Nancy Pelosi is as tough as old boots. She is 82, she has served two stints as Speaker of the House of Representatives and is third in line to the US presidency. Never let it be said that if she does end up kicking off World War Three in the Pacific, she did not know what she was doing. She will have coolly assessed the risks and decided it was in her political interests — and that of the Democrats in the November midterm elections — to take a tough stand against China. Back home, US voters like their leaders to stick it to the Communists.
As for the rest of us, we can only pray she made the right call. Because if war breaks out at some point between China and its US-friendly neighbour, we may all be swept into it. It is too soon to tell whether her visit to Taiwan will be a reckless staging post on the road to a terrifying conflict or a clever attempt to call China’s bluff. Right now, Chinese military forces have encircled the island and are undertaking tests of long-range weapons and conventional missiles in response. But the People’s Republic had been bullying Taiwan before this latest escalation.
We know President Biden and his national security team tried to dissuade Pelosi from going, not least because they have been trying to stop Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, from providing military assistance to the Russians in Ukraine. The possibility of war on two fronts in Europe and the Far East will be raising Biden’s blood pressure. But Pelosi, the daughter of the post-war mayor of Baltimore (the tough city of the TV series The Wire), is impervious to pressure.
On the day she was telling Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen, “Out of a crucible of challenge you have created a flourishing democracy,” her husband Paul Pelosi, also 82, a Californian investment banker, was in court pleading not guilty to being drunk behind the wheel of his Porsche and injuring another driver. You’d never have guessed it.
I have to admit that I enjoyed Pelosi’s dig at President Xi before she left Taiwan yesterday. “Whether there are insecurities of the president of China relating to his own political situation, I don’t know,” she said. For if there is one thing she knows about, it is domestic politics. Xi is seeking a historic third term in office at the twice-a-decade Communist Party congress this autumn. But Pelosi has her own agenda. Although she is running for re-election in November (does no-one retire in US politics?), she has hinted it will be her last term as Speaker.
Pelosi is seeking to burnish her legacy. She has just added a visit to the demilitarised zone with North Korea to her itinerary. Although the US foreign policy establishment has been shaking its head at her “reckless” behaviour, she has won praise from pundits such as the Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin, who tweeted: “Our Speaker can go anywhere she damn pleases,” and from some Republicans — even though “Crazy Nancy”, as Donald Trump calls her, usually drives them wild. And to be fair, she has long been interested in human rights in China, having unfurled a protest banner in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago.
In fact, her freelance foreign policy may have done Biden a favour. The President would have looked weak had he forbidden her visit to Taiwan. This way, he managed to signal his displeasure without kowtowing to China, while Pelosi made it “unequivocally clear” to the Taiwanese that America would “not abandon” them.
Isn’t that the essence of “strategic ambiguity” — the decades-old US policy of keeping the Chinese guessing about its response to military action against Taiwan? But it is not something a sane person would like to put to the test.
