Everybody knows you should never let a good crisis go to waste, and Nancy Pelosi gave China all the hardware it needed to construct a golden chariot of crisis and ride it to glory. But the People’s Republic promptly crashed its crisis chariot into a ditch.
Today was Day Two of our long national nightmare of [scary cable-news intro music] NANCY PELOSI BEING IN TAIWAN. China continued to playact at being so so mad about this, with war games and sand embargoes and whatnot. But its heart plainly wasn’t in it.
Trouble is, propagandists had whipped China’s citizenry into a froth, as if Pelosi were Satan incarnate planning to use Taiwan as a base camp to attack the mainland with gallons of Super Covid Monkeypox. Now they’re disappointed and confused about why the People’s Liberation Army didn’t just shoot Pelosi’s plane out of the sky, and Beijing is scrambling to explain how it’s good, actually, that World War III isn’t happening.
Meanwhile, Pelosi’s tour of Taiwan seems perfectly crafted to highlight China’s malignancy at every stop, writes Matthew Brooker. So not only has Xi Jinping’s government been embarrassed at home, the rest of the world gets reminded of its bad behavior and the many downsides of its autocracy relative to Taiwan’s democracy. Trolling China is far too dangerous to be a staple of American foreign policy. But this particular crisis has been a pretty smooth ride so far.
Bloomberg
