Pelosi heads for Singapore, but is silent on Taiwan

Americas
By Editor_1
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) walks back to her office after a news conference with House Democrats to discuss the South Asian Heart Health bill on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 28, 2022. Speculation about a stop in Taiwan, where Pelosi would be the highest-ranking US visitor in decades, has jangled nerves in both Beijing and Washington -Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
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By David E. Sanger and Vivian Wang

WASHINGTON – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi began a fraught tour of Asia on Sunday (July 31), one that administration officials say they now expect will include a stop in Taiwan, despite China’s increasingly sharp warnings in recent days that a visit to the self-governing island would provoke a response, perhaps a military one.

Pelosi was scheduled to arrive in Singapore on Monday (Aug 1), after a weekend stopover in Hawaii to consult with American commanders responsible for the Indo-Pacific. She said in a statement that she was planning to travel on with a congressional delegation for high-level meetings in Malaysia, South Korea and Japan, and did not mention Taiwan.

But it would not be unusual to omit Taiwan from an announcement given security concerns, and President Joe Biden’s aides said she was expected to proceed with the plan for the highest-level visit by an American official to the island in 25 years. Pelosi could still change her mind about travelling to Taiwan, administration officials said, but added that seemed unlikely.

Biden’s aides said he had decided against asking Pelosi directly to cancel her trip, largely because of his respect for the independence of Congress, forged during his 36 years in the Senate. He is also clearly reluctant to back down in the face of Chinese threats, including Beijing’s warning that the United States was “playing with fire,” which followed Biden’s nearly 2 1/2-hour conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday (July 28).

At its core, some officials said, the administration concluded after the call that the potential domestic and geostrategic risks of trying to halt the visit — including letting China dictate which American officials could visit a self-ruling democracy of 23 million people that China claims as its own — were greater than allowing Pelosi to proceed.

But they said that while they had collected some intelligence on China’s likely responses, they were not yet ready to release it publicly — and they conceded that they did not know the extent to which Chinese officials were willing to risk a confrontation.

In private, American officials have urged the Chinese government to shrug off the visit, noting that Newt Gingrich visited in 1997, when he was the House speaker, and that congressional delegations regularly visit the island to express American support for its defence. But the strategic environment of Gingrich’s trip was entirely different, and in recent years, Xi has made it clear he considers reunification with Taiwan a priority.

American officials were carefully monitoring Chinese government preparations over the weekend, trying to discern Beijing’s intentions. The clearest sign they saw involved the Taiwan Strait, where provocations, testing and signalling play out weekly. The Chinese military announced Saturday (July 30), with less notice than usual, that it would conduct drills with live ammunition in the waters off southeastern Fujian province, about 80 miles from Taiwan.

On Sunday, a spokesperson for the Chinese air force said, without specifying dates, that the country’s fighter jets would fly around Taiwan to demonstrate its ability to defend its territory. That raised the possibility that the exercise would be timed to meet the US Air Force plane that Pelosi and her delegation are taking. Their trip was part of a series of efforts to reassure the region that the United States is still committed to its “pivot” to the Indo-Pacific even while pouring tens of billions of dollars in military aid into Ukraine, to shore it up against the Russian invasion.

American officials doubt the Chinese military will interfere with Pelosi’s ability to land safely in Taiwan, betting that Beijing does not want a direct confrontation with the United States. But they say it is possible that Chinese planes will “escort” Pelosi’s plane, as a demonstration of control over the air routes.

That sets up the possibility, officials fear, of an accident — akin to the kind that happened two decades ago when a Chinese air force plane collided with, and brought down, an American spy plane, leading to an early crisis in the George W. Bush administration.

Officials say they have no reliable intelligence on what the Chinese government may be planning. But they expect that the largest reaction could come after Pelosi departs, and that it could include military manoeuvres in the Taiwan Strait, cyberattacks or communications cutoffs that would demonstrate Beijing’s ability to choke off the island, which is also the world’s — and China’s — largest supplier of the most advanced semiconductors in the world.

In recent weeks, American intelligence officials have warned that China may be preparing to act against the island sooner rather than later. Intelligence analysts have concluded that China may fear that the United States’ commitment to help turn the island into a “porcupine” — armed with weaponry of the kind provided to Ukraine to fend off the Russians — may make Xi and his military think that they need to move in the next 18 months, lest they lose military advantage.

The Biden administration insists that its stance on Taiwan has not changed, a message that Biden relayed to Xi during their phone call, according to the White House. Long-standing American policy acknowledges, without endorsing, China’s position that Taiwan is part of its territory, and holds that the United States would protect the island without saying exactly how.

But Biden has little official authority over Pelosi and her travel plans. And rising anti-China sentiment in both the Democratic and Republican parties makes it awkward politically for Biden to openly discourage her trip.

Domestic politics, in both China and the United States, has left little room for graceful de-escalation, said Chen Qi, a professor of international relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing. It could cost the Democrats politically if Pelosi decides not to visit Taiwan, Chen said in an interview with a journalist for Xinhua, China’s state news agency. And China cannot afford to be seen as weak in the face of a perceived provocation.

“Now it’s up to who blinks first,” Chen said.

-New York Times

 

 

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