PELOSI'S VISIT TO TAIWAN ANYTHING BUT `RECKLESS'

The speculation had lasted for weeks, and she kept everybody guessing until the last minute.

When the U.S. air force carrier SPAR19 took off from the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur Tuesday with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi aboard, the plane didn't head straight north to Taiwan. Instead, it veered away in an arc over the island of Borneo, and instead of transiting the Taiwan Strait, the aircraft carried Pelosi and her small congressional delegation up the east coast of Taiwan, landing at the island nation's capital Taipei shortly before 11 p.m. Tuesday evening.

The detour added about three hours to the usual flight time. The point was to avoid the live-fire drills and other antics the People's Liberation Army was carrying out on Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping's orders in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, the Yellow Sea and the Bohai Sea, accompanied by stupid hyperbole from the Beijing regime's usual mouthpieces to the effect that Pelosi's visit was “reckless” and “provocative.”

“Reckless” was also a word the New York Times' chronically wrong columnist Thomas Friedman used to characterize Pelosi's visit, owing to Pelosi being the most senior U.S. official to visit the beleaguered and plucky democracy in 25 years, and how upsetting it all was for the Chinese Communist Party, which claims Taiwan as its sovereign possession. Pelosi's visit was “against President Biden's wishes,” Friedman complained, which might even be true. It was “utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible ... in my view, Taiwan should have just asked Pelosi not to come at this time.”

Taiwan's brave and brilliant President Tsai Ing-wen didn't think it was reckless, and neither did Taiwan's leading opposition party, and neither did the people of Taiwan, who have kept cooler heads than most about everything even though it's their own beloved, hard-won and flourishing democracy that Beijing is constantly threatening to invade and overthrow.

Before she left Washington last Sunday, Pelosi was given bipartisan encouragement, even if most of her Democratic Party colleagues in Congress tended to be a bit quiet about it, given Biden's oblique statement last week, “I think that the military thinks it's not a good idea right now. But I don't know what the status of it is.”

Republicans haven't been so timorous, complaining only that the five congresspeople accompanying Pelosi on her Indo-pacific jaunt with stops in Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan included no one from their team. Pelosi's office says she did invite Texas Republican Michael Mccaul, but he'd made prior commitments.

Expressing the typical Republican sentiment, here's Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse: “Speaker Pelosi should go to Taiwan, and President Biden should make it abundantly clear to Chairman Xi that there's not a damn thing the Chinese Communist Party can do about it. No more feebleness and self-deterrence.”

Typical of the Communist party's more loutish opinions was the sentiment expressed by the national chauvinist Hu Xijin, former editor-inchief of the party-run Global Times, in the run-up to Pelosi's visit: “Our jet fighters should deploy all obstructive tactics. If those are still ineffective, I think it is OK to shoot down Pelosi's plane.” Hu's account was temporarily suspended by Twitter.

The United Nations' police-state bloc weighed in, too, taking its cue from Beijing's UN ambassador, Zhang Jun: “As we can see, such a visit is apparently very much dangerous, very much provocative. If the U.S. insists on making the visit, China will take firm and strong measures to safeguard our national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Straight away the Kremlin weighed in, blasting Washington's “aggressive policy” as “undermining regional stability and international security.”

Venezuelan caudillo Nicolas Maduro's foreign ministry called Pelosi's visit “a direct provocation that seriously threatens China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.” The Bolivarian commentary was aped by Belarus and by Cuba, and by Khomeinist Iran and its satrapy in Damascus, the torture state run by Syrian mass murderer Bashar Assad, and of course it was: Beijing and Tehran signed a 25-year, $400-billion partnership last year and Beijing recruited Assad into its global “belt and road” empire only a few months ago.

And what would this bestiary be without Kim Jong Un's Democratic Republic of North Korea? “The current situation clearly shows that the impudent interference of the U.S. in internal affairs of other countries and its intentional political and military provocations are, indeed, the root cause of harassed peace and security in the region,” Pyongyang declared.

All of this quite elegantly proved Pelosi's point, which she hammered home in a Washington Post opinion essay published during her stopover in Malaysia. The Xi regime has crushed the political freedoms and human rights of Hongkongers. It persists in a campaign to erase the Tibetan language, religion and culture. Beijing is perpetrating genocide against the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, and throughout China the regime targets and arrests democracy activists and anyone who fights for religious freedom.

“Indeed, we take this trip at a time when the world faces a choice between autocracy and democracy,” Pelosi wrote. “As Russia wages its premeditated, illegal war against Ukraine, killing thousands of innocents — even children — it is essential that America and our allies make clear that we never give in to autocrats.”

So Pelosi didn't give in, and all she did was pop in for a few informal visits in Taiwan, which has never been ruled by the People's Republic of China, and prides itself on being a free democracy, while Beijing riles up nationalist passions to distract the increasingly sullen masses from a bank mortgage crises that is threatening a loss of $350 billion.

It's also no wonder that while roughly 95 per cent of Taiwanese people are descended from China's ethnic Han majority, less than five per cent identify as “Chinese.”

The Taiwanese need to be assured that the world's liberal democracies are with them.

They need to know the United States, particularly, has got their back. Pelosi is right: “The world faces a choice between autocracy and democracy.” And that's why Pelosi chose to defy Beijing and stop in for a visit with President Tsai Ing-wen, and she was right to do so.