Nancy Pelosi in Taiwan

It worked so well the last time, why not try it again.

You recall that the Biden administration, facing a crisis on the Ukraine border in February of this year, chose to send a strong, empowered women to a Munich security conference. Apparently, they could not find anyone who was dumber and more incompetent than Kamala Harris.

So, Vladimir Putin assessed the macho posturing and invaded Ukraine. Thousands of people are dying. A nation is being destroyed. But at least we are leading the world in macho posturing-- especially by strong, empowered women.

So, it worked the last time, so why not try it again. Why not send Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker herself, to Taiwan? It seems just the right time to poke the dragon in the eye. Pelosi is not only a strong, empowered woman. She is also a notorious drunk.

Anyway, many Republicans are cheering her from the sidelines. From Newt Gingrich to Mike Pompeo to a chorus of Republican senators, the message has gone out. Pelosi must go to Taiwan, lest the world see us as weak. 

On the other side, the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman thinks that the visit is “utterly reckless,” and former president Donald Trump has declared it to be a big mistake. Tucker Carlson is certainly not convinced. Neither are various members of the Biden administration. 

For my part, I reject the notion that we are showing how tough we are by doing something stupid. I am opposed to empty macho gestures. They do not show firmness and resolve. They do not show command and control. They are more show than substance, and they will surely be met with a counter thrust-- though probably not immediately.

Among the rank absurdities of the Pelosi visit is the simple fact that the Biden administration apparently does not want her to go. Tom Friedman reported:

Biden’s national security team made clear to Pelosi, a longtime advocate for human rights in China, why she should not go to Taiwan now. But the president did not call her directly and ask her not to go, apparently worried he would look soft on China, leaving an opening for Republicans to attack him before the midterms.

It is a measure of our political dysfunction that a Democratic president cannot deter a Democratic House speaker from engaging in a diplomatic maneuver that his entire national security team — from the C.I.A. director to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs — deemed unwise.

Perhaps it shows political dysfunction. Perhaps it shows who is really in charge in the Biden administration. Or else, perhaps the administration is happy to speak out of both sides of its mouth, letting Pelosi go and pretending that it does not support her decision. This dual message, self-contradiction, might seem like a clever way of having your cake and eating it at the same time. 

In truth, it shows an administration that is incompetent and not in control of its own policy.

As for Friedman’s reasoning about the visit, he suggests that, since the conflict in Ukraine is not really over, it is dumber than dumb to risk precipitating another world conflict. Of course, we should also understand that the Biden administration, facing a red wave election in November, must try to pretend to look like it is really, really tough. Then again, , when the Democrat House Speaker does something that the administration does not support, it makes the Biden people look like they are not even in charge of Pelosi. Not a very good look.

He wrote:

In short, this Ukraine war is SO not over, SO not stable, SO not without dangerous surprises that can pop out on any given day. Yet in the middle of all of this we are going to risk a conflict with China over Taiwan, provoked by an arbitrary and frivolous visit by the speaker of the House?

It is Geopolitics 101 that you don’t court a two-front war with the other two superpowers at the same time.

This suggests that it’s all about domestic politics. Niall Ferguson floated that idea in his Bloomberg column:

Presumably, the calculation in the White House remains, as in the 2020 election, that being tough on China is a vote-winner — or, to put it differently, that doing anything the Republicans can portray as “weak on China” is a vote-loser. Yet it is hard to believe that this calculation would hold if the result were a new international crisis, with all its potential economic consequences.

One understands, though perhaps it is wishful thinking, that China is not going to shoot down the Speaker’s aircraft. One also understands that in a battle for Taiwan, we would not prevail. The latest in Pentagon war games has it that we would lose rather rapidly. Ferguson notes that President Trump was decidedly opposed to provoking a conflict that might force us to defend Taiwan.

Then again, China does not need to be flamboyant. It holds enough economic cards, whether pharmaceutical production, or rare earth minerals, that it can bide its time and strike us economically. 

Economic historian Ferguson explains:

The war in Ukraine has in many ways taken us back more than a century, to the kind of conflict we saw in World War I. There are brutal battles of attrition in which artillery is the crucial weapon. And there is economic warfare in which the private property of enemy citizens and the reserves of central banks are fair game.

In recent weeks, I have discussed the implications with two eminent central bankers. One worried that the confiscation of private assets had fundamentally discredited the Anglo-American claim to uphold the rule of law and private property rights. Another feared that the freezing of the Russian Central Bank’s reserves could ultimately undermine the reserve currency status of the dollar. Neither talked of these measures as secret weapons China would be unable to withstand. As one of them put it, the key question is: “What do the Chinese do now that we’ve shown them our playbook?”  

An excellent question, one that I have been raising from time to time in relation to the Biden administration’s efforts to shore up Ukraine. 

If you would like a little comic relief in the midst of this crisis, I refer you to the satirical site, The Onion. It has lit on the one way that China can do the most damage to America-- by sending Pelosi back to America where she can go about her work of undermining the nation:

Warning the United States that the House Speaker would be spared, China reportedly threatened to retaliate Thursday for Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan by letting her return safely. “Should Nancy Pelosi follow through with her planned trip to Taiwan, China will be forced to take the hostile measure to weaken America by allowing her to return unscathed,” said President Xi Jinping, warning that any move by Pelosi to legitimize the Taiwanese regime would be met with a first class ticket back so that she is well-rested and ready to return to legislative matters. 

Sometimes, playing it for the humor allows you to light on the truth.