By Jim Geraghty
Monday, August 01, 2022
As of this writing, it appears
House speaker Nancy Pelosi will travel to Taiwan, based on statements from
unnamed U.S. and Taiwanese officials. But it is not confirmed.
Conservatives rarely applaud Pelosi, but
her willingness to visit Taiwan — and to tell the Chinese government in Beijing
to go pound sand if it doesn’t like her making the trip — is one of those rare
times when they do. As the editors
of National Review put it:
Much as we
disagree with the speaker on most issues, on this question she has been
stalwart. Pelosi, by making this trip against the background of Chinese
threats, would do a service to her country, Taiwan, and all nations with an
interest in resisting a totalitarian party-state’s military aggression. She
must go to Taiwan.
With some of
the more hyperactive Chinese state-media propagandists talking up the possibility of the Chinese military shooting down
her flight and the Chinese
military promising live-fire exercises near the coast, Pelosi is demonstrating courage and accepting a
certain amount of risk to life and limb by making the trip. The chances of the
Chinese military deliberately or accidentally shooting down her flight are not
high . . . but they are not zero, either.
Pelosi sees herself as “a progressive
hawk” on China; in recent days, people dug
into the archives and found footage
of her trip to China in 1991, two years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, when students and
protesters in Beijing were crushed by the Chinese government. Pelosi and other
members of Congress visited Tiananmen Square and displayed a banner honoring
the demonstrators — until Beijing police showed up, hassling them and the media
traveling with them. Back in the day, Pelosi opposed giving
China most-favored-nation trade status, calling it “a nation that proliferates weapons of mass destruction,
maintains trade barriers that bar U.S. products from its market, and continues
to arrest, detain, exile or harass those who peacefully express their political
or religious beliefs in China and Tibet.”
We discussed Pelosi’s trip on The
Editors podcast last
week, and I can see the
argument from Allahpundit that
what the U.S. could gain from a Pelosi visit is minuscule compared to the costs
of this escalating into some sort of military skirmish.
But once the speaker of the U.S. House of
Representatives says she’s going to Taiwan, and the Chinese government demands
that she cancel the visit, the speaker must go to Taiwan.
Otherwise, backing down communicates to China that if it rattle the saber
enough, it can veto what our political leaders do. What happens when China
demands that no other American officials travel to Taiwan? What happens when
Beijing demands that the U.S. shut down our de facto embassy, the American Institute in Taiwan, or demands an end to commercial air travel between the U.S. and
Taiwan? At what point do we say, “Sorry, pal, but we’re a sovereign country and
we make our own decisions”?
If Pelosi doesn’t go, then the United
States will have backed down from a bully, and bullies are rarely satiated by
one victory.
Many people in politics like to think of
themselves as the noble, brave, and righteous types who are willing to stand up
to a bully — and obviously, few people in politics think of themselves as
bullies. But there’s the key question of which bully a person
chooses to oppose. Some of the forces on the globe that seem most indisputable
bullies are not always treated as such.
The Chinese government is obviously a
bully, but not every American wants to stand up to Xi Jinping, because a lot of
economically and socially powerful Americans have a lot of money at stake in a
continued partnership with China. Corporate America’s quick, sweeping moves in
response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine offered a strange contrast to
the way corporate America rarely if ever uttered a critical word about the
government of China, despite its ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs, its
human-rights abuses, its oppression of Hong Kong, its threats toward Taiwan,
etc.
Actor John Cena plays a lot of tough-guy
characters who stand up to bullies. But when push came to shove, he was very eager to apologize and
mollify the bully that is the Chinese government. NBA star
LeBron James shares anti-bullying public-service announcements, but when push came to shove, he didn’t want
anyone in the NBA upsetting anyone in the Chinese government by tweeting, “stand with Hong Kong.”
We’re all anti-bullying . . . unless we’ve
got a few billion dollars at stake in the bully’s consumer market. Then, all of
a sudden, standing up to a bully gets complicated.
I mentioned Russia a few paragraphs ago.
The Biden administration would argue that right now, it’s standing up to
Vladimir Putin. The problem is that one of the reasons Putin is the threat that
he is today is because there was no sufficiently consequential U.S.
response to the occupation of Crimea, the aggression in the Donbas,
Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 being shot down by Russian-backed forces, and
other acts of belligerence. Sure, Biden says he wants to stand up to the
bully now. But if he and Barack Obama and their teams had done so
around, say, spring 2014, the world might not be in the mess it is in today.
Everybody says they want to stand up to
Vladimir Putin now. But even here, there’s odd foot-dragging and half-measures,
and a sense that the U.S. government’s heart really isn’t in it. A week
ago, senior U.S.
officials said they were considering whether to provide Ukraine with new
fighter jets and the training needed to operate them. But back in March, the administration
vetoed the transfer of Polish MiGs to Ukraine. (Those are the planes that Ukrainian pilots actually know how
to fly.) If we’re going to send jets, why did we wait five months? Why
would we send them jets that they need to be trained on, instead of the
ones they can deploy comparably quickly?
For that matter, what was the point of
making those early concessions to Russia on Gazprom 2? Why did the
administration try to
eliminate weapons systems whose
primary purpose is to deter Russia from using battlefield nukes? Why is the
administration insisting we keep a tax treaty with Russia in place? Why are we going ahead with trading Viktor Bout
for Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan? If we’re standing up to the bully, why are we also trying to placate
him?
Does anyone want to dispute that the
Iranian regime is a bully, both to its own citizens and dissidents, and to its
neighbors in the region? And yet, the Biden administration has spent a year and
a half begging it to come back to the negotiating table. This administration
has also sent out social-media messages in Farsi declaring, “Racism exists
in America. Xenophobia exists in America. Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia,
homophobia, transphobia.”
(Because if there’s any group of people on Earth who vehemently oppose
antisemitism, it’s the Iranian mullahs, right?) If we’re standing up to the
bully, why are we also trying to make a deal with him?
Some Americans would argue — with some
compelling evidence — that the Saudi Royal family is a
bunch of bullies. And at one point, Biden made it clear that he was going to
make that regime a pariah for its bullying. He tried some
half-measures for a while, and
then, once oil prices got high enough, the Saudis got
a presidential fist bump. And
corporate America’s willingness to embrace
rainbows for Pride Month everywhere except the Middle East is a glaring demonstration of how its willingness to stand for
values is highly dependent upon conditions.
Is that standing up to the bully?
Mind you, the list above consists of autocratic
and despotic regimes that commit horrible human-rights abuses with impunity.
China, Russia, and Iran would like to see America weakened and helpless; the
Saudis would like to see us taken down a peg, but not so much that we can’t
afford to keep paying top dollar for their oil. You would like to think that
Americans, left, right, and center, could all agree that these regimes and
their enforcers are the bad guys, indisputable bullies, and the sort of thugs
we ought to stand up against — not through outright war, but through the
application of the full spectrum of geopolitical leverage.
We have bullies at home in the U.S., too,
but your least favorite political figure isn’t nearly as much of a potential
problem as Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or Ayatollah Khameni. Your least
favorite political figure can get voted out of office; they don’t command
armies, navies, spies, hackers, and off-the-books assassination squads.
Your least favorite political figures,
cable-news hosts, talking heads, celebrities, and social-media influencers are
capable of being bullies. But they’re bullies on a smaller scale and represent
a different kind of threat than these overseas bruisers. They’re not capable
of, say, attempting
genocide the way Putin is right now.
Ask a progressive who’s a bully, and
they’re likely to say Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson, the
GOP-appointed Supreme Court justices, Mitch McConnell, evangelical Christians,
gun owners, etc. Ask a conservative who’s a bully, and they’re likely to say
the biggest voices in the mainstream media, the insufferable scolds in
Hollywood, the woke mobs in academia, Anthony Fauci and an unaccountable public-health
apparatus, mayors such as Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, etc.
Ask a conservative who the bullying forces
in American life are, and they’re likely to say big tech companies, because
they censor voices on the right. Ask a progressive who the bullying forces in
American life are, and they’re likely to say big tech companies, because they
don’t censor voices on the right enough.
I suspect some American leaders choose to
pick fights with convenient not-so-strong foes at home because they don’t know
what to do with those inconvenient strong foes abroad. You can’t cancel
Vladimir Putin, you can’t “deplatform” Xi Jinping — heck, in some cases, he may
effectively own the platform — and you can’t shame the Iranian mullahs.
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