11/01/00 10:05 a.m.
America the Humiliated
We have only begun to reap the bitter harvest sown by the “farmer” from Tennessee.

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy

n Indonesian naval officer yesterday boasted that two of his country's patrol boats had "driven away" a U.S. warship steaming on what The Australian newspaper called an "approved international transit" through Indonesia's archipelago near the island of Ambon. Ambon has been the scene of two years of sectarian bloodshed and a source of friction between the two nations. That friction has only been exacerbated of late by anti-U.S. demonstrations and terrorist threats in Jakarta seemingly intended to show solidarity with co-religionists in the Palestinians' struggle with America's ally, Israel.

This episode (literally) of gun-boat diplomacy employed against the United States is but the latest indicator that, during the Clinton-Gore years, our nation has behaved less as the world's only superpower and ever more as the world's most precipitously waning power. Unless sweeping changes are promptly made in the nature and direction of U.S. foreign policy, starting with next week's election, we had better get used to the contempt being shown us by bad actors around the planet--and the malevolence that will accompany it.

One place to start is by ending the present administration's practice, usually undertaken in the name of cross-cultural sensitivity, diplomatic niceties and good press notices, of routinely abasing the offices they hold and the nation they represent. The most recent example of this phenomenon were Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's public outings in Pyongyang during her visit last week to Kim Jong-Il's Stalinist prison state.

Bad enough were the videos of her trying to perform synchronized gyrations like those of brainwashed preschoolers celebrating their Dear Leader's success in getting them food from international donors; her preposterous depiction of Pyongyang as a "beautiful" capital city; and the respect she paid at the mortuary of Kim Il-Sung, a ruthless despot whose aggression 50 years ago precipitated the bloody three-year war on the Korean peninsula that cost more than 50,000 American lives.

Far more egregious, however, were Mrs. Albright's efforts to paper-over the younger Kim's provocative affront — parading before her tens of thousands of youngsters attesting with their precision marching drills and highly orchestrated placard displays to the glory of the North Korean atomic-weapons and ballistic-missile programs. After applauding and describing the 90-minute program as "awesome," the secretary of state mortified herself and her country further by seemingly placing great stock in the blithe "quip" uttered by Kim as the crowd simulated the take-off of the North's long-range Taepo Dong 1 missile that it had been the first and would be the last of such launches.

Were the United States, on the basis of such vacuous assurances, now to offer the North Korean regime full political legitimization, removal from the State-Sponsors of Terrorism List, financial aid, satellite launches, technology transfers, food, energy, etc., what little respect Washington still enjoys around the world would be further eroded. After all, such appeasement will breed not only more widespread contempt, but also fresh demands for concessions from other quarters.

There are already too many grounds for concern that perceptions of American weakness are emboldening potential adversaries to behave aggressively against allies, interests, and citizens. Consider a few early warning indicators of such a trend:

o In the wake of the recent, murderous attack on the U.S.S. Cole — made possible by a benighted desire to curry favor with the government of Yemen, despite its close and longstanding association with terrorists — that government has spurned American requests for cooperation in the post-mortem. As in North Korea, there is so little regard for this country's will to use power against those who defy it that U.S. investigators have had to repair to ships off the coast since their safety ashore could not be assured; many have simply returned home frustrated and largely empty-handed.

o The latest of innumerable abasements by the Clinton-Gore Administration to China occurred last week when it could not find an appropriate counterpart to the senior People's Liberation Army's top political commissar, who was then making a grand tour of American military facilities to collect intelligence about the morale and readiness of U.S. forces. It seems unlikely that this hardened Communist officer took the decision to make senior military chaplains his hosts as other than a further sign that the administration hasn't a clue about the abidingly malevolent nature of the PRC and its international agenda.

The extent to which the Clinton-Gore team is contemptibly out of touch with reality regarding China is laid bare by classified documents and other damning evidence compiled by the Washington Times' crack national-security correspondent, Bill Gertz, in a new book entitled The China Threat: How the People's Republic Targets America. Among its revelations, proof that the administration offered the PRC access to U.S. missile technology if it would agree to join an international regime that has proven hopelessly inadequate to control the proliferation such equipment and know-how.

o The Clinton-Gore team has been no more impressive with respect to an outrage being perpetrated by the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin. The former KGB thug-turned-president has dismissed out of hand Washington's hapless protests over the barbaric mistreatment the Kremlin is according to an innocent and gravely ill American businessman, Edmund Pope. As a result, Pope remained incarcerated for six months without charge or access to Western medical attention. He is now being subjected to a show-trial for espionage worthy of Stalin and — unless Washington either increases the costs for such behavior or, more likely, rewards Moscow with political, financial or other concessions — he is likely to be given what will amount to a death sentence.

Such concessions in the past have been extremely costly. Vice President Gore's secret agreements, signed in 1995 with then-Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, are a case in point. These accords — which effectively waived U.S. laws governing Russian conventional weapons proliferation and nuclear technology transfers to countries like Iran — exhibit a truly stupefying contempt for the U.S. Constitution, and the checks-and-balances on executive-branch action that are at its heart.

The veep not only appears to have been party to violating the law. He compounded that outrage by promising to deny Congress information it would need to ensure compliance — something the Administration is doing even now, as it refuses to share with Congress copies of the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreements and supporting documentation.

Not surprisingly, the Kremlin recognized this behavior for what it was: an act of abject appeasement. Moscow responded by not only selling Iran the slew of advanced weapon systems and nuclear technology it had on order as of 1995 (including submarines, homing torpedoes, tanks, mines and fighter aircraft). It is continuing to do so to this day.

In the second presidential debate, Republican candidate George W. Bush declared that he favored a "humble foreign policy." His Democratic rival immediately agreed, without clarifying what either of them had in mind.

The record concerning the foreign policy pursued by the vice president and his boss over the past eight years is nonetheless becoming increasingly clear and it is characterized less by humility than by humiliation. Tragically, we have only begun to reap the bitter harvest sown by the "farmer" from Tennessee and his friends.