Sinatra’s 1942 classic comes to mind as a California congresswoman nudges the U.S. closer to war in the Pacific

(Originally published Aug. 2 in “What in the World“) We are, according to the United Nations’ Secretary General, António Guterres, just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation, away from nuclear annihilation. And the opportunities for both are only multiplying.

The war in Ukraine appears to have reached a watershed, with Russian forces now holding much of eastern Donbas, but unable to advance against barrages by Ukrainian forces armed with American missile launchers. Ukrainians are using the missiles for surgical strikes to cut Russian supply lines; Russians are retaliating by bombarding anything and everything. The U.S. weapon systems are considered so effective that Russian hackers have mounted cyberattacks against their manufacturer, Lockheed Martin. That won’t likely stop the U.S. from handing more missiles to Ukraine as part of its latest, $500 million, delivery of military aid ahead of a Ukrainian counteroffensive aimed at liberating the Black Sea port of Kherson and turning the tide in the war. Russian forces are already shifting south in anticipation.

Even as this showdown looms, humanity’s maniacal gaze has been pulled to the Pacific, where an 82-year-old U.S. Congresswoman has managed to, apparently single-handedly, usher her nation to the brink of potential war with China merely by suggesting she will visit the island of Taiwan. That Congresswoman is California’s Nancy Pelosi, who is reportedly planning to fly from Singapore to Taipei sometime in the next day or so.

In real terms, Pelosi’s visit means absolutely nothing and changes nothing. Pelosi is a U.S. citizen and so can visit Taiwan for up to 90 days provided she obtains a special permit from Taiwan’s representative office in the United States, can demonstrate she isn’t carrying Covid-19 and undergoes a three-day quarantine.

Of course, Pelosi isn’t just an ordinary U.S. citizen. She represents the 12th district (think San Francisco) of the state of California, which is home to at least 75,000 Taiwanese-Americans. She is also Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and so to some extent represents that half of the U.S. legislature, one of three branches of the American government. In that capacity, she’s planning meetings with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen. But Pelosi doesn’t represent U.S. foreign policy. She doesn’t even sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Before becoming House Speaker, she sat on the intelligence committee, which is ironic given how little intelligence seems to have gone into her decision to visit Taiwan.

That’s because Taiwan is no ordinary island and Pelosi’s visit comes at a particularly fraught juncture for all involved. Though Taiwan governs itself, both Taiwan and China regard it as part of China, just a part that was split from China’s Communist government when China’s Nationalists fled there and took it over in 1949. Not even Taiwan’s government considers itself independent; and the U.S. government also recognizes that Taiwan is part of China. To accommodate Taiwan’s unusual status, therefore, the U.S. doesn’t recognize Taiwan’s government per se. The U.S. doesn’t have an official embassy in Taipei, nor does Taiwan have an embassy in Washington. Instead, they have “cultural offices.”

In the 50 years since Taiwan and China split, the two have evolved like a Darwinian experiment, with Taiwan developing a raucous democracy and a developmental capitalist model copied from Japan that propelled it from an exporter of cheap knockoffs to one of the world’s most important semiconductor producers today. China followed its own Communist pathway to a similar form of state-guided capitalism, eventually opening to cross-straits investment, which helped finance its own use of the Japanese model to arrive where it is today, the world’s second-largest economy, the world’s most populous nation and an increasingly assertive global player.

There are many in Taiwan who support independence, but Washington doesn’t and certainly not Beijing, which has long said reunification is inevitable, by force if necessary. Any suggestion to the contrary has long been a guaranteed way to send Beijing into a wild temper tantrum, warning of invasion if Taiwan or anyone else moves a muscle to declare independence. That sensitivity has forced Washington to develop an odd security policy towards Taiwan called “strategic ambiguity,” warning China against attacking Taiwan and keeping its Pacific forces ready, but never explicitly pledging to come to Taiwan’s defense and thereby give pro-independence forces in Taiwan a blank cheque.

For many decades, China and Taiwan spent a lot of energy firing missiles at each other across the narrow Taiwan Strait. But as their economic fortunes converged, many believed their economic linkages made the stakes too high for actual conflict. Now China is wealthy and developed enough not to need Taiwan’s money, which makes things much more dangerous. Moreover, Beijing has been warily observing Washington’s push eastward in Europe via the expanding membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Americans tend to forget it, but the U.S. still maintains large bases in Japan and South Korea and a constant naval presence around Taiwan and Southeast Asia. It’s akin to China or Russia maintaining military bases in the Caribbean and Canada and their navies cruising up and down the Atlantic coast.

It’s Washington’s propensity to meddle in support of pro-U.S. governments deemed “democratic” and work to topple those deemed anti-U.S. that worries Beijing. It is therefore especially paranoid, perhaps justifiably so, about efforts by the U.S. to “contain” China’s military expansion to support its territorial claims in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, or to create alliances with neighbors to do so.

That has created an atmosphere of tit-for-tat, in which China’s increasing assertiveness is interpreted as aggression by the U.S., which China in turn uses to justify its assertiveness. China has longstanding claims to not only to Taiwan, but to the islands Japan calls the Senkaku, and, most outlandishly, to the entire South China Sea and its many reefs and atolls. To defend and advance those claims, it has occupied the atolls in the South China Sea, installing military outposts there, and has conducted an accelerating campaign of air incursions into Taiwan and Japan’s respective air space, both to test and exhaust their defenses and demonstrate the growing capacity of its military to overwhelm them.

When Russia responded to what it saw as the creeping NATO menace by invading Ukraine in February, China failed to condemn Moscow, but stopped short of supporting it and lending aid. Instead, Beijing has maintained its trade and diplomatic ties with the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin in calculated defiance of the Washington-led coalition to punish Russia with sanctions and pour military aid into Ukraine. As Washington has sought to rally allies in Asia through its Quad alliance with Australia, India, Japan and the oddly antiquarian AUKUS alliance with Australia and the United Kingdom, China has mounted its own regional diplomatic push, cementing a security agreement with the Solomon Islands, and trying to court similar ties with the far-flung yet strategically important islands of the Pacific.

The U.S. intelligence community has been warning for some time that China’s military is working to achieve the ability to invade and conquer Taiwan. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Washington has rededicated itself Taiwan’s defense, adopting a “porcupine” strategy learned adapted from Ukraine’s defense against Russia. U.S. President Joe Biden showed his hand in May, when he effectively ended “strategic ambiguity” by saying the U.S. would defend Taiwan if invaded.

Now, China is only three months away from the most important political event in its five-year calendar, the 20th annual party congress which will determine the next head of the Communist party and, by extension, the next president. President Xi Jinping has laid the groundwork for an unprecedented third term, but his success isn’t a lock: he can’t afford to appear weak or to suffer policy embarrassment, whether on Covid or China’s territorial claims. Covid and a slowing economy may give Xi enough to worry about without adding conflict with the U.S. But like many American presidents, he undoubtedly knows there’s nothing like a foreign-policy crisis to sweep away domestic opposition.

Pelosi doesn’t speak for the U.S. or its foreign policy. But that hasn’t stopped China from objecting to her visit. Just as Americans believe China’s government is a monolith, Beijing often mistakes U.S. foreign policy as a strategy focused on its impact outside the U.S. Pelosi is most likely playing to a domestic audience of China baiters. Yet Beijing won’t fail to see her visit as yet more evidence of U.S. determination to repress China and deny its rightful ascendance as a great world power. Just as the U.S. maintains a “cultural office” in Taipei, it has long used legislators as thinly veiled emissaries to the island. Beijing may see Pelosi as Biden’s proxy and her meetings with officials as tacit recognition of Taiwan’s sovereignty.

The danger, then, is that the Pelosi visit becomes the straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back—that it convinces Beijing that it has reached a point of no return in Taiwan. Ominously, Chinese military officials began a few months ago referring to the Taiwan Strait as a domestic waterway, rather than an international one. And China’s air force has so far this year stepped up incursions by its air force into Taiwan’s air space by two-thirds, according to an estimate by The Wall Street Journal.

Officials in the Biden Administration worry Pelosi’s visit could provoke China to move militarily. China is already planning military exercises in the South China Sea this week and Washington is warning China not to misinterpret her visit. A more conciliatory tone would be more appropriate. Washington continues to deliver high-handed lectures to Beijing when Beijing is intent on getting respect. And Beijing unfailingly rises to Washington’s bait.

The White House may have failed to dissuade Pelosi from visiting Taiwan. Let’s just hope it can convince Beijing that her visit is nothing to worry about.