WTH Is Going On With Pelosi's Taiwan Trip? Rep. Mike Gallagher on Why Pelosi Was Right To Go and How Biden Created Another Needless Crisis
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2022
⏱️ 47 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
We break our hiatus briefly today, because this is important. News leaked that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi planned to travel to Taiwan this month, and it caused an uproar as the public battled online about whether her trip would provoke China. Leadership hasn’t handled this well: Xi Jinping threatened military action and instead of condemning the threat, Biden hid behind the Pentagon. We know today that Pelosi plans to follow through with the visit, but this incident leaves us alarmed at the Biden administration’s lack of preparedness. By 2027, when China’s military is predicted to be capable of taking Taiwan, America’s is set to be at its weakest. We know that “integrated deterrence” was unsuccessful in Ukraine, yet there are few real plans to focus on hard power in Taiwan. America has promised to arm Taiwan, but $14 billion of delayed defense equipment requested by Taiwan sits idle. Why doesn’t the White House have a coherent war plan by now? Are we letting China deter us on the cheap?
These questions and more today with Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Member of Congress representing Wisconsin’s 8th district. Gallagher sits on the House Intelligence and Armed Services Committees. He served seven years in the US Marine Corps, with two tours in Iraq.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name knows what |
| 0:22.4 | it's all about. Hi, I'm Daniel Padka. Mark Tiesin. |
| 0:38.4 | Welcome to our podcast. What the hell is going on? Surprise podcast. Mark, why are we here? |
| 0:45.3 | Well, what the hell is going on is we're supposed to be on our August hiatus that we told you about in the last episode. |
| 0:51.0 | I believe that's pronounced hiatus, Mark. |
| 0:53.4 | Oh, yes, of course. |
| 0:54.3 | Hiatus. |
| 0:55.1 | Yes, that's, for those of you who didn't get to the end of the last podcast, Annie and I had a great exchange on her strange, Buckley-esque pronunciations of certain words. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. What is here or there is we're recording this on a Sunday. And Speaker Pelosi is in Asia and possibly |
| 1:12.6 | headed to Taipei, possibly not headed to Taipei. We don't know. This has been a huge, huge |
| 1:17.8 | rise in tensions between the United States and China over the prospect of Speaker Pelosi visiting |
| 1:23.4 | Taipei. I want to start out by saying that I am not a fan of Speaker Pelosi, but on this |
| 1:29.0 | issue on China, she has long been outstanding. She is a strong opponent of the Chinese Communist |
| 1:35.0 | Party. When you and I were working for Senator Jesse Helms in the late 1990s and early 2000s, |
| 1:41.3 | and we were debating whether or not to allow China into the World Trade Organization. |
| 1:45.2 | He was prescibly correct that that would be a disaster, but she was right next to him in |
| 1:51.2 | fighting that fight. She's good on China, as the phrase goes. And I hope, you know, we don't know |
| 1:56.7 | by the time this goes up, whether she will know whether she has landed in Taipei or not. |
| 2:01.5 | I hope she does. |
| 2:02.6 | But this has been a catastrophe of incompetence in terms of the Biden administration, in terms of putting this out there before she even landed. |
| 2:10.9 | Look, I think that Pelosi probably, shockingly, I think you probably overpraised Nancy Pelosi a little bit. |
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