Nancy Pelosi’s Helen of Troy complex?
The speaker’s ill-timed visit has launched a vast and toxic armada
[ Updates at 10 am EDT Friday August 5 with spreading fallout from the ill-considered decision by Nancy Pelosi to visit Taiwan at a most sensitive moment. ]
The beauty of the mythical Helen of Troy impelled the men of Sparta to launch a thousand-ship armada to win her back from neighboring Troy. Now there’s Nancy Pelosi. The Speaker of the House, recognizing perhaps that with her speakership in desperate jeopardy after the Congressional midterms in November, she will have only diminishing expectations for leaving her historical mark on the world. So, she decided in one ill-timed and clearly ill-advised, certainly ill-considered adventure, to betake herself to the shores of Taiwan within shooting distance of one of the world’s great superpowers. It should hardly have come as any surprise that Xi Jinping has unleashed an armada of power that neither Menelaus and the Greeks nor the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe who invoked Helen’s name centuries later, could scarcely have imagined.
In my latest, and perhaps most important, column in years for CNN Opinion, I have unpacked the fears of UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres, who proclaimed this week, “humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.” While failing to invoke the visit of Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, it should hardly have been far from his mind as China unleashed military maneuvers in the Straits of Taiwan of a magnitude as to send “tensions in the Taiwan Strait spiking to the highest level in decades,” as the Washington Post described them. The “exercises” even appeared to be, as The New York Times observed, “designed as a trial run for sealing off the island.” Or for an eventual D-Day style, shock-and-awe landing and lighting takeover, perhaps?
The exercises, which will continue through the weekend were expanded Friday by Beijing severing a host of ties with Washington. All dialogue with the United States has been halted—particularly on such critical issues as climate change, returning illegal immigrants, criminal investigations, transnational crime, and illegal drugs. All dialogue between U.S. and Chinese regional commanders and senior defense department officials have also been shelved, along with talks on military maritime safety. In Tokyo, diplomats suggested that some Japanese officials were furious with Pelosi for triggering a new escalation of tension across Asia. “If we could have given our advice, we would have said this is not a good idea,” a senior Japanese diplomat told Philippe Mesmer, the veteran Tokyo bureau chief of the French daily Le Monde. Clearly. Japan had not been consulted in advance. Still, astonishingly, the speaker was sticking to her guns, showing no remorse for touching off the deepest rift in decades between Washington and Beijing. In a Tokyo press conference, Pelosi observed archly, "It is bipartisan in the House and in the Senate, overwhelming support for peace and the status quo in Taiwan."
Pelosi was the most prominent American official to visit Taiwan since one of Pelosi’s equally ignorant and vainglorious predecessors, Newt Gingrich, paid the same visit a quarter century ago to the island nation that China considers a sacred part of its homeland. There were innumerable differences, though. At that time, Gingrich stopped first in Beijing. Then, with a far deeper, it would appear, understanding of Chinese sensitivities, did not fly directly to Taiwan from the mainland but buffered the afront by detouring to Japan first. And he spent just a token few hours in the Taiwanese capital. He wasn’t decorated with a cartoonishly large medal, then draped, in the style of Donald Trump, with a ribbon in Taiwan’s colors, did not hold a side-by-side press conference as Pelosi did with the island’s leader.
How could Nancy Pelosi failed to have grasped the likelihood of what ensued: the live-fire exercises, the flotilla of a dozen ships-of-the-line of the PLA Navy bristling with weapons that moved through the waters on Taiwan’s side of the straits, the fly-over by scores of PLA Air Force fighters that all but surrounded the tiny and deeply vulnerable island that the US has sworn to protect at all costs. “Use the momentum to surround,” the Chinese communist party’s People’s Daily headlined in announcing the start of the maneuvers. There have, at least not yet, been any casualties. But every frightened child hearing the explosions that ripped through the air barely 10 miles offshore, every airliner forced to detour for fear of being shot out of the skies, any toxic accident that could still happen are all on the speaker’s shoulders.
Which is why I am breaking with precedent and, instead of publishing here on Andelman Unleashed only what you, my dear reader, will see nowhere else, believe it’s important to showcase my newest musings for CNN Opinion on one of the direst perils the world now faces. Never before have we approached so close to Armageddon. The world and especially those leaders who should believe so deeply in the power of diplomacy and wisdom on a path toward diplomacy and peace, have never before hovered so close to the unleashing, even by accident if not intent, of a nuclear catastrophe that could end life on our planet. Each action, every word, especially from those with the stewardship of such awesome power, must be oh so carefully considered.
And here’s why……
One miscalculation away from nuclear holocaust
Some excerpts…for the full CNN Opinion column, click here:
Opinion by David A. Andelman
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres is hardly a global figure given to panic, or hyperbole for that matter. But rarely has he seemed quite so afraid.
"Humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation," Gutteres said this week. The way he and a growing number of those who think deeply about nuclear issues and their consequences see it, the world is plunging headlong towards potential Armageddon, with little regard to the consequences of their actions, or inaction.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to have paid little heed to such fears as she moved blithely ahead with her visit to Taiwan in the face of dire warnings from the leadership of mainland China, whose arsenal of 350 nuclear weapons lies just across a narrow strait. And this in the context of bellicose words and actions from Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine and Kim Jong Un's ongoing nuclear rhetoric and actions in nearby North Korea.
Gutteres's fears, of course, were broader and deeper than this single Asian flashpoint. He was addressing a world conference of the nations that have signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons -- a gathering delayed by two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Signed on July 1, 1968, by 93 nations, and in force two years later, the treaty now has 191 adherents. Yet never has it seemed more vulnerable, if not more relevant, than today.
The context, as Gutteres observed, was that this year's conference -- the 10th since its signing -- "occurs at a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War." ……..
Indeed, the very foundations of global security that have effectively guaranteed the peace since America exploded the "Fat Man" plutonium device -- the last ever detonated in battle over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 -- have been deeply eroded.
The United States was, and remains, the only nation ever to have detonated a nuclear weapon in a war. The Soviet Union tested its first device four years later.
In July 1959, then-French President Charles de Gaulle sent the Count Alexandre de Marenches, the co-author of our book, "The Fourth World War" to Washington, to ask US President Dwight Eisenhower to give France the secrets that would allow the French to join the nuclear club. Ike politely but firmly declined.
There are many who look back on that era as the good old days of nuclear confrontation -- and with good reason. Each side, for decades, possessed enough nuclear weapons -- as many as 41,000 for the USSR and 31,000 for the US at their respective peaks -- to have utterly obliterated the other side, not to mention all life on earth. This led to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
Since then, arms control agreements have reduced the size of these arsenals dramatically -- to levels still able to incinerate the earth, but without reducing much of the tension. While arsenals have shrunk since the Cold War, the number of countries with nuclear weapons has proliferated.
How is it at all possible to have MAD when you have nuclear weapons in the hands of nine powers? (The countries in question are the US, Britain, France, Israel, Pakistan, India, Russia, China, and North Korea.) Within this group of nations, there are pockets of mutually assured destruction. Some 93% of all the world's 13,900 nuclear weapons are still controlled by Washington and Moscow…….
Somehow, though, an even more worthwhile objective might just be for the world to find a way to turn back the clock from 2022 to 1962 or even 1982. These were terrifying years when, innocently, we practiced weekly duck-and-cover exercises under our little wooden desks in kindergarten, dug home fallout shelters in our backyards against an imminent nuclear attack.
But those very real and immediate threats led the nightly news, consumed the global dialogue, motivated every action by every world leader who understood that nuclear arms were, and should be, at the very top of priorities. They no longer are.
It is this fear that is at the heart of the Secretary-General's pessimism -- and should be at the heart of all of us.
Speaker Pelosi is 82 years old. Perhaps her age colors her perspective.
As the scorched earth burns further,with floods and drought conditions, becoming the new normal. Add the confluence of the world’s nuclear arsenals, anger, greed and hatred, this world isn’t far from a holocaust!