-Caveat Lector-
E D I T O R I A L
'Appeasement' Vs. 'Isolationism'
Date: 11/2/99
It went almost unremarked, but something stunning happened in
Washington, D.C., last week. A former CIA director denounced the
administration for pursuing, as he saw it, a policy of
''appeasement'' toward the People's Republic of China.
It's significant enough when a top spook, even one who vacated
the office a few years ago, breaks custom and criticizes his
president. But this was President Clinton's own first director of
intelligence. And R. James Woolsey was draping him with a charge
that harks back to the mollification of Adolf Hitler.
Granted, the president's predecessor, George Bush, appointed
Woolsey first. But Woolsey's nonpartisan reputation impressed
Clinton so much that a reappointment recommended itself. Nor is
Woolsey, who served honorably in 1993-94, an unnuanced or
reflexive anti-Communist. We remember when he thoughtfully
excused himself so that the wife of a Vietnamese diplomat could
be seated at a White House Correspondents Dinner.
Last week, at a Nixon Center forum that coincided with a
congressional hearing on Taiwan defense, Woolsey's gentlemanly
patience with a dangerous policy deserted him - and with it the
imagined protocol that an ex-CIA director doesn't criticize his
president. ''It is wrongheaded and dangerous,'' he said of the
Clinton administration's attempt to forge a ''strategic
relationship'' with mainland China.
The elements of that relationship include the soft-pedaling over
Chinese spying on U.S. missile technology, the embrace of a
one-China approach that tilts toward Beijing over Taipei and the
incessant apologizing for NATO's errant bombing last May of
China's embassy in Yugoslavia. Woolsey warned that such weak
posturing might have emboldened Maoist hardliners in Beijing.
With allegations of
illegal campaign contributions from China to the 1996 Clinton
campaign still unresolved, what emerges is a potentially historic
scandal.
''The executive branch,'' urged Woolsey, ''needs to be forced to
change its shortsighted policy.''
That exhortation, uncharacteristic of the estimable intelligence
officer, could well foreshadow the foreign policy debate of next
year's presidential campaign.
The Democrats have tried to blunt this kind of sharp criticism.
When the Senate two weeks ago refused to ratify the nuclear test
ban treaty, the president turned a press conference into a
tantrum, shaking his finger at the ''new isolationists'' he saw
running the GOP.
The display might have been written off as intemperate, a chief
executive losing control of the national agenda in the dwindling
days of his term. But next the White House suited up Sandy
Berger, the national security adviser, to go out with a formal
speech. ''New isolationists'' had been fashioned into an official
branding iron.
It takes historical illiteracy or a wanton manipulation of the
electorate's memory to engage in such rhetoric. Only seven years
ago, the then governor of Arkansas, running for president,
accused President Bush of kowtowing to the butchers of Beijing,
who had sent tanks to roll over the protesters in Tiananmen
Square. The Bush administration, he cried, pursued commercial
contacts over human rights, abstract foreign policy over pressing
domestic issues.
Today the president who regularly chats up his special
relationship with Jiang Zemin, China's top official, is none
other than Clinton. We've not noticed a lessening of human rights
abuses on the mainland, or reduced bellicosity from Jiang and his
aging Maoist cronies toward Taiwan. Indeed, on both counts, by
most reckonings, Beijing is less friendly to Western values than
in 1992.
Proposals for a more nuanced posture toward China, one that
encourages trade while pressing for human rights, do not qualify
as isolationist. Neither does pointing out the flaws in a nuclear
test ban treaty that isolate America as a vastly more targetable
place. In his press conference, Clinton aligned himself, not with
those who would have America lead the world toward greater peace
and freedom, but with those - China and Russia -who find the pact
advantageous.
Apparently, the Clinton administration needs irresponsible
rhetoric to put off balance those who see its own foreign policy
for what it is. Serious as the word sounds, ''appeasement'' turns
out to be far more accurate than ''isolationist.'' We have the
president's own first CIA director, James Woolsey, to thank for
the history lesson.
(C) Copyright 1999 Investors Business Daily, Inc.
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The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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