WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The United States is locked in a covert economic war with China, White House chief strategic Steve Bannon claimed in an interview published Wednesday.
"We’re at economic war with China," Bannon told the American Prospect magazine, adding the US administration needed to be "maniacally focused" on it in order to stay an economic power.
The official said the next few decades would decide who would be a "hegemon." "If we continue to lose it, we're five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we'll never be able to recover," he warned.
The strategist dismissed the ongoing standoff with North Korea as "just a sideshow," stressing there was no military solution to it that would not put ten million South Korean lives at risk.
Bannon said he might look into a deal on a US military pullout from the peninsula in return for a verifiable freeze in the North’s nuclear research. China and Russia have been calling for a simultaneous freeze in North Korean tests and joint US-South Korean military drills. Washington refused, while Pyongyang never responded to this proposal.
