China issued strong private warnings to the US government about a planned trip to Taiwan by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which included a possible military response, the Financial Times reported. China’s foreign ministry earlier this week officially vowed to take a “resolute and strong” response to any Taiwan visit by Pelosi, which was reported to be next month.
(Bloomberg New, July 24, 2022)
In fact, China would not dare. Which is why the United States should make a public show of calling its bluff.
China’s bullying bluff
Truth be told, far from the image of the dragon that breathed fire, China is rather like the boy who cried wolf. After all, it has been issuing similar warnings for years. As it happens, I decried its patented bluffing in a recent blog post, “China huffing and puffing about blowing Taiwan away,” on June 16.
But nothing betrays the bullying intent of its warnings quite like the groveling public apology China forced movie star John Cena to make last year, in Chinese no less. This, simply because he committed the cardinal sin of calling Taiwan a country…
Except that Cena’s apology reflects how people all over the world are living in constant fear of causing even a slight crack while walking on egg shells, which constitutes respecting China’s woke culture these days.
Consider, for example, the bullying way China keeps trying to get the world to recognize its dominion over Tibet. Because this has seen China issue similar warnings to force countries like South Africa to rescind invitations for Nobel Peace Laureate the Dalai Lama to visit (even though only to attend a peace conference) or face existential economic consequences. Which shows that China is not only bossy, but petty-minded too.
More to the point, though, Cena apologized for the same reason celebrities, corporations, and countries alike do all they can to avoid cracking those egg shells. And that’s because they all want to maintain access to China’s lucrative market.
This clearly makes the Orwellian notion of self-censorship seem radical… But it’s also why China is predicating its rise on the willingness of Westerners to sell even their souls for cheap stuff and a quick buck. And Westerners keep proving it right.
If China can make a superpower like the US kowtow…
Even in this case, the United States has already shown China far too much deference by even debating whether or not Pelosi should go. After all, if China’s power is such that it can scare a powerful US politician like Pelosi from even visiting, why should Taiwan have any confidence that America would come to its defense if China invades?
This is crazy! Except this is exactly the point China is trying to make with its bullying bluster. The irony is that, by publicly kowtowing to China – as this debate is doing, the US is practically forcing China to put up or shut up.
And, trust me, that’s the last thing it wants to do. In other words, China is no more likely to launch military strikes against Taiwan than North Korea is to do so against South Korea…
The lessons of Vietnam and Ukraine
Even so, it behooves the United States to honor its pledge to help Taiwan defend itself by arming it to the teeth today. This, to avoid the Ukrainian spectacle of Taiwan having to continually beg for weapons to defend itself once the fighting starts.
The aim should be to telegraph to China that invading Taiwan would be even more punishing for it than invading Stalingrad was for Germany…
Then of course there’s the deterrent effect Russia’s shambolic invasion of Ukraine is having. After all, Russia’s economic isolation on the world stage, not to mention its military humiliation in Ukraine, means that no matter how much it huffs and puffs, everyone knows China is only blowing hot air with its threats to go to war over Taiwan.
The bottom line is that, if China is crazy enough to launch military strikes against Taiwan (for any reason), China knows it could trigger a conflagration that would be ten times as costly for it as Vietnam and Afghanistan were for America … combined.
Which is why this is all just saber-rattling folly.
Related commentaries:
Ukraine…