by Evan X Hyde

     The visit to Taiwan this week by Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker in the United States of America, and the third most powerful Biden administration leader after President Joe Biden himself and Vice-President Kamala Harris, came after Mainland China threatened some kind of military action to demonstrate its anger at the prospect of such a visit. Mainland China considers Pelosi’s Taiwan visit a slap in their face, because they believe the island to be a part of the Chinese state. 

     Since Pelosi arrived in Taiwan, the most important supplier of semiconductors (semiconductors are critical components in the manufacture of strategic equipment and weaponry) to the United States, China has been carrying out aggressive military exercises in space which, strictly speaking, is Taiwanese. The danger here is that the Taiwanese may react to the Chinese provocations and trigger a situation which could result in a confrontation between the Americans and the Chinese. (The Americans consider themselves defenders of the Taiwanese.)

    This is not pleasant to contemplate, because the U.S. and China are nuclear powers. Meanwhile, in Ukraine there is concern over Russian activity in a massive nuclear plant which is inside Ukraine territory. 

    I think that the Democratic Party is supporting the Pelosi visit to Taiwan in order to have the Biden administration appear strong at a time when Biden’s Democratic administration is trailing the Republican Party badly in polls preceding mid-term Senate and Congressional elections later this year in the United States.

    When you combine the Pelosi visit to Taiwan with the months of increasing tension between the U.S. and Russia because of America’s open financial and military support for Ukraine, you will conclude that our world has become a much more dangerous place recently. In the words of Robert Nesta, “See them fighting for power, but they know not the hour.”

    In October of 1962, planet earth came close to nuclear catastrophe when one of the members of America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, called for a nuclear attack on Cuba, where Russia had installed missiles at the request of Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. 

    In Belize (then British Honduras), we were totally unaware of the danger. We did not know that Castro was very angry when the Russians backed down and removed the missiles. Fidel risked nuclear war in defence of Cuban sovereignty.