NANCY PELOSI’S recklessly provocative visit to the breakaway Chinese province of Taiwan will have far-reaching consequences for Sino-US relations going forward.

That one aged US senator and senior Washington functionary believes that the road to stability and peace in East Asia will be served by triggering an international incident is a metric of how out of touch with reality she and her advisers are.

Taiwan in its current mode of existence is a dagger pointed at the Chinese mainland’s heart. Its strategic location and history as a major jumping off point for the Japanese invasion and occupation of China in the 1930s — during which the atrocities and crimes committed against the Chinese people were legion — makes this issue more than one of territorial integrity. It is also about security.

The One China policy, recognised by successive US administrations since 1979, is an inviolate international agreement that anti-China hawks in Washington, such as Pelosi, are intent on undermining not out of some noble or honorable principle, but out of determination to halt China’s rise and growing geopolitical footprint.

Rather than deal with Beijing in a spirit of understanding and positive engagement, however, Washington prefers the path of confrontation and provocation.

Not only is such an approach dangerously irresponsible, it does nothing to enhance the security of the US and more importantly the security of the people of Taiwan. Not that Washington cares about the people actually living on the island.

The conflict in Ukraine constitutes clear evidence of the willingness of the Nancy Pelosi’s of this world to speak the language of democracy to justify using people as a convenient proxy and pawn to advance a US geostrategic agenda that is coterminous with imperialism — and do so no matter the death, devastation and destruction wrought.

When your engagement with other states is reduced to a high-stakes game of “call my bluff,” it is time to re-evaluate your methodology.

Imagine the outcry in Washington if a comparably senior official in the Chinese government were to conduct a visit to Puerto Rico without bothering to seek permission from the US government, and, while there, encourage this US territory’s growing ambition to become independent.

The outcry would be enormous, and with good reason.

The blatant disregard for China’s sovereignty and security on the part of Pelosi has its roots in Sinophobia, which itself has deep cultural roots in the US, stretching back centuries.

She and others of her ilk regard China as a lesser nation populated by a lesser people, who exist far down on the invisible totem pole of human worth established in the name of white supemacy.

This malign racial and ideological construct defines the US and its history and actions far more than democracy ever has, and has been the driver of immense human suffering in the US and beyond. Genocide and human slavery at home, wars of conquest abroad, this is the legacy of a state that purports to exercise dominion over the world.

Returning to Taiwan, what can be said about a territory that is home to political parties that claim sovereignty over the Chinese mainland? The ultra nationalist party the KMT is chief among them. Still today the KMT leadership pays homage to war criminal and fascistic dictator Chiang Kai-shek, who led the party until his death in 1975.

During the hard years of Japanese occupation in the 1930s, the KMT spent more time and expended more energy fighting and massacring Chinese communists and their supporters than it did resisting the occupation.

Such an inglorious legacy is important to highlight given that the party’s former leader continues to enjoy — as with Ukraine’s Stepan Bandera — an exalted status regardless of his crimes.

Sooner or later the status of Taiwan will have to be resolved if China and the region is to move forward on the basis of stability and harmony. Anti-China hawks in Washington dread nothing more than this very prospect, struggling as they are to comprehend a world that is shifting beneath their feet.

This and nothing else explains Pelosi’s provocative statements and actions in the face of an inordinately strong response by Beijing.

Austrian-born US economist and political theorist, Joseph Scumpeter, writing at the turn of the 20th century, provides the most cogent summation of US foreign policy then and now.

Schumpeter: “There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest — why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality.”

Substitute American and America for Roman and Rome in the above passage and you arrive at the most lucid understanding of where we are now and why.

Pelosi portrays herself a moderate, yet in her stance towards China she is an extremist who has no respect for international agreements and national sovereignty.

Here, she stands in the ignoble tradition of US political leaders and idealogues who have long viewed the world as a giant banquet upon which people such as her are entitled to feast.

Senator Pelosi and anti-China hawks like her in Washington need to wake up to the fact that this particular banquet is over.

Editor: Zhong Yao、Zheng Yifan

From:https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/us-plays-with-fire-over-taiwan.（2022-8-12）