“That’s where the fight for democracy is taking place,” she said.Īnd, she said, despite the work she and others in Congress have done to point out the concerns over China’s military and economic rise, and its human rights record, “that has only gotten worse.” A decade after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, she said, Putin went up. “The role of Putin in terms of Russia that is a bigger threat than it was when I came to Congress,” she said. The world has changed much since Pelosi joined Congress - one of her first trips abroad was in 1991, when she dared to unfurl a pro-democracy banner in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square shortly after the student demonstrations that ended in a massacre.Īfter the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s again Russia and China that remain front of her mind.
Zelenskyy presented to Congress a Ukrainian flag signed by front-line troops that Pelosi said will eventually be displayed at the U.S. The visit evoked the one made by Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Britain, at Christmastime in 1941 to speak to Congress in the Senate chamber of a “long and hard war” during World War II. In one of her closing acts as House speaker in December, Pelosi hosted Zelenskyy for a joint address to Congress. “That was really quite a message and quite an optic to be there. Pelosi offered rare praise for McCarthy’s own meeting with Tsai, particularly its bipartisan nature and the choice of venue, the historic Reagan library.
“Cowardly,” she said about the military exercises China launched in the aftermath of her trip. Last year, in one of her final trips as speaker, Pelosi touched down with a delegation in Taipei, crowds lining the streets to cheer her arrival, a visit with the Taiwanese president that drew a sharp rebuke from Beijing, which counts the island as its own. remained a partner despite the Republican president’s “America First” neo-isolationist approach to foreign policy. During the Trump era she acted as an alternative emissary overseas, reassuring allies that the U.S.
Pelosi’s travel abroad has not been without political challenges, and controversy. Pelosi told Zelenskyy in a video released at the time “your fight is a fight for everyone.”Ī year on, with no end to the war in sight, Pelosi said: “I would have hoped that it would have been over by now.”
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