As flashpoints go, few come flashier than Taiwan. To pick one incident from a string of recent close calls: the visit of Nancy Pelosi to Taipei in the summer of 2022. Pelosi, then speaker of the House and third in line to the presidency, was travelling to Taiwan to make an “unequivocal statement that America stands with Taiwan”. The visit produced predictable fury in Beijing: it was “manic, irresponsible and highly irrational”, according to officials; Pelosi was “playing with fire”. Troops were placed on high alert; military exercises were ordered; missiles were launched into the Taiwan Strait. The editor of one mainland tabloid even called for Pelosi’s plane to be shot down. But the more Beijing threatened, the more determined the speaker became, and so, for a few days that August, the world’s two largest economies stood one small military accident away from catastrophic conflict.
How, the observer wonders, did we come to this? There are a dozen reasons, which Sulmaan Wasif Khan, a historian at Tufts University, lays out in his deeply researched and fascinating history of the island. But the nutshell answer is that a mixture of poisonous nationalism and fudged diplomacy over many years, combined with the premierships of Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, has turned the Sino-American relationship into a tinderbox. Taiwan could be the spark that ignites it.
