- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is traveling to Asia and may make a controversial visit to Taiwan.
- Experts say such a visit could raise the risk of an “incident” that could lead to a military crisis in the region.
- “If she leaves, the prospect of a crisis increases significantly as China will have to respond,” a former US diplomat told Insider.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi left on Friday for a tour of Asia that could include a controversial stop in Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy at the center of growing tensions between Beijing and Washington.
Top China experts warn that a visit to Taiwan by Pelosi, who will fly a military plane, raises the risk of an “incident” that could trigger a military crisis in the region.
“There is a risk of an accident, not a risk of an immediate Chinese attack on Taiwan,” Bonnie Glaser, a leading China expert and director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told Insider.
Pelosi will be the most senior US lawmaker in more than two decades to visit Taiwan, an island democracy of 23 million people that mainland China’s rulers, the same ones who have repressed democratic Hong Kong, have long had in their sights.
The prospect of Pelosi visiting the island has sparked heated rhetoric and warnings from Beijing, and reports suggest the Pentagon is making plans to possibly call in US military aircraft and ships to provide additional security near Taiwan if the House speaker visits. And repeated mixed messages from the Biden administration about whether the U.S. would respond militarily to a Chinese attack on Taiwan could contribute to heightened tensions between Beijing and Washington.
Glazer said there was a risk that a Chinese military aircraft would try to “interfere” with a plane carrying Pelosi and perhaps even try to prevent it from landing in Taiwan.
However, Glaser stressed that even if China sends fighter jets and Taiwan mounts its own warplanes in response, “we are unlikely to see a shootout.”
“But it does increase the potential for an accident because these fighters would be flying very close together and in ways that they haven’t done in the past,” Glaser said. “That is the crisis we are essentially facing today.
There is a “real” potential “for the Chinese to use force against Taiwan,” she added, but that is more likely to happen “years from now.”
“It’s an interactive dynamic. The Chinese see what the U.S. is doing and what we’re saying, and then they react to that,” Glazer said.
“If she leaves, the prospect of a crisis increases significantly”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attends her weekly news conference at the U.S. Capitol on February 23, 2022 in Washington, DC. Win McNamee/Getty Images
China strongly opposes Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, warning that such a trip could trigger a possible military response.
“If the US insists on pursuing its own course, the Chinese military will never sit idly by,” a Chinese defense ministry spokesman said earlier this week.
Accordingly, Chinese leader Xi Jinping warned President Joe Biden not to “play with fire” when it comes to Taiwan as the two world leaders spoke by phone for more than two hours on Thursday, according to a Chinese government statement.
Pelosi declined to confirm that she would visit Taiwan, citing security concerns. “I never talk about my travel. It’s a danger to me,” Pelosi told reporters on Wednesday.
America’s relationship with Taiwan has a complicated history, and Pelosi’s visit will come at a time when Beijing is rapidly racing to upgrade its military and taking an increasingly bellicose tone in its relations with the United States. Biden said the US is racing China to win the 21st century, and senior Pentagon officials have repeatedly noted the challenges posed by China’s growing aggression in the Indo-Pacific region.
The US has not had formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan since 1979, when Washington established formal relations with Beijing. Under what is known as the one-China policy, which has been pursued by successive administrations for decades, the US does not support Taiwan independence and offers diplomatic recognition to Beijing’s position that there is only one Chinese government. But the US government still maintains stable unofficial relations with Taipei and is legally bound to provide defensive weapons to Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.
For years, the US has taken a deliberately opaque position on whether it would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack, a policy known as “strategic ambiguity”. Biden has been accused of undermining that long-standing approach by repeatedly suggesting that the US would indeed respond militarily if China attacked the island.
The White House dismissed Biden’s remarks, saying there was no change in US policy. But critics say the administration’s inconsistent approach to Taiwan has exacerbated already contentious dynamics with Beijing.
“The Chinese believe that Washington is deliberately provoking a crisis, and I don’t know what Biden could say to Xi to convince him otherwise,” Susan Thornton, another prominent China expert and senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School , Insider said.
“We continue to maintain that our one-China policy has not changed, but Pelosi’s visit would clearly be a precedent and cannot be construed as consistent with ‘informal relations,'” Thornton, former acting assistant secretary for Eastern Asia and Pacific Affairs at the State Department, added. “If she goes, the prospect of a crisis increases significantly as China will have to respond.” Thus, it will speed up Beijing’s timetable for Taiwan, which is the opposite of what we should be doing.”
“We just weren’t very consistent”
President Joe Biden listens as he meets virtually with Chinese leader Xi Jinping from the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Nov. 15, 2021. AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File
The U.S. needs to “be clearer and more consistent in our policy” toward Taiwan, Glaser said, adding: “The U.S. says it does not support Taiwan independence. We need to be clear about what that means we will not do.”
But Glaser also emphasized that “this is not one-sided,” adding that the Chinese are “using economic, diplomatic and military coercion against Taiwan in ways that are extremely destabilizing.”
“I don’t think it’s wrong to say that the Chinese are more to blame — certainly more to blame than Taiwan — for changing the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and introducing the degree of instability that exists today,” Glaser said. “But the US is a factor, it’s not just Beijing and Taipei. And I just don’t think that was handled very well by the US. Congress is also part of it. It’s Congress, it’s the executive branch. We’re just not very consistent.”
Last week, Biden told reporters that the US military “doesn’t think it’s a good idea at this time” for Pelosi to visit Taiwan, although the White House also said “the Speaker of the House makes his own decisions about the trip.”
Meanwhile, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle expressed support for Pelosi to make the trip. Some suggest that if Pelosi does not go, it would send a dangerous signal that China’s threats are working when it comes to Taiwan.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week that if Pelosi did not leave, she would have handed China “a victory of sorts.”
Rep. Ro Hanna, a Democrat who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, told CNN on Monday that Pelosi “shouldn’t” cancel the trip. “We will not allow the Chinese Communist Party to dictate where the Speaker of the House should go,” Hanna said, saying the visit would not undermine the One China policy.
Another factor looming over Pelosi’s potential trip to Taiwan is the ongoing war in Ukraine. Many foreign policy experts are…
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