Pelosi stands up to bullies running China

Chiang Ying-Ying

Bret Stephens in today's NY Times:

What should the U.S. do? Don’t back down.

1. Congressional delegations ought to arrive in Taiwan every week for the next year. Make them so routine that Beijing forgets to protest.

2. President Biden should formally state what he has said repeatedly off the cuff: that the United States will intervene militarily if China seeks to invade Taiwan. 

He can underscore the point with frequent transits of U.S. Navy ships through the Taiwan Strait, along with an expansion of the secretive joint training exercises that U.S. and Taiwanese special-operations forces have already conducted.

3. The United States can also provide Taiwan with the kind of easily dispersed, easily hidden, asymmetric weapons that have done such damage to the Russians: Javelin anti-tank missiles, Switchblade “kamikaze” drones, Stinger antiaircraft missiles, naval-strike antiship missiles.

4. Biden should propose sharp increases in military spending, particularly for the Navy, which now ranks behind China’s in terms of ship numbers. It would have bipartisan support both as an industrial policy and as a measure of global security.

With luck, China will accept that the ultimate costs of confrontation vastly outweigh the benefits. 

It’s a lesson Vladimir Putin may have learned — albeit only after he invaded Ukraine and at a tragic price for the world. The key to saving Taiwan is to get that point across to Beijing now, before they blunder into similar tragedy. Cheers to Pelosi for standing firm.

See also Proud of our representative from 2020.