{"id":21990,"date":"2022-08-07T15:47:48","date_gmt":"2022-08-07T15:47:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=21990"},"modified":"2023-03-24T18:32:42","modified_gmt":"2023-03-24T18:32:42","slug":"nancy-pelosi-is-rolling-the-dice-on-world-war-111","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2022\/08\/07\/nancy-pelosi-is-rolling-the-dice-on-world-war-111\/","title":{"rendered":"Nancy Pelosi is rolling the dice on World War III"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following article by Ben Burgis was first posted by Jacobin<\/a>. It looks at\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>the implications of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.<\/strong><\/p>\n

NANCY PELOSI IS ROLLING THE DICE ON WORLD WAR THREE\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Speaker of the U.S. House Of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), leaves the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s house of parliament, on August 03, 2022 in Taipei, Taiwan. (Photo by Annabelle Chih\/Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan \u2014 a pointless trip that ratchets up tensions with one nuclear-armed superpower just as the United States finds itself knee-deep in a potentially catastrophic proxy war with another.<\/p>\n

President Joe Biden is hardly a pacifist. But\u00a0even he<\/a>\u00a0discouraged her from going, noting that the military thought it was a stupid risk. Hell, Thomas Friedman, a\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>columnist who can generally be\u00a0counted on<\/a>\u00a0to be recklessly enthusiastic about American military power,\u00a0has described<\/a>\u00a0Pelosi\u2019s visit as \u201cdangerous and irresponsible\u201d \u2014 arguing that \u201cTaiwan will not be more secure or more prosperous as a result of this purely symbolic visit, and a lot of bad things could happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bringing the US and China Closer to the Brink<\/strong><\/p>\n

The United States has poured tens of billions of dollars into Ukraine\u2019s war effort as well as being more directly involved in semi-covert operations to\u00a0assassinate Russian generals<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0sink Russian ships<\/a>. (I don\u2019t know how \u201ccovert\u201d an operation is if \u201cintelligence sources\u201d turn right around and brag about it to the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>.) Crucially, China so far has\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0provided similar assistance to its ally Russia \u2014 or at least not yet.<\/p>\n

According to a \u201csenior U.S. official\u201d quoted by\u00a0Friedman<\/a>, President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan have held a \u201cseries of very tough meetings with China\u2019s leadership\u201d \u2014 including Biden personally threatening Chinese president Xi Jinping about the economic consequences of military assistance to Russia. So far, it\u2019s worked.<\/p>\n

But a calculated diplomatic provocation, like the Speaker of the House paying what looks suspiciously like a state visit to an island claimed by China as part of its territory, could provide fodder to anyone within the Chinese government arguing for a more hawkish posture toward the United States.<\/p>\n

Really take a beat to let that part sink in. We\u2019re already closer to the brink of World War III than we\u2019ve been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The prospect of a third major power being added to a hot war is disturbing. And that\u2019s not even close to the worst-case scenario from increased US-China tensions.<\/p>\n

In response to Pelosi\u2019s visit, China has announced live-fire drills that include coordinates\u00a0within ten miles<\/a>\u00a0of Taiwan\u2019s coast \u2014 a direct challenge to Taiwanese sovereignty. (China conducted similar drills during another standoff twenty-six years ago, but these are aimed much closer to Taiwan\u2019s coast.) While the probability of an all-out war between China and Taiwan is still low, there\u2019s no doubt that Pelosi has raised that probability \u2014 a few months after Joe Biden recklessly abandoned the long-term American posture of \u201cstrategic ambiguity\u201d about what the United States would do in such a war.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou didn\u2019t want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons,\u201d a reporter\u00a0asked Biden<\/a>\u00a0in late May. \u201cAre you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s terrifying monosyllabic answer was, \u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey Didn\u2019t Say Anything When the Men Came\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Taiwan, Pelosi suggested that China\u2019s reaction to her deliberate diplomatic provocation reflects a sexist double standard. Referring to a visit in April from Lindsey Graham and several other senators, Pelosi\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0that China \u201cdidn\u2019t say anything when the men came.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a nonsensical defense for at least two reasons. First, Pelosi seems to have forgotten that the Speaker of the House, being constitutionally in the line of succession to the presidency, has always been regarded by foreign governments as an official representative of the United States in a way that rank-and-file senators are not. Second, China\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0say something about these senatorial visits,\u00a0officially warning<\/a>\u00a0the United States that it was \u201cgoing down a dangerous path.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the first time an American of Pelosi\u2019s rank has visited the country since then speaker Newt Gingrich went there in 1997. And as Michael Swaine of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft\u00a0explained<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0Democracy Now<\/em>, even citing that apparent precedent for Pelosi\u2019s trip is misleading.<\/p>\n

She flew over to Taiwan on an official US military jet that looked like Air Force One. She described her visit in Taiwan as an official visit. She publicized it in a very major way. Unlike Newt Gingrich, who went as Speaker of the House twenty-five years ago to Taiwan \u2014 Newt Gingrich went to Beijing first, he stopped in Taiwan very briefly and then moved on, the Chinese didn\u2019t like it then, but now what Pelosi has done is much larger scale than this, much higher publicity, much more of the trappings of an official visit, and that really is a basic violation of the understanding that the United States and China reached at the time of normalization.<\/p>\n

That understanding was that, on the Chinese side, Beijing wouldn\u2019t surrender its territorial claim to Taiwan or disclaim its right to use force within what it considers to be its sovereign territory, but, implicitly, it would focus on a long-term pursuit of peaceful unification. On the US side, Washington would accept Beijing\u2019s claim that there was only \u201cOne China\u201d but refrain from adjudicating which government \u2014 Beijing\u2019s or Taipei\u2019s \u2014 had the valid claim to sovereignty over it. Meanwhile, it would reserve the right to arm Taiwan for the purpose of self-defense. That awkward compromise has sometimes felt\u00a0very<\/em>\u00a0shaky. But it\u2019s kept the peace for decades.<\/p>\n

Making Basic Distinctions<\/strong><\/p>\n

Taiwan was a right-wing, one-party state until the 1990s. The process of democratization went along with the rise of the Taiwanese labor movement and the development of a relatively generous welfare state, and the country is now a real multiparty democracy. While a handful of\u00a0eccentrics<\/a>\u00a0on the margins of the western Left may believe there should be no objection to China reintegrating Taiwan by force, against the will of the overwhelming majority of people who live there, most of those raising concerns about the potentially catastrophic consequences of increased US-China tensions take it as a given that that, too, would be a disastrous outcome.<\/p>\n

As with\u00a0Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine<\/a>, we should be able to distinguish between two very different questions. The first is whether the actions of a rival power are morally justifiable. The second is what role US policy might play in making those actions more or less likely to happen. I\u2019m old enough to remember a time when Chomskyite critics of American foreign policy were accused of being apologists for al-Qaeda when they suggested that American actions in the Middle East helped to fuel terrorism. Anyone who can understand the flaw in that reasoning should be able to understand what\u2019s wrong with accusing contemporary advocates of de-escalation of being apologists for Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping.<\/p>\n

The Taiwanese people deserve to be left in peace. This is one of many excellent reasons to dial down great-power tensions. A good start would be for the Biden administration to say no the next time Nancy Pelosi asks to use a military jet.<\/p>\n

4.8.22<\/strong><\/p>\n

______________<\/p>\n

also see:<\/p>\n

Very much in control \u2013 Moshe Machover, Weekly Worker<\/a><\/p>\n

NATO preparing for inter-imperialist war with China and Russia, Gilbert Achcar, The Nation<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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The following article by Ben Burgis was first posted by Jacobin. It looks at\u00a0the implications of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. NANCY PELOSI IS ROLLING THE DICE ON WORLD WAR THREE\u00a0 Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan \u2014 a pointless trip that ratchets up tensions with one nuclear-armed superpower just as the United States finds itself knee-deep…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1845,1868,8830],"tags":[9122],"class_list":["post-21990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-imperialism","category-against-imperialism","category-chinese-east-asia","tag-author-ben-burgis"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/mastodon.scot\/@rcfscotland\/110079689616073323","error":""},"views":8495,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21990"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23328,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21990\/revisions\/23328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}