Pelosi’s Taiwan Trip: Why Now?

BUCK: Welcome back to Clay and Buck. This is Buck.

I remember they used to tell us when I was in the CIA that they only wanted one-handed analysts because they never wanted to hear the “On the one hand… On the other hand…” This was always the… These are analyst jokes. You think dad jokes are bad? Analyst jokes are really bad. You could always walk in, “On the one hand, this could lead to nuclear war. On the other hand, maybe it’s a good move.” That was a little bit of what you got there from Senator Coons. And, you know, Pelosi, on her possible trip here to Taiwan, it’s interesting, isn’t it, the timing of it all?

On the one hand, you have this bill making its way through Congress, the CHIPS Bill, which would spend a whole bunch of money to improve domestic semiconductor production. Basically, it’s a big giveaway to that industry. Now, they argue, of course, that that industry specifically is of tremendous national security implications; so that’s why we should do it. But Nancy Pelosi is now in a position where she either backs down to China’s demands or she goes and risks some kind of provocation from Chinese Communist Party.

Now, I will remind everybody that it was the consensus opinion in the foreign policy establishment, it felt like, at least, from all the news reports that Russia wasn’t really going to invade Ukraine, right? That’s crazy. He’s not gonna do that. He wouldn’t risk the international sanctions and all the… Yeah, actually, he did and he would, and I think Vladimir Putin would probably do it again, even if he had to restart the whole process because of his view of what that war means for Russian security and even a Russian irredentism, a desire for lost territory from a Soviet imperial era.

Whatever, right? You gotta get into Putin’s mind, not an easy thing to do. But what does China think about the situation in Taiwan? Here’s what it all comes down to. It’s not, “Can they take Taiwan?” It’s “When they try, will America do anything about it?” And if Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, as much as it is a little bit of a sad thing to say out loud, third in line for the presidency, the most powerful figure in the United States Congress right now.

If China says, “You can’t go to Taiwan or else we’re gonna throw a fit! We’re gonna do something,” and she doesn’t go, even if she wasn’t really that excited about going in the first place, although I’m sure she’d get all kinds of really good information about the semiconductor industry, investment moving kind of information, but not that she’d ever or her husband ever act on that. No, never. But if she doesn’t go now looks like she’s bending the knee to Beijing.

And that’s not a good thing, either, given the trajectory in that part of the world. Remember we were all talking about Hong Kong? You’ll notice there are these people who are all about, “Oh, we stand with the people of,” fill in the blank. “We stand with the people in Hong Kong,” they said. Did they really stand with them? Who ended up winning that contest? The authoritarians, the totalitarians of the Chinese Communist Party or the people who were making a lot of noise on social media about how we stand with Hong Kong?

What about Ukraine, by the way? You’ve probably seen there are fewer Ukraine flags in people’s bios these days, which is strange. I told you in the first week of February, I think it was, first week of February that my expectation was that the Russian military would grind on, that there would not be some rapid defeat of Putin’s Russia no matter how much we sent munitions and whatever we tried to provide in materiel to Ukraine and that they would slowly but surely try to take over half of the country. Well, here we are in July.

The people that were all about Ukraine stands and, “We stand with Ukraine,” where are they? ‘Cause I’m sitting here saying, yeah, Russia is taking territory day in and day out, as I expected them to. I also think it’s a little bit heart right now for some of the Ukraine flag wavers here — and look. I’m rooting for Ukraine insofar as they deserve to have their country back from Russia, but this became an item of virtue signaling for so many Democrats. It was all…

They went from the Ukraine flags to then lots of pride flags to wear their masks in all their photos to whatever the thing is of the moment, people that are sharing it all. But when Zelensky does his whole posing for Vogue with his wife, for Vogue magazine in the middle of a war, people do ask some questions. They start to say, what is the message here? There are soldiers on the front line losing their lives in their country every day. Zelensky is posing with his wife? Seemed very strange. But, remember, if it makes people people in the Democrat Party in Malibu and on the Upper West Side of New York feel like their guy, Zelensky, is doing a good job over there.

It’s all that matters to the Vogue editors.