Pelosi heads for Singapore, but is silent on Taiwan

Written : David E. Sanger and Vivian Wang
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi began a fraught tour of Asia on Sunday, one that adminration officials say they now expect will include a stop in Taiwan, despite China’s increasingly sharp warnings in recent days that a visit to the self-governing island would provoke a response, perhaps a military one.
Pelosi was scheduled to arrive in Singapore on Monday, after a weekend stopover in Hawaii to consult with American commanders responsible for the Indo-Pacific. She said in a statement that she was planning to travel on with a congressional delegation for high-level meetings in Malaysia, South Korea and Japan, and did not mention Taiwan.
But it would not be unusual to omit Taiwan from an announcement given security concerns, and President Joe Biden’s aides said she was expected to proceed with the plan for the highest-level visit an American official to the island in 25 years. Pelosi could still change her mind about traveling to Taiwan, adminration officials said, but added that seemed unlikely.
Biden’s aides said he had decided against asking Pelosi directly to cancel her trip, largely because of his respect for the independence of Congress, forged during his 36 years in the Senate. He is also clearly reluctant to back down in the face of Chinese threats, including Beijing’s warning that the United States was “playing with fire,” which followed Biden’s nearly 2 1/2-hour conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday.
At its core, some officials said, the adminration concluded after the call that the potential domestic and geostrategic risks of trying to halt the visit — including letting China dictate which American officials could visit a self-ruling democracy of 23 million people that China claims as its own — were greater than allowing Pelosi to proceed.
But they said that while they had collected some intelligence on China’s likely responses, they were not yet ready to release it publicly — and they conceded that they did not know the extent to which Chinese officials were willing to risk a confrontation.
American officials were carefully monitoring Chinese government preparations over the weekend, trying to discern Beijing’s intentions. The clearest sign they saw involved the Taiwan Strait, where provocations, testing and signaling play out weekly. The Chinese military announced Saturday, with less notice than usual, that it would conduct drills with live ammunition in the waters off southeastern Fujian province, about 80 miles from Taiwan.