TO CHINA WITH LOVE
LAGON, MARK P.
TO CHINA, WITH LOVE Bill Gertz's chronicle of Bill Clinton's national security failures By Mark P. Lagon You might expect, from a book with the title Betrayal, a typical blast from the far, far...
...To assemble Betrayal, Gertz collected the combustible reporting he's done in recent years as national security correspondent for the Washington Times...
...while at the same time, the United States is sending over $1 billion to help the Russians "dismantle" nuclear weapons...
...In its policy toward Russia, Gertz concludes, the Clinton administration has simply mistaken America's interests...
...Though liberalized, Russia and China are not so predictably benign that we needn't worry about their military capabilities...
...In the decade that has followed the end of the Cold War, America's foreign-policy experts have focused their attention on rogue states like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea...
...aircraft carriers near Taiwan in 1996—Russia allowed China to buy missiles and destroyers designed to fight off aircraft carriers...
...His stunning stories, based on an unparalleled network of defense and intelligence sources, reveal the extent to which the Clinton administration has funneled aid and loans to a Russian government determined to act against U.S...
...In Bill Clinton's Washington," Gertz concludes, "national security facts never get in the way...
...But it is much clarified and expanded in Gertz's careful reconstructions in Betrayal...
...Indeed, the Cox committee's recent findings reveal that technology sold under loosened regulations or stolen from national laboratories has given China nuclear capabilities it can use itself or share with the likes of Pakistan and Iran...
...The collection of his work in Betrayal reveals that nothing has changed in the last two and a half years...
...Serious consideration is worth paying to Gertz's argument that the often-praised Nunn-Lugar aid for financing the dismantling of weapons has actually subsidized the modernization of Russian arms: Unlike the United States, which has no new nuclear weapons in development, Russia is engaged in a major strategic arms buildup that includes new long-range land-based missiles and a new class of long range ballistic missile submarines...
...TO CHINA, WITH LOVE Bill Gertz's chronicle of Bill Clinton's national security failures By Mark P. Lagon You might expect, from a book with the title Betrayal, a typical blast from the far, far right—a raging, rambling indictment of William Jefferson Clinton for everything from drug-running at Mena airport to conniving in Vince Foster's murder...
...Betrayal makes the solid and convincing case that over the last six and a half years, the president's foreign policy has regularly betrayed American interests and principles for a variety of political, personal, and financial expediences...
...On December 2, 1996, The Weekly Standard ran a profile of the Washington Times's national security correspondent, pointing out the extent to which this man, who never graduated from college, drops bombs in his columns that reverberate throughout Washington...
...But in his new volume, the reporter Mark P. Lagon is Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs fellow at the Project for the New American Century...
...And then, on August 31, 1998, the supposedly persuaded North Korea fired a three-stage rocket over Japan, demonstrating a capacity to hit American territory...
...The story of China—from the Loral and Hughes satellite transfers that improved China's missiles to ongoing spying at nuclear laboratories—won Jeff Gerth of the New York Times a well-deserved Pulitzer prize...
...But despite the administration's claim that treating China as a "trading partner" helps stabilize Asia, China's technological aid to Pakistan was a major factor in the nuclear tests undertaken by India and Pakistan last year...
...In its policy toward China, on the other hand, the Clinton administration has embarked on a conciliatory "new mercantilism...
...Even with regard to the rogue states the Clinton administration claims to take as serious threats, the record has not been good...
...Indeed, Gertz points out, both Russia and China have helped Iran develop nuclear and chemical arms and the missiles needed to deliver them...
...And by way of concluding his argument, Gertz includes in Betrayal copies of the secret documents provided by his sources...
...In Iraq, too, Clinton's policy has vitiated American credibility—notably in Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's bizarre effort to block U.N...
...But the agreement was purely symbolic (since it was reversible within minutes) and one that China nonetheless failed to keep: It was Gertz, in a Washington Times story, who revealed that China was continuing to expand its missile force and aim it at America...
...In the end, and in return for major concessions, China did agree not to target the United States with its nuclear missiles...
...The Clinton administration's fawning treatment seems only to have encouraged China to threaten, for example, to vaporize Los Angeles in 1996 if America defended Taiwan (a message, Gertz notes, delivered by a Chinese general to Chas Freeman, who had recently been the top Pentagon official in charge of U.S...
...The two states have even worked together, as when—after the stationing of two U.S...
...The policy toward North Korea, Gertz demonstrates, is at best feckless...
...The Iraq case demonstrates Gertz's ability to shed light even on reports he didn't break...
...policy in Asia...
...interests, courted China while the People's Liberation Army has stolen military technology, and willfully refused to punish Iraq and North Korea for developing instruments of mass murder...
...Bill Gertz has put together something considerably less than that—and consequently, something considerably more...
...The administration rewarded North Korea's flimsy promise to desist from building nuclear arms in 1994 with an inexplicable offer of light water reactors and fuel oil...
...And as he shines his light in unwelcome places, he remains as well an agenda setter, compelling the Clinton administration to a more responsible—or at least less disastrous—foreign policy...
...The North Koreans did clear out the facility before finally granting access to inspectors this spring—access for which Pyongyang extorted $200 million in American aid...
...weapons inspectors (such as Scott Ritter, who resigned in protest) from pursuing promising leads into Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program...
...Bill Gertz remains a national asset...
...The result is a hair-raising volume, an indictment of the Clinton administration more devastating and frightening than anything published before...
...American intelligence found that North Korea continued to prepare weapons-grade fissile material in a mountainside facility at Kumchangri...
...But Gertz shows that our Cold War problems haven't disappeared...
Vol. 4 • July 1999 • No. 40
