Though willing to risk sending F-16s to Ukraine, Washington sees a Taiwan trip by the U.S. House Speaker as too provocative

(Originally published July 27 in “What in the World“) Officials in the Biden Administration fear China may move militarily in the next 18 months against Taiwan, perhaps trying to restrict international access to the Taiwan Strait.

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.

Since the February invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Washington has been refocusing on Taiwan as a potential flashpoint and shifting its strategy to helping the self-governing province of China adopt a Ukraine-style “porcupine” defense. Now the White House is reportedly trying to dissuade Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, from a planned visit to Taiwan, fearing it could further provoke Beijing and even trigger a military response. For its part, Beijing has warned of “serious consequences” if Pelosi ventures to Taiwan. U.S. President Joe Biden is due to speak with China’s President Xi Jinping later this week.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is preparing a counteroffensive to retake the Black Sea port of Kherson from the Russians and has been softening up enemy positions with U.S.-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS. The Pentagon is now considering ways to step up its aid to Ukraine with U.S. jet fighters—likely F-16s like those now sold to Taiwan and Turkey or A10 “Warthogs” like those the used for close ground support of troops in the three decades since the first Gulf War.

Any delivery of fighters would be months away and require training Ukrainian pilots. It would also overturn one of the earliest limits on U.S. aid. Supplying fighter jets was seen as likely to be interpreted by Moscow as a direct intervention by the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and thus plunge the two into war. The Biden Administration in March rejected a Polish offer to give Ukraine MiG fighters in return for U.S. jets, since the Polish MiGs would need to be flown into Ukraine and even that flight would likely appear on Russian radar as a NATO attack. That’s why Poland wanted the jets flown to Ukraine from Germany.

But since then, other former Warsaw Pact nations, such as the Czech Republic, have been supplying Ukraine with old Soviet-era tanks. And Slovakia is reportedly considering a plan to fly its own MiG’s to Ukraine, with its former Warsaw Pact neighbors monitoring its airspace as the transfer takes place.

The offer to provide Ukraine with air power, however, will likely bring to the fore a long-running debate over why Russia has failed to use its own air force to secure the air space over Ukraine. Analysts have been marveling at this aspect of the Russian invasion for months, with some speculating that Moscow fears losing fighters to anti-aircraft fire, that its pilots simply refuse to risk their lives in Ukraine, or that Moscow is just exercising restraint in its approach to carving off eastern Ukraine and the corridor to the Crimea.

But much of the volte-face by Washington over fighters appears to stem from a calculation that Ukraine is, despite early expectations, likely to survive the war and become a NATO ally, if not a member.