The proposed trip is causing a stir in China and also concerns the Pentagon and the White House. US President Joe Biden gently said the US military believed a visit to Taipei by the 82-year-old speaker was “not a good idea right now”. Pelosi’s response seemed tongue-in-cheek: “I think what the president was saying is that maybe the military was afraid that my plane was going to be shot down or something. I don’t know exactly.”
Flying a US military aircraft carrying the speaker out of the sky would be an unthinkable climb. But there are real-world responses that China could consider after promising “determined and forceful” measures; including the imposition of a no-fly zone around the self-governing island.
Now that word of the potential trip has spread, the U.S. will look like it’s caving in China if Pelosi doesn’t go. And hawks warn, anyway, that Beijing should have no say over who visits.
“Speaker Pelosi should go to Taiwan and President Biden should make it very clear to President Xi that there is nothing the Chinese Communist Party can do about it,” said Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican who almost never aligns with the Democratic Speaker. “No more weakness and self-talk.”
But officials who spend their lives trying to keep U.S.-China tensions from boiling over may disagree. A visit by Pelosi, a world figure with a long history of criticizing Beijing on human rights, would create extraordinary political pressure on President Xi Jinping to respond. And now may not be the best time to trigger a superpower showdown, as the White House is already locked in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and beset by many other challenges.
Pelosi must weigh all of this as she plans her next move. For decades to come, US officials will likely be pondering versions of the same two questions: How far is the US willing to push China, and how might Beijing respond?