Republican presidential hopeful and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said on Tuesday that if the U.S. stops aiding Ukraine in the war against Russia, China will take it as a sign of weakness and invade Taiwan – and American soldiers will need to be on the frontlines.
Christie warned that should the U.S. “cut and run” from Ukraine, China would see it as a sign of frailty and launch an invasion against Taiwan, and “American men and women” would be needed to fight “to protect the freedom of Taiwan,” during an interview on MSNBC Tuesday morning.
Christie suggested that a large presence in international affairs is needed to make the U.S. “bigger, stronger, richer, [and] freer.”
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“Russia-Ukraine is the undercard … because the Chinese, who are funding the Russian aggression against Ukraine, are watching. If we cut and run on Ukraine, the next fight is going to be in Taiwan. And there, it’s not going to be us just supplying weapons. It’s going to be American men and women who are going to be sent three-quarters of the way around the world to fight there,” Christie said.
“They’re going to have to fight, there not only to protect the freedom of Taiwan, but for those who don’t care about that, be practical,” Christie said. “Two-thirds of the world’s semiconductors are produced in Taiwan. Everything that runs our cellphones, our computers, our automobiles, and just about every other element of American life now, will be controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. I don’t think that’s a place that we want to be in for a practical economic or technological perspective.”
“And the folks in the Middle East, whether it’s the Saudis, the Emiratis, [or] the Qataris, are going to look and say, ‘it’s not worth it to be friends with the United States. We might as well cut the best deal we can with the Chinese, because when things get tough, Americans run the other way,’” Christie noted.
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Christie evoked former presidents who involved the U.S. in global conflicts and said the war in Ukraine is the next fight in which the U.S. must prove itself to retain “leadership around the world.”
“We had a country after the revolution. We had a united country, free of slavery, after the Civil War. We protected a free Europe and a free rest of the world and became the leader of the world after World War II … that’s the kind of thing we should be doing. The Ukraine fight, Joe, is the undercard. If we do it right, there won’t be other fighting,” Christie said.
Christie met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a surprise visit to Kyiv last Friday.
He also toured parts of Ukraine that had previously been occupied by Russia in 2022, including Bucha, a city in Kyiv where Russian forces reportedly killed hundreds of civilians.
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