Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Monday urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to take her intended trip to Taiwan in August despite the misgivings of the Biden administration.
“I feel very strongly that Speaker Pelosi should go to Taiwan and she should take a bipartisan delegation,” Gingrich said to loud applause at the 2022 America First Policy Institute summit in Washington, DC.
US Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), speaks during her weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on July 14, 2022. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Gingrich spoke about his experience being the highest ranking American official ever to visit Taiwan in 1997, and the pressure he faced then not to take the trip.
“In 1997, I led a delegation. And John Dingell, the senior Democrat, was on the delegation. It was a truly bipartisan group,” he said.
He said he did so despite high tensions with China at the time. Then-President Bill Clinton had sent two aircraft carriers through the Taiwan Strait. He had also just been invited to China to give a speech, he said.
“And then we told them after this had all been announced that we’re going to go to Taiwan. And they were furious. And the [Chinese] Ambassador called [the person] who was handling national security and was our trip planner. And I remember he happened to be in my office. We took the call, and at one point he says, ‘The Chinese Communist Party does not dictate the travel plans of the American Speaker of the House,'” Gingrich said.
He said the Chinese backed down and the two sides agreed not to fly directly from China to Taiwan, and stop in Japan in between. “They grudgingly accepted that,” he said.
He called the Biden administration’s concerns with Pelosi’s trip “timidity, covered by insecurity and an eagerness to appease people who aren’t Americans.”
He criticized reported security concerns by the Defense Department over the trip and a potential military confrontation.
“You have — unlike 1997, and we had a Defense Department that actually focused on defense — you have a woke Defense Department which is as timid as the State Department, which is really dangerous,” Gingrich said.
Gingrich said he read an article that morning that said the Department of Defense is worried that Pelosi’s trip will cause problems. “Well, my first suggestion is this — if the Department of Defense is not certain that they can protect an American speaker of the House in a public visit, why would we think they could protect Taiwan?”
“And if you’re the Chinese Communists, and you [watched] the total mess in Afghanistan, the total mess in Ukraine, you begin to think this administration is just begging to be bullied. And so I come in there and said we have enormous disagreements on 98 or 99 for some of the things. So on this one, I think she had her instincts right. I hope she sticks to her guns,” he said.
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