Chinese Delivery: Chinese Puzzle

IN the debate over the United States’ China policy, one thing that is seldom mentioned is strategy. The Clinton Administration demonstrates by word and deed its conviction that traditional foreign-policy and national-security concerns can now be subordinated to economic ones—which in practice might include, as Bill Gertz suggests, the imperatives of financing an election campaign. Opponents of this policy, meanwhile, mostly criticize it for ignoring moral issues like democracy and human rights. The moralists and the economists represent significant constituencies, namely religious conservatives and Big Business. The voice of the strategist is lost amid the din.

But ignoring geopolitics is unlikely to help America advance either its morals or its commerce, at least in the long run. And the tensions between the United States and China—over Taiwan, human rights, nuclear proliferation, and other issues—reflect a strategic change: the Soviet threat that bound us together is gone. That is one reason why the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 shattered America’s pro-China consensus where Mao’s much greater bloodshed had not. The ferment that led to that massacre also frightened China’s leaders, who now see Western ideals rather than Russia as the main threat to the regime’s survival. Indeed, China, emerging as a superpower in its own right and eager to flaunt its “independent” foreign policy, is now making common cause with Russia against American “hegemony.”

PW

About the Author

Peter W. Rodman

Featured Tags

IN the debate over the United States’ China policy, one thing that is seldom mentioned is strategy. The Clinton Administration demonstrates by word and deed its conviction that traditional foreign-policy and national-security concerns can now be subordinated to economic ones—which in practice might include, as Bill Gertz suggests, the imperatives of financing an election campaign. Opponents of this policy, meanwhile, mostly criticize it for ignoring moral issues like democracy and human rights. The moralists and the economists represent significant constituencies, namely religious conservatives and Big Business. The voice of the strategist is lost amid the din.

But ignoring geopolitics is unlikely to help America advance either its morals or its commerce, at least in the long run. And the tensions between the United States and China—over Taiwan, human rights, nuclear proliferation, and other issues—reflect a strategic change: the Soviet threat that bound us together is gone. That is one reason why the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 shattered America’s pro-China consensus where Mao’s much greater bloodshed had not. The ferment that led to that massacre also frightened China’s leaders, who now see Western ideals rather than Russia as the main threat to the regime’s survival. Indeed, China, emerging as a superpower in its own right and eager to flaunt its “independent” foreign policy, is now making common cause with Russia against American “hegemony.”