House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful lawmaker in the US Congress, has returned from a trip to Asia that included a stopover in Taiwan. The consequences of this visit are just beginning.
When the first media reports surfaced that she wanted to visit the island, China’s regime began issuing warnings of grave consequences. The United States, Beijing officials insisted, was playing with fire.
Furthermore, Joe Biden, the pressured US president and leader of Pelosi’s Democratic Party, made it clear through aides and leaks to the media that he thought a stopover in Taiwan was an unnecessarily provocative and ill-timed idea. His government is trying to cool rising tensions with China, and Biden knew the trip would do the opposite.
Pelosi decided to go because she knows she is nearing the end of her political career and wants to be remembered as a fearless leader to defend a democracy trapped in the shadow of a bully authoritarian giant.
His supporters point out that there is precedent for such a visit. A quarter of a century ago, then-mayor Newt Gingrich ignored Beijing’s shrill warnings and went to Taipei, the Taiwanese capital. But a lot has changed in 25 years. The US’s global military might remains unparalleled, but China’s own military might, at least in its immediate vicinity, is now much greater.
In the 1990s, China had to accept that threats to directly confront the US Navy would not add much to its negotiating capacity. Today the balance of forces is much less clear.
And the timing is much more sensitive, because China is weeks away from a historic Communist Party congress at which leader Xi Jinping, architect of the country’s aggressive foreign policy, will choreograph his own coronation for a third term that breaks with the history of institutional government of modern China. This is not a time when the Beijing leader will ignore an American act of assertiveness he has already denounced.
The most important thing that Pelosi’s stopover in Taiwan did was to highlight once again the unsustainable absurdity of the US-China Taiwan deal. The Chinese regime continues to pretend it has the right to force 23 million citizens of democratic Taiwan to accept the Communist Party’s right to impose a police state on them.
Washington continues to pretend it cares as much about Taiwan’s future as China does. Official US policy is to recognize that there is only “one China” in theory, but leave open the possibility of waging war to prevent Beijing from using force to create this “one China” in practice.
President Biden added to the confusion by insisting on three separate occasions that the US would fight China to protect Taiwan, a statement that has been carefully avoided by former presidents. Despite the clear statements, White House representatives have tried to shield Washington’s strategic ambiguity, insisting that Biden has not changed the country’s policy.
Meanwhile, the Chinese foreign minister described Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan as “manic, irresponsible and highly irrational”, before Beijing responded by firing ballistic missiles into the sea, a display of frustrated fury worthy of a North Korean autocrat.
The biggest concern is that Pelosi’s visit has set new precedents. China’s live-fire military exercises in waters that Taiwan considers to be within its territory will make even greater provocations much more likely in the future. Xi is now more likely to use the Party Congress to set new limits for Taiwan that future US officials will be tempted to test.
The US and China are not on the brink of war. Both governments recognize that in today’s globalized world, there is no Berlin Wall to protect security and prosperity on one side from potential turmoil on the other. Both coexist with the threat of mutually assured economic destruction.
But Pelosi’s provocative trip allows the Chinese military to rehearse for a future war, as well as prompting China’s leaders to save honor by drawing new red lines for Taiwan and raising fresh doubts about the long-term stability of the Taiwanese economy.
Beijing’s belligerent response, in turn, encourages China’s hawks in Washington to keep pushing hard on Taiwan — without a credible plan for a response if the pressure will ever turn into action.
