“By openly arguing among ourselves about Pelosi’s travel, we made the trip a public spectacle, forcing Beijing to react,” said David R. Stilwell, former assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. “Had we done the trip quietly, as we usually do, it would have generated none of the brinkmanship we’re seeing now.”

Those arguments began when Biden cast public doubt on the wisdom of Pelosi’s Taiwan visit by suggesting that the Pentagon saw it as too risky. “The military thinks it’s not a good idea right now,” Biden said last month.

The president perhaps can be forgiven for an errant comment that suggested White House interference in the legislative branch’s business. It was hot. He was jet-lagged from his recent Middle East travels. And a PCR test the next day revealed that he’d probably been wrestling with Covid as he spoke with reporters.

But Pelosi added accelerant to what would rapidly become a media dumpster fire by suggesting the next day that the Pentagon had warned that her plane “would get shot down” if she traveled to Taipei.