White House struggles to insulate Biden’s China policy from Pelosi’s

On Aug 2, 2022

WASHINGTON — As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly prepares to land in Taiwan on Tuesday evening for a long-rumored official visit, her trip has exposed a rare schism between the Biden White House and the most powerful Democrat in Congress.

Officially, the Biden administration has been careful to avoid directly answering questions about whether it agrees with Pelosi’s decision to make the trip.

But unofficially, the White House and the Pentagon have made little secret of their opposition to such a visit, which comes at a time when U.S.-China relations are the poorest they’ve been in decades.

In late July, Biden responded to a question about Pelosi’s then-rumored stop in Taiwan by saying, “The military thinks it’s not a good idea right now. But I don’t know what the status of it is.”

For weeks, American officials from the president on down have tied themselves into knots trying to talk about Pelosi’s choice to visit Taiwan, and stressing that it was her decision, and hers alone.

Missing the point

Now, experts say it’s becoming clear that this effort missed the point. That’s because schisms in Washington are effectively meaningless to the rest of the world, which has learned to view American presidents and their top allies in Congress as interchangeable stand-ins for one another on foreign policy matters.

The fact that U.S. policy toward Taiwan is deliberately ambiguous only serves to make it that much more difficult to draw any meaningful distinction between what Pelosi is doing and what the White House is saying.

Pelosi, a longtime China hawk, has not officially announced that she will visit the self-ruled island off the coast of mainland China, which Beijing considers a renegade province.

I think what you really see from China’s side, and it’s not unreasonable, is that we’re kind of pushing the envelope of the One China policy.

Andrew Mertha

China Global Research Center, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

But after weeks of Pelosi and her office refusing to confirm the visit, citing security concerns, Taiwanese media reported Monday that Pelosi and a congressional delegation of five other House Democrats planned to spend Tuesday night in the capital, Taipei, and meet with Taiwanese leaders and members of the island’s legislature on Wednesday.

Beijing has been furious for months over the reported visit, which would mark the first time in 25 years that an American House Speaker visited the island.

Any trip by Pelosi “will greatly threaten peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, severely undermine China-US relations and lead to a very serious situation and grave consequences,” senior Chinese diplomat Liu Xiaoming tweeted late Monday night. Liu’s statement reflected the tone and tenor of weeks’ worth of warnings and threats that have emanated from Beijing.

On Tuesday, China escalated this rhetoric with a series of actions, starting with the announcement of new tariffs on Taiwanese goods. Shortly afterward, Reuters reported that…