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Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends register here. On this day in 1972, the Associated Press revealed that the federal government had withheld syphilis treatment from hundreds of black men in Alabama in a decades-long study of the disease’s effects on the human body.
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s potential visit to Taiwan next month – which has not been officially announced but remains highly controversial in Washington and Beijing – would be the capstone of her decades as a fierce critic of China in Congress.
If, and it’s a big if, it happens.
President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have made it more difficult for Pelosi to travel to the democratically-ruled island, which Beijing considers a renegade province to be reunited with the mainland if necessary by force.
Officially, Washington has no formal diplomatic ties with Taipei and subscribes to a “one China” policy under Beijing’s rule – while selling weapons to support Taiwan’s self-defense and maintaining strong trade relations. Pelosi’s visit would send another high-level signal of US support. Beijing has threatened unspecified but strong retaliation.
Biden made the trip more difficult in two ways. First, he seemingly confirmed that the unannounced trip was in the works, while making it clear that the Pentagon was opposed to it.
“The military thinks it’s not a good idea right now, but I don’t know what the situation is,” he told reporters last Wednesday.
Second, Biden changed the public face of US Taiwan policy by saying – not once, not twice, but three times since August 2021 – that the US military would come to the island’s aid if it was attacked by Beijing.
In doing so, the president removed some of the ambiguity from the traditional American policy of “strategic ambiguity”—an attempt to purposely leave unclear whether, how, and under what circumstances America would help defend Taiwan from attack by Beijing.
- “We have made a sacred commitment to Article Five that if indeed someone invades or takes action against our NATO allies, we will respond. Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with — Taiwan,” he told ABC News last August.
That comment appeared to elevate Taiwan, with which the United States has no formal mutual defense treaty, to the same status as NATO allies bound by the alliance’s pact that an attack on one is an attack on all.
Two months later, in a CNN town hall, Biden was asked if the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense if it were attacked. “Yes,” he said, “we have a commitment to do that.”
Finally, in late May 2022, Biden was asked at a news conference in Tokyo if he was prepared to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if China invaded. “Yes,” he said again, “that is the commitment we made.”
That rhetoric raised the stakes for a visit by America’s third-ranking elected official.
As for Putin, he made things more difficult in late February by expanding Russia’s war in Ukraine, sparking Europe’s biggest military conflict since World War II and effectively prompting the U.S. and its allies to try to thwart the plans for a former Soviet republic.
A month earlier, the Biden administration acknowledged that the world was watching both the former KGB officer’s actions and the US-led response — including officials in Beijing considering what to do about Taiwan, when and how to do it. But nothing that raises the stakes regarding Taiwan makes the speaker’s journey there any easier.
- To be clear, Beijing was always going to be staunchly opposed to Pelosi’s visit, which would have made her the highest-ranking US official to set foot in Taiwan since House Speaker Newt Gingrich went there in 1997. Her relentless criticism of Beijing’s human rights record has made her a particularly loathed figure among China’s leaders and in state media.
And China’s political calendar adds another layer of complications. The annual celebration of the People’s Liberation Army is held on August 1. Senior officials of the Chinese Communist Party traditionally meet at the Beidaihe resort in August. And Chinese President Xi Jinping is seeking to minimize disruption ahead of the party’s bi-decade congress this fall, which is expected to give him another term in power.
Biden denied that his remarks changed US policy. But they certainly highlighted his personal evolution in the matter.
In April 2001, President George W. Bush told ABC News that the US had a duty to defend Taiwan, including militarily, and pledged to do “whatever it takes” to help repel a Chinese invasion. (He quickly softened his stance.)
That drew a rebuke from the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one Joseph R. Biden, Jr. “Words matter in diplomacy and in law,” he chided the new president.
- “The president should not concede to Taiwan, much less to China, the ability to automatically drag us into a war across the Taiwan Strait,” Biden wrote in The Washington Post.
Last week, Biden said he would speak with Xi before the end of July. Pelosi’s possible trip and Taiwan may figure prominently in their discussion.
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