Pelosi in Taiwan

When the six months of Russia's war against Ukraine are on the way to the end without a way of resolving the conflict in sight, political and military tension has risen dangerously in another region of the planet, also with another great nuclear power involved and with global repercussions.

The unexpected visit of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, to Taiwan has unleashed a forceful military and economic reaction from the Beijing regime and has symbolically strengthened Taiwan.

But she has placed the Biden Administration in a difficult situation because the president has openly expressed his rejection of a visit whose consequences are unpredictable and in any case destabilizing at this time.

Beijing has announced military maneuvers that begin today and end on Sunday and that effectively entail the blockade of Taiwan's maritime and air spaces.

They will include live fire and the presence of warships just 20 kilometers from the coast of the island considered a rebel by the Chinese regime.

In the economic field, it has imposed restrictions on imports of Taiwanese fruits and fish and suspended exports of natural sand to the island.

For its part, Taiwan has put its Armed Forces on alert and has reported more than 20 violations of its airspace in recent hours by Chinese warplanes.

For Beijing, the problem with the visit does not lie only in the rank of the visitor -Pelosi is the third institutional figure in the United States, after the president, Joe Biden, and the vice president, Kamala Harris-, but in her hostile profile.

The veteran Democratic Party politician has a long history of criticizing the Chinese communist regime.

Examples abound.

Two years after the Tiananmen massacre, she unfurled a banner in support of the victims in the historic Chinese square;

she is often seen with the Dalai Lama, she has repeatedly condemned the Chinese occupation of Tibet and denounces the human rights abuses suffered by the Uyghur minority.

On the program of her visit have not only been Taiwanese personalities, including the president and leader of the Democratic Progressive Party, Tsai Ing-wen,

but prominent exiled leaders of the Hong Kong dissidence, without significant protests or signs of rejection from a population far removed from China.

His forceful declarations of US support for the island — “we will not abandon you” — leave little room for diplomatic interpretation, despite the fact that Biden defended the one-China doctrine a week ago before Xi Jinping.

Pelosi's visit sends a message of support for Taiwan's current

independence , but it may create dissonance in US foreign policy or even consequences that no one now controls, with Europe committed to a war on its own soil.

China could find in a visit in itself innocuous the pretext or the incentive for a military escalation, in any case unlikely given the celebration within three months of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party.