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Roy Blunt lived up his surname when he said this week: “So I’m about to use four words in a row that I haven’t used in this way before, and those four words are: ‘Speaker Pelosi was right.’”
The Republican senator was praising Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the first by a speaker of the US House of Representatives in a quarter of a century.
But not everyone was so sure. In poking the hornets’ nest and enraging China, which claims the self-governing island as its territory, Pelosi deepened a rupture between the world’s two most powerful countries – and may have hurt the very cause she was seeking to promote.
On Thursday, China fired multiple missiles into waters surrounding Taiwan and began a series of huge military drills around the island; the White House summoned China’s ambassador, Qin Gang, to protest. On Friday, China said it was ending cooperation with the US on key issues including the climate crisis, anti-drug efforts and military talks.
It was yet another moment of peril in a world already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine and mass food shortages.
So why did Pelosi go? The speaker is a fervent defender of Taiwan and critic of China’s human rights abuses. During the visit, she pointed to a global struggle between autocracy and democracy, a favourite theme of Joe Biden’s, and told reporters in Taipei: “We cannot back away from that.”
But the 82-year-old may also have been rushing for a last hurrah before November’s midterm elections in which she is expected to lose the speaker’s gavel. Her televised meetings in Taiwan, sure to have registered in Beijing, appeared to some like a vanity project.
Writing just ahead of the trip, Thomas Friedman, an author and New York Times columnist, described Pelosi’s adventure as “utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible”, arguing that Taiwan will not be more secure or prosperous because of a “purely symbolic” visit.
Friedman warned that the consequences could include “the US being plunged into indirect conflicts with a nuclear-armed Russia and a nuclear-armed China at the same time”, without the support of European allies in the latter.
Biden himself had publicly admitted that the US military felt the trip was “not a good idea right now”, not least because President Xi Jinping is preparing to secure a third term at the Chinese Communist party’s national congress later this year.
