“We want to be friends with the world. All we want is for everybody to love everybody else (particularly us). We are willing to give almost anything for such friendship, including our nuclear technology, our missiles and our good name.
“Why, then, is everyone carrying on so? Why are you, India, exploding nuclear bombs all over the place? Why are you, Pakistan, threatening to blow up your own bombs, and perhaps Kashmir as well? Why are you, China, looking as pleased as the Shanghai cat who swallowed the American canary?
“All we did was give China some nuclear missile technology to calm its nerves. Who could have guessed that technology would set off a chain reaction across all of Asia?”
Those are very likely some of the thoughts in the White House during this past week of upheavals seemingly everywhere. So, let’s try to unravel a few of the ideas and suppositions behind those created, but symbolically accurate, words.
There’s an acerbic saying about fickle politics in the nation’s capital: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog!” But President Clinton already has a dog. And so his people tell you all the time about how China can now be our friend, not to speak of a “strategic asset,” which in most books means excluding others from such special status.
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Starting with trips to China by Defense Secretary William Perry in the first Clinton administration, it was decided to give China highly sensitive technology so that it could have safer nuclear experiments and become a “modernized” country. Then it would understand what a good friend America can be to nice countries.
It did not hurt, of course, that aerospace companies were giving the largest amounts of campaign contributions to the Democratic Party in exchange for the administration “opening” China to their expensive missile technology.
On top of that, China soon showed how a good friend should respond: with, from many corroborating reports now, campaign donations to the Democratic Party from highly self-interested elements within Chinese military intelligence.
But the Indians, who also have a rather big country on the same continent, did not see all of this as very friendly at all. They see a rapidly growing China inexplicably getting more and more from Washington every day and giving almost nothing in return.
They see China with 15 or 16 unresolved border disputes across Asia and a rapidly developing military. They see Chinese nuclear missiles deployed in Tibet, and they know that China never did manage to renounce its claim to a portion of eastern India.
There is something else odd going across the globe. National Journal writer Michael Kelly calls this “a hungry time, filled with small nations aching with desire to be larger than they are.” And this is as natural as it is dangerous, because it is a time of the end of the great secular ideologies.
When the former Yugoslavia disintegrated, local ethnic “armies” arose to put chaos in the place of the former center. So now different nations are coming to the fore with the desire to be larger than they are. Of all of these, China is the most dangerous because, unlike in Russia, communism there did not die. Rather, its passions were replaced by the expansionist passions of a kind of Chinese “manifest destiny” over Asia.
This White House has at every turn unwittingly encouraged Chinese expansionist ambitions. It not only has eschewed any use of reasonable force but has opted passionately for the “commercial diplomacy” that constantly gives in to the dictates of American corporations eager to do business in China.
The Chinese, meanwhile, are remarkably forthright. Only a week ago, President Jiang Xemin said in a speech that the coming “liberation” of Taiwan was a “holy duty.” A recent National Defense University publication of Chinese military writings quotes leading military men as saying that their major intention is to go after the United States, as the world’s greatest “hegemony”; it added that it would follow old Chinese dictums to “work your enemy’s weakness.”
With friends like us, they are not having to work very hard.