Adding more insult-to-injury, 70-year-old Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) took her turn visiting Taipei, slapping Chinese President Xi Jinping in the face. Taiwan still hasn’t gotten over the latest backlash from 81-year-old House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Aug. 4 visit, signaling to Beijing, that the Speaker would not change her travel itinerary because of threats from Communist China. China warned Pelosi, and other U.S. elected officials, that visiting the island nation was equivalent to vacating the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, signed into law by former President Jimmy Carter, promising that Washington would only recognized one-China, the one in Beijing. Pelosi and now Blackburn wants to remind Xi that the U.S. visits anywhere on the planet deemed safe by the U.S. State Department. China’s threatening military exercises exposed real tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
Xi thinks that the U.S. has its hands full with its proxy war against the Russian Federation. President Joe Biden, 79, tried-but-failed to get Xi to condemn 69-year-old Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Feb. 24 Ukraine invasion. Xi told Biden to mind his own business, while Beijing forged closer ties to Russia than ever before. Biden tried to slap Putin with the most punitive sanctions in history but found out the hard way that many nonaligned countries have close ties with Moscow. Biden couldn’t stop the BRICS bloc, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, from doing business with Moscow, especially on energy purchases. Biden hoped to choke off the Russian economy but instead found that Russian has many economic relationships around the globe, giving Putin a safety net when it came to Biden’s economic sanctions. Blackburn gets her turn to kick sand in China’s face.
Pelosi started the rebellious trend by U.S. elected officials with Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) following Pelosi with his own delegation to Taipei. So when Blackburn arrived in Taipei, it infuriated Beijing, having another U.S. elected officials visi Taiwan in the last three weeks. Taiwan fiercely values its independence from Beijing, a long history started in 1949 when Gen. Chaing Kai-Shek led a band of Chinese Nationalists to the Island of Formosa to escape the Maoist Revolution. So, for more that 73 years, the U.S. has backed Taiwan militarily to stop any possible Mainland Chinese claim over the Island. Carter’s 1979 Taiwan Relations Act forced the U.S. to recognized only one China and abandon the 1954 Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, that had the U.S. protecting the island from Communist China. For some unknown reason, Xi has made a big deal over Taiwan’s independence.
Taiwan’s independence is nothing new to Beijing but part of the Republic of China’s [ROC] DNA for the last 73 years. Xi understands that Taiwan is a different kettle of fish than Hong Kong, who fought over the last few years heavy-handed crackdown by Mainland China. China used local Hong Kong authorities, led by Administrator Carrie Lam, to crack down on Hong Kong’s fledgling pro-democracy movement. Pelosi, defying Beijing to visit Taipei, said her 1991 visit to Tiananmen Square made a big difference, vowing she would never abandon’s Taiwan’s pro-Democracy roots. Whatever Blackburn’s visit, it didn’t go over well in Beijing, increasing the boiling point over Taiwan. Blackburn knows the U.S. can ill-afford a war with Communist China.
Taiwan’s government said they planned a 12.8% increase in the Defense Ministry budget, signaling to Beijing that the independent Island nation wouldn’t go down without a fight. Getting U.S. Congressmen and women to visit the Island hopes to show Beijing that the U.S., as Pelosi said emphatically, has Taiwan’s back. Biden said May 23, when asked whether he would defend Taiwan militarily against a Mainland invasion, he would defend Taiwan, infuriating Chinese Communist officials Chinese officials know that the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act expressly forbids the U.S. from any mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. So when Biden said the U.S. would defend Taiwan, it sent the Chinese Politburo apoplectic. Since signing the Taiwan Relations Act, no U.S. president has said what he would do to protect Taiwan, so-called “strategic ambiguity.” Biden broke that unwritten rule May 23.
Blackburn’s visit today to Taipei threw more gasoline on an already volatile situation with Beijing. Whether China invades Taiwan or not, official U.S. visits to Taiwan have wrecked U.S.-Chinese relations. Biden walks on thin ice with Beijing, largely because Xi has shown Putin all the cooperation he needs as Biden prosecutes his proxy war against the Russian Federation. While the media obsesses over seized documents at Mar-a-Lago, Blackburn inflames U.S. national security with Beijing, pushing Xi to take more aggressive actions to prove his sovereignty over Taiwan. “Chinese Communists continued expansion of targeted military activities in recent years, the normalization of their harassment of Taiwan’s nearby waters and airspace with warships and war planes,” said the Taiwan Defense Ministry. U.S. politicians should stop grandstanding and let things settle down.
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.
