Just days before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was expected to visit Taiwan, Chinese President Xi Jinping had a request of President Biden: Find a way to keep Pelosi from visiting.
, would make her own decisions about foreign trips, the official said. Biden also warned Xi against taking provocative and coercive actions if the House speaker were to travel to Taiwan, the official said.Even as they defended Pelosi’s right to visit, however, top U.S. officials harbored deep concerns about the trip, according to several senior administration and White House officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly.
Pelosi’s visit, which some analysts criticized as a legacy-burnishing move for her, frustrated administration officials and deepened tensions between the administration and the powerful House speaker responsible for securing the president’s legislative agenda.Yet Pelosi was unmoved by White House officials’ arguments.
So far, administration officials have successfully aligned partners in the region and elsewhere — including in Europe — in condemning China’s reaction to the trip, which the U.S. and its allies have said was outsize and unprecedented. U.S. officials briefed allies on how they expected China to react and the live-fire exercises it could execute to intimidate Taiwan and how the United States would respond, a White House official said, to ensure the U.S.
“The president, in his conversation with President Xi, made clear that Congress is an independent branch of government and that Speaker Pelosi makes her own decisions, as other members of Congress do, about their overseas travel,” Kirby said.The last House speaker to visit Taiwan was Newt Gingrich in 1997, though arguably that took place under different circumstances. China was not the global superpower it is today, and Gingrich was not the same political party as then-President Bill Clinton.
White House officials quickly clarified that the U.S. position on Taiwan and the one-China policy had not changed. But Biden’s comments in MayPelosi’s legacy on China
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