candidate “by becoming an expert on China”.
“My focus on China was, again, largely pragmatic,” Barr wrote. “I had no deep-seated attraction to China as an object of academic study.” Plus, he noted Russian experts were a dime-a-dozen in the CIA because Russia had been the country’s main adversary for a long time.
An Intelligence Community assessment released this week, according to a Fox News report. It declared China a “near-peer competitor, challenging the United States in multiple arenas — especially economically, militarily and technologically — and is pushing to change global norms and potentially threatening its neighbors.”
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