The official Chinese media is making a meal of the affront anyway. Democrats, increasingly anxious about Biden’s floor-level popularity with voters ahead of the midterm elections and keen to limit the House’s losses, may have thought the risk was worth it. Whatever the intention was, executing it was a public blow to Biden’s already fragile prestige while raising Pelosi’s as a defender of American values. One possibility is that the White House danced a two-step to re-assert its weakened position on Taiwan after Biden’s earlier gaffe with the President saying don’t go to appease the Chinese and distance the White House from responsibility, while privately approving Pelosi’s gesture for an international audience. According to the media, he didn’t want her to include Taiwan in her Asian tour in case it sabotaged the administration’s efforts to persuade the Chinese not to send Putin weapons to use in Ukraine. Why Pelosi chose apparently to snub Biden so publicly over such a sensitive policy issue is not yet clear. Hopefully this will close the matter for both sides without causing material damage. Xi’s government has felt obliged to make good on its promise to respond to the visit by preparing live fire drills which would involve the use of long-range weapons and conventional missiles hitting the seas around Taiwan, which lies 90 miles off the mainland. In contrast, Pelosi, who at 82 is two years older than Biden, is still a sharp-elbowed political warrior who knew exactly what she was doing and was steelier than the State Department mandarins who make a fetish of never offending Beijing, which regards Taiwan as part of China. The US has no treaty obligation to defend Taiwan. Pelosi’s visit and declaration cannot guarantee Taiwan immunity from attack but she sent a clear message to Beijing that its threats have no automatic bar over American foreign policy.īiden himself pledged to fight for Taiwan last winter at the height of the West’s enthusiasm for the defence of Ukraine but the White House quickly dismissed his words as a confused old man’s gaffe. Ukraine today looks increasingly left in the lurch despite Nato promises to help it defeat Vladimir Putin’s invasion. If Ukraine is the yardstick, actual bravery rather than brave words is a commodity in short supply in the West. Undeterred by a telephone warning to Biden by President Xi last week that ‘those who live by fire will perish from it’, Pelosi said after talks with President Tsai Ing-wen: ‘Our delegation came here to send an unequivocal message: America stands with Taiwan.’ But her démarche served its purpose if any imminent danger of Taiwan becoming an Asian Ukraine has been alleviated. Pelosi wearing a pink suit in Taiwan may not have the same historic resonance as Richard Nixon in Peking in 1972. CONSERVATIVES loathe Nancy Pelosi, but in visiting Taiwan in defiance of Joe Biden and Chinese threats of military retaliation, the US House Speaker showed bravery and a resolve which gave substance to Western assurances of support for the beleaguered island.

Brave words