As President Biden prepares for his phone call with Chairman Xi of Communist China tomorrow, a former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, tells The New York Sun that his experience suggests America must not back down on Speaker Pelosi’s planned trip to Free China. 

Mrs. Pelosi “has to go” to Taipei, Mr. Gingrich tells the Sun in a telephone call this afternoon. “Once it becomes public, she simply has to go. She can’t back down in face of Communist China’s aggression,” he says, calling the current Speaker her “own travel agent.”  

While speaker in 1997, Mr. Gingrich visited the free island, which is under constant threat of invasion from the Communist mainland. To date, he is the highest-ranking American to do so. “I said very strong things on television at the time,” Mr. Gingrich said — including that Beijing cannot tell the Speaker what to do.

“If they say to us, ‘You can either visit Beijing or Taipei but not both,’ we would cancel Beijing,” Mr. Gingrich said at the time. Yet, he says, “I don’t remember any opposition from the White House” to his trip to Taiwan, or even to his tough public stance in respect of Free China. 

Much has changed since President Clinton was in the White House. According to several recent reports, Mrs. Pelosi is already inviting a bipartisan group of members of Congress to join her on the still-unannounced Taipei visit. As of yet the only public confirmation of the trip came from Mr. Biden — and not in a favorable way. 

“The military thinks it’s not a good idea right now, but I don’t know what the status of it is,” the President said last week in response to a question about press reports on the Speaker’s travel plans. 

While the White House and the Pentagon are working behind the scenes to push back against Mrs. Pelsoi’s plan, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley, said yesterday that if a congressional delegation does decide to go to Taiwan, “we will do what is necessary to ensure a safe conduct of their visit.”

Many in Congress are even more resolute. “Speaker Pelosi should go to Taiwan and President Biden should make it abundantly clear to Chairman Xi that there’s not a damn thing the Chinese Communist Party can do about it,” Senator Sasse of Nebraska said, adding: “No more feebleness and self-deterrence.”

“Feebleness” may well be used to describe one facet of Mr. Biden’s approach to Beijing’s ever-escalating aggression against democratic Taiwan: In 2001 Senator Biden pounced when President Bush said that he would do “whatever it took” to defend Taiwan.

“The president should not cede to Taiwan, much less to China, the ability automatically to draw us into a war across the Taiwan Strait,” Mr. Biden, then chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, said. 

In May, though, Mr. Biden showed his other side while on a visit to Japan, saying “yes” after a reporter asked if America would intervene militarily to defend the island against an invasion by the People’s Liberation Army. 

Would America actually intervene? “The problem is that Washington’s China rhetoric has overtaken its China policy, and the US is badly positioned for a prospective crisis over Taiwan,” Johns Hopkins University’s Hal Brands wrote yesterday.

The president is vowing to defend Taiwan as the Navy is consumed with internal disputes, the Pentagon is ill-equipped for fighting more than one war at a time, and “the Biden administration has twice requested defense budgets that grow less than the rate of inflation,” Mr. Brands writes.

So will it be the muscle-flexing Mr. Biden who shows up for tomorrow’s phone conversation with Chairman Xi? If so, the Beijing strongman may well dismiss his interlocutor as a paper tiger. Then again, too, if it is the famously concession-prone version of Mr. Biden who speaks with Mr. Xi, Beijing will be able to declare victory in a crisis of its own creation. 

That crisis began after Beijing threatened “strong measures” if Mrs. Pelosi crossed a “red line” by visiting Taipei. The bluster is notable as it comes in the lead-up to the Communist Party’s annual August retreat at a coastal resort in Beidaihe. 

This year’s gathering of party bigwigs could coincide with Mrs. Pelosi’s visit across the Taiwan straits. Widely seen as a dress rehearsal for the fall’s 20th meeting of the Communist Party congress, the Beidaihe retreat is expected to seal Mr. Xi’s coronation as a third term party chairman.

In his first two terms, Mr. Xi has aggressively challenged America’s global leadership, intimidated Asian neighbors, and expanded the country’s economic reach around the world. The promise to annex Taiwan has been central to Mr. Xi’s tenure. Now he can hardly afford any sign of weakness toward Mrs. Pelosi. 

Yet, “we must not let China dictate our actions,” a diplomat from an American-allied Asian country told the Sun, asking for anonymity as he was not authorized to speak on the record. “Now that it’s all out there, it is important for Speaker Pelosi to go,” he added. “If they don’t want to raise tension over Taiwan, the U.S. can be more cautious after her visit.”

The question is whether Mr. Biden can deliver even that kind of a conciliatory message tomorrow, and whether  the bellicose Mr. Xi can publicly accept it.