![]() ![]() ![]() What’s driving Nancy Pelosi to visit Taiwan? The midterms. Unfortunately, we don’t do finesse very well anymore. Taiwan is the festering one and the one that would drag us in very rapidly, and that’s the one that needs to be handled with finesse. Although Tibet still sits out there, Xinjiang province is still giving them all kinds of problems too. Why mess with it? Let’s keep hoping that eventually, economic ties and the strength of those ties move Taiwan and China, the mainland, together to the extent that it is, in effect, a rapprochement and rejoining, if you will, of the final state. So this is just a terrible, terrible way to do business. Wow, that’s crazy, too, because you sink a couple of carriers and then we’re in for a penny and for a pound. Whether they come in or they don’t come in, we’ll sink in a couple of carriers, and they’ll be very reluctant to do anything further. We don’t give a hang about the United States. If you don’t do what we want you to do in these stages, say, over ten years or whatever, and you don’t make it public that we are taking these steps over the next ten years, we’re going to end you. They would call up the current leadership, and they would say, look, we’re going to finish you. I think they would simply do it by innuendo and threat. I don’t think China would do it by brute force. Once you get there, you have a choice to make if you’re Washington. I hope Pelosi is smart enough, I don’t know that she is, to save some face, maybe a little bit, but to postpone the trip as she did once before, because of COVID. ![]() This Pelosi visit would just be a slap in the face, two slaps in the face. So you don’t want to put someone in that position. That’s the reason I don’t like this strategic clarity business because sometimes you look at history and you think, well, why did that happen? Why did those people start that war? It’s more over leaders’ prestige, leaders’ feelings, leaders’ emotions and leaders’ concept of what’s happening to them and to their country than it is concrete reasons for using military force. If we make Xi Jinping see it otherwise, see taking Taiwan back as a matter of honor, so to speak, and saying to hell with the economic relationship, then that obviates the whole process and obviates the whole strategic ambiguity. It would be inimical to the economic relationship, which is quite strong and quite powerful. In other words, China not using military force. They are so close together right now, economically, that I tend to think that is the main ingredient of them not fighting. They’re like lips and teeth, to borrow another Chinese phrase. It’ll be peaceful, and it will be forced- not forced- but it’ll be compelled, let’s put it that way, on them by the fact that they are so close economically and financially. I think I’m back with Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon and Ambassador Freeman and others who would say- I’m putting words in their mouths, of course, but I think they would say, well, eventually China and Taiwan will reunite. Now, I’m with Richard on the point that this can’t go on forever. I think the policy should continue as a very successful strategic ambiguity. Even worse than that, I think it would be making it NATO status and sticking your middle finger up at Beijing at the same time. That’s strategic ambiguity, and it’s worked. We recognize that you are that China, Xi, but we also ask you to refrain from the use of military force against Taiwan. Strategic ambiguity is we recognize that there’s only one China. Strategic clarity, as Richard Haass would have it is, we will fight you to the death if you take over Taiwan. It can continue to work for at least another decade or two, and that’s a decade or two without war and without China using force to reclaim Taiwan. People like Richard Haass, my former boss, saying that our policy now should be strategic clarity, not strategic ambiguity. We’ve been sticking our fingers in his eyes for some time now. That’s not good because that’s just sticking your finger in Xi Jinping’s eye and twisting it. She would take a whole delegation with her, and as I remember, she would be the highest, in that sense, she’d be the highest Americans to go to Taipei in a long, long time. That is a small thing, but at least it’s indicative of maybe the President’s understanding that we are in a very perilous situation vis-à-vis Beijing right now in Taiwan and that we shouldn’t exacerbate it. I’m encouraged to a certain extent, a very tiny little extent, really, but nonetheless encouraged by the fact that I picked up my phone this morning, clicked on, and saw in the New York Times overview that Biden has essentially said that Nancy Pelosi shouldn’t go to Taiwan. policy, with regard to China, and particularly with regard to Taiwan vis-à-vis China, as I see it today, is particularly dangerous. ![]()
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