A Democrat more dangerous than Nancy Pelosi
- As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Menendez is co-sponsoring a bill that if passed, will effectively force the United States government to gut the ‘one-China’ policy
Nancy Pelosi may have attracted all the attention. But flying under the radar, fellow Democrat Bob Menendez may be the more dangerous. The senator from New Jersey is co-sponsoring a bill, known as the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022.
If passed, it will effectively force the United States government to gut the one-China policy. Since Menendez is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, this possibility cannot be entirely discarded in the current political climate.
Writing in The New York Times to coincide with the House speaker’s just-ended trip to Taiwan, Menendez explains the rationale behind the bill and inadvertently shows all the misjudgments of the US posture towards Taiwan and mainland China.
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Mainland China conducts military live-fire drills as tensions soar over Pelosi visit to Taiwan
He makes three key assertions, each of which amounts to a misperception on the Taiwan Strait situation but taken together, may well turn “the threat of China” into a self-fulfilling prophecy: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offers valuable lessons for Beijing to invade Taiwan; “dysfunctional democracies and hesitant international institutions” are emboldening countries such as Russia and China; and the long-standing US policy of strategic ambiguity needs to be overturned.
What Beijing has learned from the war in Ukraine is not that it too needs its own invasion, as in “monkey see, monkey do”. What the incessant linking of Ukraine to Taiwan by the US and not a few European political leaders has taught China is that Washington is inherently incapable of recognising what it considers its core legitimate security interests. If rational diplomacy can’t produce the desired results, force may be the only option.
Far from making China exploit “dysfunctional democracies and hesitant international institutions”, it’s precisely those same institutional flaws that have made Washington and Brussels far more belligerent towards China than rationality would justify.
Why Beijing thinks Pelosi’s Taiwan visit is not like Gingrich in 1997
For example, a Democrat president couldn’t ask a Democrat speaker of the House of Representatives not to visit Taiwan even though the White House clearly considered the risks outweighed the benefits – for fear of opening themselves to attacks from rival Republicans ahead of the November midterm elections.
As opposed to ambiguity, “strategic charity” means the US will defend Taiwan no matter what the circumstance surrounding an armed conflict between the island and mainland China.
This obviously includes a unilateral declaration of independence by Taiwan. Menendez is proposing an incentive to spur such a move.
With American “friends” like Menendez, God help the Chinese people.
