She risks accidental war but Nancy Pelosi is right to visit Taiwan
Although newspaper editors still talk of the August silly season, it remains the most dangerous of months, and not just because so many decision-makers are at the poolside in Greece or gunning down birds in Scotland.
There was August 1914, of course, but it was also the month in 1945 when nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when in 1961 the Berlin Wall was slapped up and when in 1968 the Warsaw Pact rumbled into Czechoslovakia. Last year it was when the US and UK staged their inglorious exit from Afghanistan. If you’re in the geopolitics business, August’s a month in which you should hope for the best and plan for the worst.
This August already seems to be living up to its savage predecessors. There are the latest twists and turns in President Putin’s war against Ukraine. The continuation of the war against terror in the form of the targeted US drone assassination of the al-Qa’ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri on the balcony of his not-so-secret Kabul bolthole. And, this week, the arrival in Taiwan of Nancy Pelosi, the US House Speaker, a move which according to the doom-mongers could yet lead to a Chinese military response either against Taiwan or against the US. It is just about feasible that all of these fronts merge or link up and turn an already bumpy summer month into the beginnings of a global meltdown.
Much depends on what is going on in Beijing’s decision-making black box. President Xi plainly wants a processional glide towards a successful 20th Communist Party Congress in the autumn. If he wants to ratchet up the pressure on Taiwan, that’s best done from the rostrum of the congress as part of his nationalist pitch to be China’s perpetual leader.
Yet there’s no doubt what he thinks of Pelosi: she has loudly denounced Chinese abuses, from the Tiananmen massacre to the persecution of Uighurs and Tibetans, and the crackdown in Hong Kong. The state-controlled press has come close to branding her an enemy of the people. She is the highest-ranking US politician to visit Taiwan in 25 years. Xi urged President Biden to stop her coming. The Pentagon advised against the visit. What if the Chinese buzz her plane when she leaves Taiwan? What if she calls for a more assertive US policy on the recognition of Taiwan?
Plenty can go wrong. It doesn’t take much more than a bit of provocative airmanship to nudge the Pelosi plane into Chinese air space, and then we could already be lurching into the realm of accidental war. Despite that risk, Pelosi made the right call.
First, the US is trying to put itself at the centre of an alliance that contains China. It will lose credibility with allies such as Japan if it backs down every time Xi tells Biden that he’s playing with fire by supporting Taiwan, the most vulnerable of Beijing’s neighbours. If Biden caved to bullying from Xi, he would lose standing within NATO too. What would the new aspiring members, Finland and Sweden, make of it?
Second, great power relations cannot be built on the premise that China is battle-ready, an invasion force in waiting. In fact, as the Asia specialist Ian Williams writes in his latest book The Fire of the Dragon, China would have to mobilise two million men to capture and occupy Taiwan. I heard similar estimates when I did a study tour of Taiwan’s military academies five years ago.
The Ukraine war has set Taiwanese generals planning: Beijing is going to be thinking long and hard before turning its campaign of harassment, cyberattacks and oppressive military drills into a war of occupation. Russia underestimated the necessary force level when it launched its land-grab six months ago. Taiwan is smaller than Ukraine but its army has been learning from Russia’s mistakes this spring; it is nimble, has trained already on US weaponry and has only a few beaches suitable for amphibian landing.
Russia had combat experience; China hasn’t fought a war since the 1970s. Russia can sidestep sanctions with its own fuel and food supplies; China would be dependent on imports.
In short, Biden may well be overstating China’s will to fight and to make good on its promises to push back on any perceived slight from the West. The zero-Covid policy has set back China’s ambitious growth plans, the population is set to shrink drastically. One forecast by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences projects a drop from 1.4 billion to 587 million by 2100.
“There certainly isn’t a China century,” says Ian Bremmer, a respected foreign policy analyst. “Indeed, there might not even be a couple of China decades. It’s increasingly plausible that China doesn’t even overtake the US as the world’s largest economy.”
That doesn’t stop Xi developing a taste for conquest. But it should act as an important backdrop to American policymaking. Xi has been getting away with a corrosive policy of denying Taiwan’s independent existence. He uses China’s commercial clout to punish Hollywood filmmakers who accidentally slip a Taiwanese flag on Tom Cruise’s leather jacket, or western airlines who dare to treat Taiwan as a separate non-Chinese destination.
Pelosi, emboldened perhaps by the likelihood of retirement after the midterm elections, does not cower at the prospect of a US-China war. Common sense tells her that it isn’t going to happen, at least not for a decade, and for sure not this August. That has freed her to take risks and tell it how it is: the US is letting itself be intimidated by Xi, the bluffer.
The Times
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