America Daily Reporter Arleen Richards talks to Brad Johnson, a former CIA operations officer and intelligence expert, about the biggest long-term strategic threats facing the United States.
FILE – In this June 9, 2019, file photo, protesters display a banner with images of Chinese President Xi Jinping during a march along a downtown street against the proposed amendments to an extradition law in Hong Kong. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu, File)(Use courtesy SOH)
Ex-CIA Officer on Strategic Threats to US, Putin’s Unsavory Wealth, and Socialism
So you are also an op-ed writer for the Epoch Times. And you’ve written a number of articles about the area of intelligence. One of your recent articles is titled “The Math of Long-Term Strategic Threats to the US.” So tell us, how does the U.S. government view long-term strategic threats?
Brad Johnson: The way government refers to long-term strategic threats is what has commonly become known as “four plus one.” The “four” being the four countries of China, Russia, North Korea and Iran; and the “one” being separated out as terrorism. So no disagreement on my part as to the fact that those are all long-term strategic threats to one degree or another.
China Is the Biggest Threat to US
Now, one of the points I make in this article is that, unfortunately, I think it implies not something purposely deceptive, but I think it implies something that’s important and not accurate. And that is the relative threat between these things. And China is far and away, head and shoulders above everybody else as the long-term strategic threat.
Brad Johnson: They’re controlling a lot of the economic issues that exist, food and trying to take over and create another monitary system. And at the same time, they’re implementing draconian control systems over their own population in China. They have around 50 million cameras set up, controlled, and operated by the government to watch their own people. And that’s not just in the big cities, that’s out in some of the small villages. Now they’re even controlling the population with these cameras in smaller rural villages… So there is nobody else out there that can compare to China. They’re just head and shoulders above anybody else for their military threat.
Russia Is a Lesser Threat
Brad Johnson: Vladimir Putin is the richest man on the planet, and he’s interested in building that new dacha on the Black Sea and enjoying his money. And you can see he goes and gets plastic surgery and is famous for having these girlfriends and playing on the hockey team… He’s out having a good time, living a good life. Now he’s also interested in changing over back some areas of the Soviet Union and so on. But he’s not out trying to do what China’s trying to do. He’s just a different type of threat, lesser type of threat than what you see out of China, not so aggressive and not so expansionist.
If we’ve got all our focus on something with Russia collusion and it’s not on China, this stuff is all gonna bite us in the rear end. We gotta be on top of it, and all the national security people need to keep that at the forefront.
