Nancy Pelosi’s contested travel plan to Taiwan worries the White House

Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi in Washington on July 14, 2022. MARIAM ZUHAIB / AP

The project of Nancy Pelosi, the president (speaker) of the House of Representatives, to visit Taiwan does not only arouse condemnation from Beijing. He quite annoys the White House and the Pentagon. “I think the military thinks it’s not a good idea now”, President Joe Biden said on July 20. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian denounced such a visit, which “would seriously undermine China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, seriously affect the foundations of the China-US alliance.”

M^me Pelosi, 82, was originally due to travel to the island in April but had to postpone her trip after being diagnosed with Sars-CoV-2. This would be the first visit by a Speaker of the House since Republican Newt Gingrich in 1997. The parliamentarian’s response to Joe Biden has rather accentuated the problem: “I think what the president was saying was maybe the military was afraid my plane would be shot down. » The practice is that this kind of trip takes place aboard a US military aircraft.

Unusual dissent

The White House, according to New York Timeswould prefer that M^me Pelosi cancels his trip, fearing misinterpretations and risk of incidents as Chinese President Xi Jinping prepares for the 20^e Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress. No one knows when the trip will take place as the Bloomberg agency announces that Mr. Biden should meet with President Xi this Thursday, July 28, an interview that had been in the works for ten days.

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This public dissent is unusual, as US policy towards China has been the subject for many years, including under Donald Trump, of a strong cross-partisan consensus. It is combined with a related dispute, but revealing American feverishness, on the possible infiltration of the Fed, the American Federal Reserve, by the Chinese. A report, released Monday, July 25, looks at thirteen persons of interest identified in 2015 by the Fed itself, but it was authored by Senate Republican minority employees and drew a backlash from the chairman of the Fed. central bank, Jerome Powell: “We are deeply troubled by what we believe to be unfair, unsubstantiated and unverified insinuations in the report regarding certain staff members”écrit M. Powell.

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