Ambassador Chas Freeman, the retired diplomat and Defense Department official, who is perhaps the nation’s leading expert on China and many other areas of the world, in an interview with EIR and the Schiller Institute today, denounced Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s possible upcoming visit to Taiwan as “an act of extreme irresponsibility on the Speaker’s part.”
The interview will be posted on the Schiller Institute website.
The visit will not help Taiwan, but greatly endanger it, he said. “Exactly what the Chinese will do, no one knows. They have many, many options, political, economic and military. It’s clear that the Speaker put herself in a position where she could not not go. She equally put Taiwan in a position where it could not not welcome her. And she put the Chinese government in a position where it could not not do something escalatory. The sad reality is that the White House and the military in Washington both see this trip as damaging rather than helpful. But the White House has not had the courage to block Mrs. Pelosi’s travel.”
On the Ukraine template, he said: “I think the issue of Ukraine and the issue of Taiwan do have something in common, in that the primary lesson we should take from what has happened in Ukraine is that if you defy the forcefully expressed objections of a great power to your actions, you do so at your peril, and the peril of those whom you purport to protect. Russia was provoked into what it did in Ukraine, which does not justify what it did in Ukraine. It was unjustified, but provoked. A similar possibility exists in the case of Taiwan.”
