It’s now up to Beijing as to how much of a military crisis it wants to create in response to US house Speaker Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan.
Xi Jinping’s government has forced itself into making a big demonstration of displeasure through its exaggerated rhetoric in the lead-up to the visit. The Chinese foreign ministry has declared it “sternly warns” the US that the People’s Liberation Army will “not sit idly by” if such an outrage as a Pelosi visit should take place.
Senior Chinese ambassadors have described the visit as “provocative and dangerous”.
This is, of course, ridiculous. There is no reason any US official should not visit Taiwan, which has never been ruled by communist China, and has been ruled for only four years by mainland China since 1895.
The Chinese government has directed its media to take an ultranationalist and aggressive public stance on the Pelosi visit. However, the sense of crisis has been heightened by the doddering incompetence of Joe Biden and the baffling, incoherent way he has handled this. Biden said publicly he didn’t want Pelosi to go to Taiwan. The feebleness of the Biden persona right now is evident in that he is sufficiently intimidated by Chinese pressure that he would try to talk Pelosi out of making the visit.
Biden’s feebleness is further reinforced by the fact he couldn’t even convince Pelosi to do as he wanted.
The Biden-Pelosi conflict – in which Pelosi is wholly in the right – sends a message of confusion, hesitancy, lack of purpose and above all weakness from Biden.
At the same time, the US system is strong and senior US officials have issued statements that Pelosi will be protected and that Beijing should not use her visit as a pretext to take aggressive action.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is extremely important that senior and powerful Americans, like Pelosi, and other international leaders visit Taiwan to demonstrate solidarity with the island democracy, one of the world’s few Chinese-speaking democracies.
Biden’s characteristic confusion and indecision, combined with an astonishing timidity in this case, is all the more baffling because when he visited Asia in May, he asserted without equivocation that the US would intervene militarily if China ever attacked Taiwan.
Although the US has formal commitments to Taiwan’s security under its Taiwan Relations Act, this Biden statement was way beyond official US policy, which opposes any unilateral change to the status quo between Taiwan and China, but also maintains a studied “strategic ambiguity” about whether it would intervene militarily.
Once Pelosi is gone from Taiwan, it is likely that Beijing will drastically increase its dangerous air force incursions into Taiwan’s air space, including its Air Defence Identification Zone.
It’s also likely to accelerate aggressive military exercises near Taiwan, including perhaps confronting and threatening Taiwanese and even US and allied vessels. This would be dangerous, but would be an intensification of existing patterns of Chinese aggression.
In all this, Pelosi has done nothing wrong. Giving in to Beijing’s threats would only have encouraged it to make more threats in the future. Any military tension that Beijing now creates is entirely its own choice.
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