Monday, August 1, 2022

Pelosi Stands Up to the Bully in Beijing

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 governmentNBA 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.

No comments: