Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan Straits A Chinese military response to her visit will signal a dangerous new era.
Nancy Pelosi seems determined to visit Taiwan on her Asian trip this week, and Beijing is promising an unspecified military response if she does. We hope the White House is ready for all contingencies, but the best response to China’s growing threats would be at long last to take the defense of Taiwan seriously.
A largely symbolic visit by the Speaker of the House isn’t a good reason to trigger a U.S.-China showdown. But China has raised its threats even beyond its usual bluster, and President Biden didn’t help by saying in public recently that the Pentagon thinks it is the wrong time for her visit. This encouraged Beijing’s leaders to think they could stop Mrs. Pelosi if they were even more obstreperous, which is what they have become.
At this point Mrs. Pelosi almost has to visit lest the U.S. appear to be backing down amid China’s threats. That sign of weakness would encourage more Beijing brinkmanship, and it would echo throughout the region, especially with our allies in Japan and Taiwan.
How China will respond if Mrs. Pelosi does visit is impossible to predict. President Xi Jinping might want calm ahead of his Communist Party coronation for a third term this fall. Or he may feel he needs to stir up nationalist fervor against the U.S. to compensate for slowing economic growth, a deflating real-estate bubble, and public impatience with harsh Covid lockdowns. Mr. Xi may also think now is the time to teach the U.S. and Taiwan “a lesson,” as Mao Zedong once said about his 1979 border war with Vietnam.
A serious Chinese military intervention would be a strategic watershed. That could include an attempt to intercept and perhaps harass Mrs. Pelosi’s plane, which we hope will have a U.S. military escort as a deterrent. The chances for miscalculation in that scenario are high. In the worst case, China could demand that her plane not land under threat of being shot down. It isn’t clear how the U.S. pilots of her plane would respond.
This could be the first step in a Beijing quarantine strategy to declare that China has the right to block or inspect any aircraft or ship seeking to land in Taiwan. China could also let Mrs. Pelosi’s plane land and later move to seize Quemoy and Matsu, the offshore islands controlled by Taiwan that triggered a geopolitical crisis in the 1950s.
The fact that any of these scenarios have to be taken seriously in Washington shows how Taiwan has already become a dangerous U.S.-China flashpoint. For 50 years the mutual understanding has been that China will wait for peaceful reunification while the U.S. recognizes one China and is ambiguous about defending Taiwan. That is no longer holding. Mr. Xi wants to unify China on his presidential watch, and Beijing’s rhetoric and its military posture are increasingly belligerent.
Mr. Biden was widely criticized this year and last when he said in response to questions that the U.S. would defend Taiwan. The White House walked back those comments each time by saying U.S. policy hasn’t changed. But intentionally or not, the President was getting at the truth of China’s changing intentions.
If China abandons its pledge of peaceful reunification—which it has made in diplomatic communiques over the decades—that would be cause for the Biden Administration to change official U.S. policy to make clear that the U.S. will defend Taiwan. This would require a far more urgent and forceful policy of bolstering and arming Taiwan to defend itself with a goal of deterring a Chinese takeover.
Even if the Pelosi trip ends in anticlimax, China’s military threats show that the status of Taiwan and its protection are fast becoming emergencies. U.S. officials say Mr. Xi has advanced his timetable for reunification from later this decade to perhaps as little as 18 months. Taiwan, the U.S., and our allies can’t wait if they want to deter a war.
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