Taiwan expressed near ecstasy — electronic welcome signs with heart emojis lighting up the Taipei 101 skyscraper and Pelosi received a government honor called the Order of the Auspicious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon.
Beijing’s response has ranged from angry to lopsided, with calls for President Joe Biden to “prevent” the United States’ third-highest elected official from committing “evil acts” against China’s territorial integrity.
Such clarity was conspicuously absent in Washington, DC, as his trip approached. Instead, US officials have delivered a drumbeat of gaffes, contradictions and denials that Beijing has deftly exploited in a propaganda offensive aimed at coercing Pelosi into altering her travel plans.
“By discussing Pelosi’s trip openly among ourselves, we made the trip a public spectacle, forcing Beijing to react,” said David R. Stilwell, former assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of Asian Affairs. East and Pacific. “If we had taken the trip quietly, as we usually do, it wouldn’t have generated the mess we see now.”
These arguments began when Biden questioned the propriety of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan by suggesting the Pentagon considered it too risky. “The military thinks it’s not a good idea right now,” Biden said last month.
The president can perhaps be forgiven for an errant comment suggesting White House interference in the affairs of the legislature. It was hot. He suffered from jet lag from his recent trips to the Middle East. And a PCR test the following day revealed he had likely struggled with Covid as he spoke with reporters.
But Pelosi added an accelerant to what would quickly become a fire of media trash by suggesting the next day that the Pentagon had warned that her plane would “be shot down” if she flew to Taipei.
These statements demanded a quick message from the White House that struck a reasonable balance between Pelosi’s right to travel to Taipei under the Taiwan Travel Law of 2018 and the longstanding US position regarding the status of Taiwan embodied in the three US-China communiqués, the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 and the 1982 Six Assurances. It also should have helped that there was precedent for his trip: then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich visited Taiwan in 1997 without incident.
But after pointlessly reporting discomfort with the visit, the White House remained silent.
“[Biden] should have said, “We don’t want high-level visits to Taiwan, we know they’re not productive in terms of the overall relationship, but you know, just once [speaker’s] visit [every] 25 years old, what’s the big deal? said Howard Stoffer, associate professor of national security at the University of New Haven.
GOP lawmakers are also unimpressed. “The administration’s messaging around the president’s trip has been horrendous,” said Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Asia Subcommittee. “The White House’s failure to set a clear tone has left too many Americans blaming us for Beijing’s territorial ambitions and left many US media to repeat the CCP’s talking points.”
The result was two weeks of mumblings from the White House about the separation of powers, complete with a news ban on whether the Pentagon was okay with Pelosi’s trip. While most congressional delegations, or CODELs, to Taiwan remained silent until officials left Taipei, the loud signage made absurd protests later that it might not even go. Beijing has happily exploited the information vacuum with a daily stream of headline-grabbing threats and invective.
The administration is undoubtedly sensitive to any development that could worsen an already strained bilateral relationship. Pelosi’s visit that came on the heels of Biden’s two-hour call with Chinese President Xi Jinping didn’t help matters. It created poor optics for both leaders, despite the strong likelihood that they had exchanged candid opinions about its implications and a mutual desire to contain domestic political fallout.
Ultimately, the muddled messages from Washington allowed Beijing’s propaganda engine to weaponize a dubious assertion of China’s collective national opposition to Pelosi’s trip – contrary to apparent divisions over the wisdom of this plan in the United States. United.
“Some American politicians only care about their own interests, openly play with fire on the Taiwan question, make enemies of the 1.4 billion Chinese people and will certainly end up in the wrong place,” said the Chinese Minister of Affairs. foreign Wang Yi. said Tuesday.
Meanwhile, World War III was trending on Twitter as international media covered Pelosi’s plane’s approach to Taipei with breathless anticipation of a potentially violent Chinese response. When China’s Defense Ministry announced live-fire military drills on Aug. 4-7 on Tuesday, that coverage intensified due to warnings from the White House about potential “unintended consequences.”
The White House has escalated the media circus with a strategy of denial that borders on gaslighting.
A reporter’s question about the “drama” fueled by US public communications about Pelosi’s trip elicited an unequivocal response worthy of China’s Foreign Ministry. “I haven’t seen any drama. … I am not aware of the drama that you claim exists. It’s quite the opposite here,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Monday.
Such a public mess to Beijing’s advantage raises questions about the Biden administration’s handling of a dynamic that Secretary of State Antony Blinken described in January 2021 as “the most important relationship we have in the world. “. Blinken has centered the bilateral relationship around a sharp strategy tied to the slogan “invest, align, compete” – anchored by Biden’s conception of a bulwark of allies and partners committed to “the rules-based international order “.
The perception of the administration’s disarray over the fundamental issue of US engagement with Taiwan could fuel doubts about the viability of this strategy.
But even the most perfect public messaging would have done little to allay Beijing’s suspicions of US intentions toward Taiwan.
“The message could have been clearer. Could have been more consistent. It certainly could have been handled better,” said Bonnie Glaser, Asia program director at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. just not convinced that we really could have convinced China in any way that this visit really didn’t matter.
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