Blind World Leadership

...The current Russian GDP is about one-quarter that of the United States in the early r95o's...

...He's going to wage an endless war on the independent-minded periphery, especially those Islamic types who have a voice in the flow ofoil through the Caucasus...

...In reality, the big issue facing us ~_9 ~i and our chtldren ]s power...

...But of course, we don't...

...Western businessmen have discovered that it isn't good enough to have powerful friends in Moscow...

...issue before the political class is the illu~ ~ sion of the unlimited benefits political...

...wackiness of our leaders and the feck~ , _9 ,~.m- " ~ " " ~ ~ : ; ; + " lessness of the opposition, the "big" ~ , +i...

...MICHAEL LEDEEN is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author, most recently, o,#Tocqueville on American Character, [orthcoming #tom St...

...They want to talk about their own happy fantasies...

...And, just like Putin, they have made no secret of their intentions...

...Instead of encouraging democratic forces inside the tyrannical regimes of Iraq and Syria, we have abandoned them, as in our shameful betrayal of the Iraqi National Congress...

...In short, the Evil Empire really did fall apart, and it's not bloody likely to reemerge in the short term...

...The perhaps unintended consequence of their cleverness was to advance "process" to the status of a real thing, and thereby to spread the dangerous hoax that peace can be accomplished by simply sitting down at a "peace table" and staying there long enough for good sense to prevail...

...There are, to be sure, plenty of those, but the core vision, as it were, isn't fabricated...

...But what did you expect of a crowd that has never taken security seriously anywhere...

...The new wave of repression suggests that the mandarins in Beijing fear the spread of democracy from Taiwan to the mainland_9 Forget all that talk about the tender sensitivities of the PRC leaders when they insist that Taiwan belongs to them...

...They launch daily intimidations against Taiwan's newly elected government, threatening military assault if the Taiwanese don't promise to be subservient...

...Free-think- . 2 _{:"'a+ "* ' ingintellectuals, even in the universi- I:.L...

...of trade...

...China is certainly wealthier than it was a decade ago, but it is not freer...

...Europe is at peace because we destroyed the Nazis and fascists, and Japan threatens no one for the same reason...

...All our money, and all the free trade the WTO can offer, won't make China freer if the mandarins are prepared to kill anyone who advocates greater freedom...

...The discussion of Russia is luminously rational compared to our leaders' words on the People's Republic of China...

...There are very aggressive ~ i ~ . ~ ~ ~ crackdowns on press freedom, extending ~ ~ to the remnants of once rough-and-tumble...

...Notice that this problem--the problem for the future of China--has nothing to do with trade, or investment, or indeed wealth...

...N...

...Clinton, ~.';i~)i~.a ~ ~ . Gore, and Albright worry terribly about ! ~ ~ ' ~ Chinese sensitivities and try to make . . . . . . . ..,, ~-J~N :: them feel better by vetome the sale of ~ t , ) n ~ n ~ _9 _9 JP~'~+~4~r...

...And what are 38 June 20 o o _9 The Americon SpectGtor we doing...

...The rulers recruit mercenaries to fight for them and maintain some semblance of public order, and they play the sort of wildly inaaginative politics that makes for such great reading in Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Burkhardt...

...Then segue gracefully into the spontaneous eruption of the secretary of state in early April of this millennial year, when, unable to give a serious answer to senators' questions about the new Russian president and his unsavory background as a spear carrier in the Soviet secret police, Albright called for an end to "all this psychobabble about Putin and the KGB thing...

...In the happy-go-lucky, tim-loving atmosphere of Bubba's theme park, the usual firewalls were torn down, and anyone with a bit of digital savvy could access highly classified national security material through the White House computer iT~etwork...

...Why should he...

...No doubt Putin is going to try very hard to establish some kind of centralized control over this crazy-quilt (this is where his KGB career comes into play), but he is unlikely to succeed...

...Except that they act as if we were the real inmates, and there doesn't seem to be anyone with the common sense to insist that they be put in strong white coats and led, gently of course, to quiet rooms with padded walls...

...China is undergoing a radical wave ~ ~ of repression, as you can easily verify from i t l t a almost an news a er over the ~ast sever...

...Or what...

...Faced with citizens who want more religious freedom, and more free speech, the rulers of the PRC respond with the mailed fist...

...Sadat made peace after a humiliating defeat by Israel, and Rabin, Peres, and Ararat shared the Nobel after the Palestinians defeated Israel in a guerrilla war...

...There are a lot of unpleasant facts out there (like the KGB, one of the most unpleasant of all), and they don't want to be asked about them...

...There are lots of little fiefdoms, ruled by petty nobles...

...What is more logical, after all, than for the folks on the mainland to ask the obvious question: If our brothers and sisters across the Strait can elect their leaders, why can't we choose ours...

...So no one should be surprised that Syrian dictator Hafez al Assad declined to make peace with Israel...

...2' al months...

...In the very first summer of the Clinton era, the White House was flooded with short-term college interns...

...But, like adolescents that really did inhale, our leaders talk nonsense...

...We'd be sure that Taiwan had an effective deterrent...

...We are defined in myriad official documents as the prime military adversary of the People's Liberation Army...

...Talk about psychobabble...

...But peace doesn't come from "process," it comes from war...

...the numbers are impressively ominous...

...Do we want Putin to fail or succeed...

...The foreign policy insanities are of a piece with loony tunes behavior at home...

...All of this has made war in Asia far more likely than it was before Clinton...

...Those petty noblemen and local mafiosi probably have more cash than Putin, and they are at least as skilled as he in the black arts of blackmail and bribery...

...They're the Washington equivalent of the legcndar...

...Russia today is like a flashback to the late Renaissance...

...How else are we supposed to understand politicians if not through studying their lfies...

...Peace" is the word we use to describe the terms that the winning side imposes on its vanquished foe...

...Any normal American would welcome the hatred and vilification from Beijing, because one is also judged by the quality of one's enemies...

...And, knowing as they do that the power of the United States could thwart their plans, they have announced that they are building a military machine capable of defeating us: Russian destroyers armed with nuclear missiles, capable of destroying our aircraft carriers and devastating Taiwan...

...They're right to worry...

...I don't think it's a deliberate, systematic falsification...

...are we going to take the logical step of supporting some of the petty nobles and mafias...

...Not only the petty nobles stand against the Putin project...

...Let's hear about the real situation, and how we're planning to deal with it...

...Martin's Press this summer...

...Just like Putin, and for many of the same reasons, the mandarins are tempted by war against the independent-minded periphery...

...Winning or losing those skirmishes is less important to him than the domestic benefits of war itself: It enhances his popularity, and justifies repression...

...It's a reflection of a basic disconnect...

...Continue by recalling the moment of presidential insanity when Clinton told the Chinese dictator that our greatest concern about the People's Republic was "if your people become rich like our people, and then instead of riding bicycles thev drive automobiles, and the increase in greenhouse gases threaten all our national security...

...Look at the three big issues, and you see it in every case: Russia, China, and the Middle East thing...

...they wanted to talk about the stock market and surging budget surpluses from the taxes of the wealthy and the dotcommanders, but that was then...

...36 ]~e 2ooo _9 The American Spectator The big news about Russia isn't Putin...

...The secret police are much better-they are universally credited with planting the bombs in Moscow apartment buildings that justified the invasion of Chechnya--but they do not seem pleased to be asked to play a political role so soon after the fall of the Empire...

...Start by reminding yourself that it's impossible to distinguish between Core and the Unabomber when you line up passages from the vice president's loon?, book opposite the corresponding deep thoughts from the Unabomber's "Manifesto...

...it's how weak he is...

...This is another fantasy_9 China is not on the road to democracy...

...you've got to deal with the local mafiosi as well...

...So let's not hear any more of this silly talk about psychobabble, or, for that matter, how easy it is, as Tony Blair recently stated in an echo of the Iron Lady, to do business with the new master of the Kremlin...

...The military is a shambles--just look how hard it was for them to win the two Chechen wars--but one will get you five that Putin will use his Chechen "slIategy" to stoke the fires of Russian nationalism...

...There ' is repression of free speech...

...THE MIDDLE EAST The "peace process" has blown up, to the considerable embarrassment of a vast international peace process industry_9 This amazingly successful multinational enterprise was the creation of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, who, in their sly way, used it to keep meddlesome Europeans and Soviets out of Middle East diplomacy...

...about peace processes that exist only in the minds of government bureaucrats and their friends in the press, about good guys in the Kremlin with whom we can do business, and about a China that will some day be a fabulous markef for our products, and which in the meantime is getting richer, freer, and more democratic by the day...

...Chinese hatred shows that the existence of America and the success of the American experiment threatens the _9...

...The two historic ins~suments for the task are the military and the secret police...

...Nobody's defeated him, and, with Israel withdrawing from its outposts in southern Lebanon, he can (and will) encourage the terrorists under his tutelage to expand their attacks into Israel proper...

...effective defensive weaDons to Tal+,+ -, wan, and ceaselessly promoting the " I / ~ ' i : ";-++i +' } ~ : mirage of "peace and free~dom ~|iTl~:l"iMItl+l ) " through commerce...

...If the mandarins are confident we will not fight for Taiwan's freedom, they will attack...

...Instead of ensuring that the real forces of peace and freedom prevail, we are selling our most advanced weapons systems to Gulf countries that could well use them in a new war against Israel, just as we have sold our most advanced military technology to China...

...Their grip on reality is awfully tenuous...

...Peace between Israel and Syria will come, if at all, after the next war, and, just as in Asia, it has become more likely as a result of our nutty policies...

...stooges, mimes the lovableness...

...We might even go all-out for an anti-ballistic missile for California...

...But her outhnrst tells us something quite important about the atmosphere at the highest tcvels of our government...

...This was only the beginning of a series of security fiascos, the most recent of which is the disappearance of a laptop computer containing supersensitive "code word" information from the offices of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the most entertaining is certainly the "tweed coat caper" of 1998, when a guy in a tweed coat walked into Albright's office and casually walked offwith a pile of classified documents...

...There is religious repression - . : ~ ' . ~ ~ (leaders of the vast Falun Gong have . . . . i , i l ] i , i . H ~ i | , i been rounded up, and the practice of :. :. .'.,,,~ _9 , +, . ~ ~+ ~ the faithful has been banned...

...they're afraid that their own people will challenge the legitimacy of Chinese Communism...

...It's one thing to kill a few innocent civilians to justify the Chechen crusade, but it's quite another to rev up the gulags again, which is what it would take to re-Stalinize the place...

...Unless she's got some copies of Putin's Rorschach tests, we'll just have to go with the public e~ddence...

...I'['tt'I|ITlilTli['ll ties, have been told to stop talking , ~ , _9 ~', -*.t about ra&cal reform, let alone about :. " ! ' ' ~[~" democracy...

...short-range surface-to-air missiles to protect China against the Taiwanese air force, and Russian fighter bombers to contest air superiority, made in part with American multi-axis machine tools, courtesy of the late unlamented McDonnell Douglas and the patriots at the Department of Commerce...

...If, as I hope, we want him to fail (why should we want a stronger, more centralized Russia, pray tell...

...We are still told that China is on the road to democracy, because "capitalThe American Spectator - J~n e 2 o o o 37 ism" is expanding there_9 Clinton, Gore, and Albright chant this soothing mantra to justify their recommendation of what used to be called "most-favored-nation status" to the PRC...

...legitimacy of Chinese Communism...

...They aren't passionate about some abstract policy principle...

...Kissinger himself received a Nobel Prize after a peace treaty following our defeat by North Vietnam...

...Thanks to the...

...Since they were only on the job for 30 to 9 ~ days, there was no chance to perform the detailed background checks that are normally required for security clearances, and as we subsequently learned, many interns had "drug problems" that would have disqualified them...

...It's easy to understand why Madame Albright has a certain sensiti~ itv to biographical inquiries, having made such an embarrassing hash out of her own, but it's nuts to suggest that Putin's long years in the KCB arc unworthy of serious analysis...

...It's a laugh a minute over there in BilI and Al's asylum...

...This crowd began by wrecking any pretense of security in the White House itself, through an intern scandal far graver than the Lewinsky affair...

...If we had congresj " . , ' I b m . ~,'~ - sional leaders worthy of the name, we d be fed a steady diet of alarm and rage: rage at an administration that has armed China, and alarm that no one seems inclined to discuss its terrible consequences...

...Until recently...

...Hone Kon~,, where the newspapers have b e e ~ ~ * . ~ : " . ~:' _9 _9 r told to muzzle themselves on the sublect of Tin- "+ .. ~. wanese independence...