Why did the speaker go, and what damage has her visit caused?

Roy Blunt lived up to his surname when he said last week: “So I’m about to use four words in a row that I haven’t used in this way before, and those four words are: ‘Speaker Pelosi was right.’”

The Republican senator was praising Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the first by a speaker of the US House of Representatives in a quarter of a century.

But not everyone was so sure. In enraging China, which claims the self-governing island as its territory, Pelosi deepened a rupture between the world’s two most powerful countries – and may have hurt the cause she was seeking to promote.

Last Thursday, China began a series of huge military drills around the island; the White House summoned China’s ambassador, Qin Gang, to protest. Last Friday, China said it was ending cooperation with the US on key issues including the climate crisis, anti-drug efforts and military talks.

So why did Pelosi go? The speaker is a fervent defender of Taiwan and critic of China’s human rights abuses. During the visit, she pointed to a global struggle between autocracy and democracy, a favourite theme of Joe Biden’s, and told reporters in Taipei: “We cannot back away from that.”

But the 82-year-old may also have been rushing for a last hurrah before November’s midterm elections in which she is expected to lose the speaker’s gavel. Her televised meetings in Taiwan, sure to have registered in Beijing, appeared to some like a vanity project.

Writing just ahead of the trip, Thomas Friedman, an author and New York Times columnist, described Pelosi’s adventure as “utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible”.

Friedman warned that the consequences could include “the US being plunged into indirect conflicts with a nuclear-armed Russia and a nuclear-armed China at the same time”, without the support of European allies in the latter.

Biden himself had publicly admitted that the US military felt the trip was “not a good idea right now”, not least because President Xi Jinping is preparing to secure a third term at the Chinese Communist party’s national congress later this year. In a call last month, the White House has said, Biden sought to remind Xi about America’s separation of powers: that he could not and would not prevent the speaker and members of Congress travelling where they wish.

But Pelosi, second in line to the presidency, flew into the island on a US military aircraft with all the government heft that implies.

It was perhaps telling that Biden and Democrats remained mostly silent, whereas the speaker’s loudest cheerleaders were rightwing Republicans and China hawks.

For months the president has sown doubts about America’s commitment to the “One China” policy, under which the US recognises formal ties with China rather than Taiwan. In May, when asked if the US would get involved militarily to defend Taiwan, he replied forcefully: “Yes. That’s the commitment we made.”

Although America is required by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself, it has never directly promised to intervene militarily in a conflict with China. This delicate equilibrium has helped deter Taiwan from declaring full independence and China from invading. But some worry that Biden is supplanting this longstanding position of “strategic ambiguity” with “strategic confusion”.

Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States thinktank in Washington, told a Council on Foreign Relations podcast last week: “So Speaker Pelosi going to Taiwan doesn’t really, I think, in and of itself cross a red line, but I think the Chinese see a slippery slope … And then on top of all this, we have President Biden talking about policy toward Taiwan in confusing ways.”

Other analysts agreed that, once news of Pelosi’s visit emerged, it would have been impossible to back down without handing Beijing a propaganda victory.

Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank and former policy adviser to Clinton, said: “I can see the arguments on both sides. Argument on one side, this was probably an ill-timed gesture on her part. Argument on the other side, once the issue was joined, allowing the Chinese to bully her out of the trip would have been a really bad sign to the region.

“If she hadn’t put the issue on the table, that would have been one thing. But once she did and once it was clear that she was pretty firm in doing it, it would have been a mistake, say, for the president to put … pressure on her not to go. That would have been both a substantive mistake and a political mistake.”

Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Palo Alto, California, wrote in an email: “It provoked a serious escalation of Beijing’s military intimidation without really doing anything to make Taiwan more secure. What Taiwan really needs now is more military assistance, especially a large number of small, mobile, survivable and lethal weapons, like anti-ship missiles. To paraphrase [Ukraine’s Volodymyr] Zelenskiy, they don’t need more visits, they need weapons.”