FOREIGN POLICY FOR SALE
LAGON, MARK P.
FOREIGN POLICY FOR SALE Clinton, China, and Diplomacy By Mark P. Lagon It was while he was first running for president that Bill Clinton promised that his foreign policy would have only two...
...The policy itself seems to be driven by a strange coalition headed by National Security Adviser Sandy Berger...
...President Clinton and his conciliatory adviser Sandy Berger have made American foreign policy synonymous with business...
...The book suggests how Clinton's policy has empowered the People's Liberation Army as the chief instrument of proliferation, external aggression, and internal repression...
...The book is an account of sensitive technology transfers driven by corporate interests and illicit campaign contributions from China...
...Year of the Rat is the chronicle of a sellout—a sellout of American security and, even more, a sellout of American values...
...And the worst results of the Clinton administration's abandonment of any high-minded foreign-policy goal can be seen in our relation to China...
...And it was for this reason that the administration jettisoned its early attempt to halt the flow of sensitive military technology from China to other countries...
...But it is the economic determinists who have provided the premises that form this coalition's lowest common denominator...
...products...
...The actual effect, however, has been merely to make the trade deficit with China America's largest—at some $60 billion dollars a year, surpassing that with Japan...
...FOREIGN POLICY FOR SALE Clinton, China, and Diplomacy By Mark P. Lagon It was while he was first running for president that Bill Clinton promised that his foreign policy would have only two touchstones: the promotion of democracy and the halting of arms proliferation...
...It was for this reason that Ron Brown made the Commerce Department's trade missions to China his top priority...
...Far more scandalous is the policy that allowed them to emerge...
...The book's dustjacket provides the perfect image for our current China policy: President Clinton reviewing Chinese troops in Tiananmen Square, nine years to the month after pro-democracy demonstrators were massacred there...
...And then in 1998, the administration quietly abandoned even its pledge (made at the time it dropped the link between trade and rights) to submit censure resolutions aimed at China to the United Nations Human Rights Commission...
...Among its members are representatives of business interests, conciliatory alumni of the Carter administration (like Berger himself), Kissingerian realists still quite sentimental about the relation to China that they forged a quarter century ago, and academic and diplomatic Sinologists who wield r phrases like "the Chinese need to pre: serve face" and "the non-Western values of Asia" in order to justify accommodation...
...The betrayals and corruptions and gangsterism that have emerged from our China policy were predictable...
...A wide range of Chinese tariffs, unpublished regulations, "export performance requirements," and the low buying-power of Chinese consumers have kept the goal of selling American products in China as elusive as ever...
...But somewhere along the way, he managed to forget his promise...
...The promoters of commercial diplomacy hold that trade weaves a web of interdependence that will provide the best protection against military threats to the United States...
...There is, no doubt, an excellent use to be made of diplomacy in expanding the reach of domestic investments and Mark P. Lagon is a Council on Foreign Relations international affairs fellow at the Project for the New American Century...
...Just this month—after winning "most favored nation" trade status under the less-controversial title of "standard trade relations" and after receiving the longest visit an American president has ever made to any foreign coun-try—the Chinese authorities arrested the organizers of the independent China Democracy party...
...One year after promulgating an executive order linking China's trade status to human rights, the Clinton administration scrapped it...
...In Year of the Rat, Timperlake and Triplett are at their best when explaining to laymen the implications of the flow of technology to and from China...
...And in November, the Clinton administration itself was forced to protest China's delivery of medium-range-missile equipment to Iran—equipment that could be used to deposit nuclear warheads on such allies as Israel...
...But it isn't the only use of diplomacy...
...Year of the Rat is perhaps too focused on such sinister and intriguing but ultimately small figures as Wang Jun— ushered into the White House for fund-raising purposes in February 1996, only to have his firm caught smuggling thousands of machine guns to California gangs three months later (though this focus may have influenced the House Judiciary Committee to take up, briefly, the question of illegal Chinese campaign contributions...
...In the recently published Year of the Rat, two veterans of congressional foreign-policy debates, Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett II, present a telling jeremiad against the grotesque commercial mutation of American diplomacy...
...The result has not been promising...
...In a windfall for the Westinghouse Corporation, President Clinton agreed to American cooperation with China on nuclear-power technology...
...In the course of their presentation, the authors amply demonstrate the hard truth of commercial diplomacy: A foreign policy defined by sales becomes at last a foreign policy for sale...
...It was for this reason that the Clinton administration allowed the transfer to China of more super-computers (used in nuclear-arms design) than the Pentagon owns...
...And the book is also a primer on the congressional investigations chaired by Senator Fred Thompson (whom the authors assisted) and Representative Chris Cox...
...The authors note, for instance, how a "Defense Conversion Commission" (the brainchild of ex-defense secretary William Perry) allowed the Chinese military "to convert some surplus military production into civilian goods, export them for hard currency, and invest the profits in modernizing their military lines...
...In doing so, they have done something worse—more subtle and yet more important—than Year of the Rat suggests...
...Under a 1985 statute, however, the transfer of such technology requires certification that the receiving country does not engage in nuclear-arms proliferation...
...Similarly, the economic determin-ists—and their partners in the coalition that has produced our China policy—argue that unfettered trade will eventually halt China's innumerable violations of human rights...
...They have effectively turned America into France by embracing the statist promotion of industry abroad, and they have posed as sophisticated statecraft their indifference to repression and arms sales...
...Commercial diplomacy" is instead what the Clinton administration decided to practice, using the nation's enormous diplomatic resources to pry open foreign markets for the entry of American industry...
...They argue, for instance, that nearly any increase in trade with China will result not only in real profits for American businesses, but also in the growth of Chinese cooperation in international markets...
...Within two months of President Clinton's delivering the required certification last January, the press reported that a Chinese state company was transferring to Iran the anhydrous hydrogen fluoride used to refine uranium for nuclear warheads...
Vol. 4 • December 1998 • No. 15
