House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) recent trip to Taiwan might have triggered a show of military strength and presidential rebuff from China, but it's unlikely the Communist country will make aggressive moves against Taiwan or the U.S. anytime soon, according to multiple sources.
China conducted military drills around Taiwan to protest Pelosi's visit, but the moves didn't cause the U.S. to shorten its estimation of China attempting to taking over the island with military force within the next two years, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl told Reuters.
"Clearly the PRC (People's Republic of China) is trying to coerce Taiwan, clearly they're trying to coerce the international community and all I'll say is we're not going to take the bait and it's not going to work," Kahl told the news agency.
William Klein, senior associate (non-resident) of the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said the Chinese perceive Pelosi's visit as "one mosaic stone in a broader constellation of U.S. efforts" to interfere with China's efforts to become a world leader.
"The idea that the United States wants to contain China, that the United States wants to disrupt China’s modernization aspirations, has always been part of mainstream Chinese strategic thought," Klein said said during the CSIS panel discussion "Toward a Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis?" on Aug. 4. CSIS released a transcript of the discussion at that time.
Klein said he is "very confident" the Chinese government and society hold a "strong mainstream view" that the U.S. wants to separate Taiwan from China and is no longer committed to the One China policy. He said China's military response to Pelosi's Taiwan visit was "commensurate to the risk and the threat and the challenge that they see to their ultimate aspirations for Taiwan.”
The military maneuvers do not signal the threat of direct conflict with the U.S., however, Klein said.
“I do not believe that the Chinese are interested in a military conflict with the United States over Taiwan at this point in time," the transcript records Klein saying. "I do believe that the Chinese leadership sees that it needs a stable and predictable external environment for its domestic modernization aspirations and that it will aspire to react at a threshold below the risk of direct military confrontation with the United States.”
Pelosi, for her part, said on social media that her delegation had "the distinct pleasure of meeting with the President of Taiwan."
“We discussed how America & Taiwan can deepen our economic ties, further strengthen our security partnership & defend our shared democratic values,” Pelosi wrote in an Aug. 3 tweet.
In another post to Twitter the same day, Pelosi wrote that she lead the delegation "to make crystal clear that America stands with the people of Taiwan – and all those committed to Democracy and human rights."
The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act asserts that the U.S. aims to maintain peaceful trade and cultural relations with both Taiwan and China. It specifies that the United States shall provide defensive arms to Taiwan and maintain the U.S. capacity to resist any force or other forms of coercion, according to the Congressional Record.
That policy hasn't changed, Biden told Xi in the phone call, according to reporting by Politico. Taiwan will continue to be an important trading partner but the U.S. doesn't support Taiwanese independence, in accordance with the U.S. following the One China policy, Politico reported.
