Beijing strikes a difficult stance against Washington, playing peacemaker in Europe, but playing tough over Taiwan
(Originally published April 7 in “What in the World“) China launched naval exercises around Taiwan in response to a meeting in California between Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen and U.S. Congressman and Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy.
Beijing’s response also includes a snap, three-day patrol and ship inspection operation in the Taiwan Strait by provincial maritime authorities in Fujian that will ostensibly involve boarding container ships and construction vessels. Still, China’s reaction seems almost perfunctory compared with the tantrum it threw last August when McCarthy’s predecessor Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei. China appears to have figured out that the Speaker of the House doesn’t set U.S. foreign policy and that such overtures to Taiwan are merely part of domestic political grandstanding. Both of America’s parties are now striving to out-do each other when it comes to bashing China, however, so Beijing has ample cause for concern.
Apparently, McCarthy had hoped to repeat Pelosi’s Taiwan visit, only to be talked down to a California meeting by President Tsai. While Taiwan has benefited from the renewed American alarm over China’s intentions toward Taiwan, provoking a war is in no one’s best interests. American chest-beating over Taiwan has earned the island additional pledges of military support and even a brigade of U.S. Marines to help make it impregnable to Chinese invasion—part of a “porcupine” defense strategy. But Taiwan is still waiting in line for weapons behind Ukraine, which is launching a spring counteroffensive to cut off the land bridge linking Russia to occupied Crimea. Until Taiwan’s quills arrive, senior U.S. politicians may find Taipei prickly about include it on their campaign trails.
Instead, Tsai took her concerns about the delays directly to California. Congress approved $3 billion in weapons for Taiwan in this year’s record $858 billion defense budget. But it didn’t approve funding for that budget, and Republicans still refuse to raise the U.S. debt ceiling for Washington to borrow the money needed to pay its own bills. The Pentagon plans to deliver $1 billion worth of Taiwan’s arms using a drawdown authority like what it’s been using for much of its assistance to Ukraine—simply handing over weapons already paid for and sitting in the Pentagon’s rapidly dwindling stockpiles.
How to pay for the other $2 billion worth is up for debate. Last year, Democrats and Republicans wrangled over whether to supply Taiwan with grants it could use to buy the weapons but settled on lending it the money instead. Even if Taiwan places orders for new weapons, it still has to contend with a massive industry backlog as defense contractors struggle to meet growing demand from not only Ukraine, but U.S. allies and, of course, the U.S. military. The U.S. Air Force has just asked Congress, for example, for 72 new fighter jets a year to replace its aging fleet.
While China goes through motions of protesting McCarthy’s visit with the head of its “renegade province,” Beijing seems more interested in cooling temperatures and has been trying to posture itself as peacemaker between Russia and the West over Ukraine. While Washington has been too cynical about China’s motives to do so, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and French President Emmanuel Macron flew to Beijing to meet with China’s President Xi Jinping, thereby seizing the opportunity to play to Beijing’s vanity and prevent China from being pushed into lockstep with Russia. Macron said his hope was to convince China to try to “bring Russia to its senses.”
When Xi flew to Moscow last month to visit Russian President Vladimir Putin, the hope was that he was doing just that. Beijing must realize that Russia can’t win in Ukraine and that Putin won’t accept defeat without resorting to nuclear weapons. But Xi’s failure to announce any breakthroughs from his trip or to then make a public break with Moscow prompted U.S. media to deride his visit as further proof of a perfidious alliance between China and Russia. Xi has also yet to hold a planned phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The U.S. media hasn’t yet labeled Macron and van der Leyen traitors for visiting Beijing. Standing beside Macron, Xi repeated his calls for peace talks and rejected use of nuclear weapons, but stopped short of condemning Moscow’s invasion. Washington and the Western media seem to require nothing less as a demonstration of Beijing’s sincerity, but doing so would almost certainly close Beijing’s door to the Kremlin. Instead, Xi reiterated his sympathy for Russia’s concerns about NATO’s eastward expansion, something China can relate to as the U.S. builds anti-China alliances in the Pacific. Xi called for “a European security architecture that is balanced, effective and lasting.”
The two presidents called for a resumption of peace talks, but Zelensky has refused to do so until Russia withdraws from all Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean peninsula it annexed in 2014.