House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan this week has prompted a flurry of U.S. military activity in the region as the Biden administration looks to bolster its defenses in the face of a bellicose China.
Pelosi confirmed her arrival in Taipei on Tuesday, making her one of the highest-ranking U.S. officials to visit the independent island in decades. But the trip has sent tensions soaring between Washington and Beijing, which considers Taiwan part of Chinese territory.
Ahead of the travel, the U.S. Navy has positioned several warships — including an aircraft carrier and an amphibious assault ship carrying F-35 fighter jets — in waters near Taiwan, a move the service called part of routine operations.
China has responded in kind, placing two of its own aircraft carriers in the South China Sea since Monday and flying its planes near the median line dividing the Taiwan Strait from the sea on Tuesday morning, Reuters reported.
Experts, however, are calling China’s moves a calculated effort to show force rather than a real threat of direct military conflict.
“There’s a lot of chance for misperception and accident, and I am concerned about forces in close proximity, but my interpretation is that this is probably not a real use of force,” Lyle Goldstein, the director of Asia engagement at Defense Priorities, told The Hill. “I don’t think either Beijing or Washington wants a war over Taiwan.”
While the visit will “unquestionably increase tensions” in the short term, the likelihood of direct military conflict “is still quite remote, as I suspect neither side has a particular appetite right now for war,” said Allen Carlson, director of Cornell University’s China and Asia-Pacific Studies program.
The United States is no stranger to cycles of escalation with Beijing over Taiwan, as the two have long gone tit for tat with shows of force in the region over disagreements over the island.
Though a self-governing state since 1949, Taiwan is viewed by China as part of the mainland through its one-China policy.
The United States, meanwhile, has pledged to indirectly defend the democratic island under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act but has also promised Beijing it will adhere to its “One China” policy.
That skewed viewpoint between the two nations has caused several major flashpoints, the most recent in 1997 when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich visited Taiwan.
Now, 25 years later, the U.S. government is again taking necessary precautions to ward off a confrontation.