Will US Speaker McCarthy go to Taiwan?

DAVID P. GOLDMAN

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Chinese media worry that Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), just elected Speaker of the US House of Representatives on an unprecedented 15th ballot, will retrace Nancy Pelosi’s steps to Taiwan and precipitate a crisis with China. McCarthy cheered Pelosi’s nearly disastrous visit to Taiwan last July and declared that he would like to make the same trip as Speaker.

But McCarthy, who has spent his whole career in politics, appears more concerned about how the China issue plays with American voters than with China as such. His first speech to the House of Representatives as speaker mentioned China in the same breath as America’s debt problem, in a formulation that would take a Washington pollster to parse:

We will also address America’s long-term challenges: the debt, and the rise of the Chinese Communist Party. Congress must speak with one voice on both of these issues. This is why we will end wasteful Washington spending. From now on, if a federal bureaucrat wants to spend it, they will come before us to defend it. As for the Chinese Communist Party, we will create a bipartisan Select Committee to investigate how to bring back the hundreds of thousands of jobs that went to China, and then we will win this economic competition.

Evidently, the newly-installed speaker isn’t sure whether the federal debt problem or the China issue will elicit a bigger response from the electorate, so he lumped them together to be on the safe side. McCarthy devoted just ten seconds of a 20-minute address to China.

A Washington adage holds that the best way to bury a problem is to assign it to a bipartisan select committee. Threatening China with such a committee is the least provocative thing any American leader has done in recent months.

Although McCarthy made a “me-too” promise to visit Taiwan during Pelosi’s visit, he hasn’t broached the subject since. It isn’t clear whether Taiwan’s government wants him to show up, either.

Taiwan’s Central News Agency reported on November 21, “Foreign Minister Joseph Wu on Monday said that no official contact had yet been made with the US House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy regarding a trip to Taiwan…Wu told a legislative session that he believed McCarthy’s busy schedule precluded any chance of a trip to Taiwan in the near future.”

That isn’t quite a disinvitation, but neither is it an exhortation for McCarthy to make a Taiwan trip a priority.

Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wu may or may not want McCarthy to visit the island. Photo: AFP / Sam Yeh

Beijing remains on edge about McCarthy’s travel plans. Writing in China Daily on January 6, foreign policy analyst Zhong Houtou inveighed, “No matter who is elected the new US House speaker, he or she should not play the Taiwan card to fulfill the United States’ narrow political goals as Nancy Pelosi did… Her visit not only undermined the political foundation of Sino-US relations, but also violated the one-China principle and the three Sino-US joint communiqués. Worse, it sent a wrong signal to separatists on the island, casting a shadow on the peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits.”

But Zhong also observed, “McCarthy is known for his hawkish stance on almost every issue. Yet many ultra-conservative representatives criticized him for not being conservative or harsh enough, which is both a surprise and a dangerous sign.”

One of McCarthy’s critics on the right, former Reagan administration defense official Frank Gaffney, alleged that the new Speaker is the victim of “elite capture” by the Chinese Communist Party due to investments in firms that have assets in China.

“Why has Kevin McCarthy not withdrawn from the House Speaker’s race after six failed attempts to win the post?”, Gaffney wrote before the California Congressman clinched the speakership on the 15th ballot. “It may have less to do with his notorious lust for power than self-preservation.”

Gaffney averred, “The trouble is that Kevin McCarthy has long worked with Sequoia Capital, a firm that has invested heavily in and for China. The botched Benghazi investigation illustrates how a Speaker like McCarthy’s mentor, Paul Ryan, can neuter an inquiry. Ditto the failure of McCarthy’s own China Task Force to examine financial firms like BlackRock and Sequoia’s enabling of our enemy.”

An online search found no public record documents or news reports indicating a relationship between McCarthy and Sequoia Capital.

American analysts with close ties to the armed services, meanwhile, are worried about the possible outcome of a military engagement with China in its home theater.

Writing in Asia Times on January 7, former deputy undersecretary of the navy Seth Cropsey characterized the US navy as a “hollow force.” He warned, “The pace of shipbuilding and virtually every other category of naval preparedness demonstrate that the most critical service in a West Pacific conflict does not believe that war is possible within the next decade.”

The Arleigh-Burke class guided-missile destroyer USS Barry conducts operations in the South China Sea in 2020. Photo: AFP / Samuel Hardgrove / US Navy

The Defense Department’s November 29 report, “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” noted that China had doubled its satellite coverage of its home theater in the past three years and that China’s 2,000 land-based anti-ship ballistic missiles “give the PLA the capability to conduct long-range precision strikes against ships, including aircraft carriers, out to the Western Pacific.”

US anti-missile systems can be swamped by multiple strikes by conventional ballistic missiles, or defeated by China’s hypervelocity glide vehicles, for which there is no conventional missile defense.

Chinese and Pentagon analysts now offer very similar views of China’s military capabilities on its coasts, I reported in a December 6 analysis.

Former Trump administration defense planner Elbridge Colby tweeted on November 6, “Senior flag officers are saying we’re on a trajectory to get crushed in a war with China, which would likely be the most important war since WWII, God forbid.”

It’s not clear who is advising Speaker McCarthy, but he seems more cautious about approaching tripwires in the Taiwan Strait than he did last February.