Your suggestions are simply an absurd extension of anything I have said.
Quite true. I saw the tactic in a number of your posts, and wondered how you would feel about it being turned in the opposite direction. Now I know.
I happen to believe that morality does have a role to play in international diplomacy, and that my country should stand for Good and oppose Sin. And if, in the short run, that may make us materially poorer, we should accept that cost. We as a nation also should recognize that dictatorships are a Bad Thing, and we should treat such governments and societies differently than we treat liberal democracies.
I hope you felt this way when we were not only tolerating but actively assisting and encouraging brutal right-wing dictatorships throughout the third world.
Our actions should discriminate between those who oppress fundamental human rights such as freedom of expression, association, and religion (all of which China today does), and those societies that do not. To fail to do so is to abet and encourage the oppressors
I see nothing wrong with discriminating. But action should be designed to achieve a pragmatic purpose; in this case maintaining and accelerating the existing pace of reform. We should measure our actions not be the quality of their discrimination, but by the degree to which they are succeeding, or are likely to succeed, in achieving this goal.
I find that people like you refuse to identify the basic evil that inheres in the current Chinese system
Spell it out for us. Please. With a prescription for how we can best encourage them to change it, since we obviously cannot change it ourselves.
Now, as part of encouraging the "good guys" (not always an easy identification), what is wrong with the idea of making it clear- not necessarily public- that if you engage in certain kinds of behavior, that there is a cost in terms of your relations with us?
A few fairly obvious points emerge here, if I resist as much as possible the temptation to point out how simplistic a "good guys vs. bad guys" analysis is. First, the kind of quiet diplomacy you describe is precisely what the "apologists" are advocating, as opposed to the kind of shrill public shrieking that will force the Chinese to either maintain their current policies or be perceived as kowtowing to foreigners. If the carrot and the stick are to have any effect, they must be used quietly. The current loud, public, attempts to portray China as an enemy serve no purpose. No foreign-policy purpose anyway; they may be accomplishing their real goal, which has more to do with domestic politics than with US-China relations.
China's economy remains primarily internal, and we are not yet in a position to apply any effective economic sanction, or for that matter any other effective sanction. This is why it is so important not to derail the primary purpose of integrating China's economy with that of the rest of the world. Once that is done, we will have the leverage to apply effective sanctions. Trying to apply sanctions before that leverage is obtained will only push China back into its economic shell and achieve the opposite of that purpose. Every dope dealer knows that you don't crank up the price and make demands until the buyer is hooked. Otherwise you're simply encouraging them to take the advice of the hardliners and "just say no".
that was an approach we used with some success toward the Bad Old
Soviet Union.
The transition of the Soviet Union out of Communism was appallingly badly managed, with an ideologue's fervor and the ridiculous assumption that once they stopped calling themselves Communists everything would be OK. The Russian people are paying the price today; we all may be paying it in a few years, if the current collapse provokes the rise of a hardcore nationalist government (of left or right, it hardly matters). If China's transition takes 50 years, but avoids that kind of crash and that kind of risk, will we still say it was too slow? If there is one lesson we should have learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is that the rapid overthrow of a Communist government, while viscerally satisfying, may in the long run be inferior to a managed transition.
A dubious proposition stated as fact.
A fact. This one I am willing to argue. It might not happen as fast as you would like, but it will happen.
Current leadership appears to want the benefits of the capitalist road without yielding their dictatorial powers.
What they want and what they get are two different things. Just ask the European feudal elite, who thought the Industrial Revolution would make them richer.
Clinton lied about when he was informed of Chinese spying in our weapons labs. For his own political agenda, he conducted a foreign policy toward China that imposed no price on China espionage to obtain WMD. If you think that should be tolerated by the US gov. and the American people, well you and I have nothing more to say to one another.... The FBI is part of the Executive branch of government. Perhaps you would like to ruminate on the implications of that fact.
Come now, surely you know how these executive agencies operate. A new administration, a new director, a few new faces at the top. At the level where the work is done, it's business as usual. OK, Clinton, like most politicians, lies about everything. What impact did it have? First, when you find a spy, you tell as few people as possible, the first priority is to manipulate that spy by providing access to false or inaccurate information. Disclosure only occurs when the people behind the spy know the spy is blown, at which point it no longer matters. The notion of punishing people for spying - which everybody does, all the time - is ridiculous. You assume the other guys are spying. They assume you spy on them. When you find a leak, you close it, and assume there are others. Retaliation is only a viable option if it serves the overall policy climate at the time. If you are in the process of trying to get a fish to take your bait, and you discover that the fish has pooped in your river, do you throw a rock at the fish or do you ignore the poop and concentrate on the business at hand, which is getting the fish onto the hook.
BTW, there is a large difference between trying to obtain WMD and trying to improve them. The overall strategic equation has simply not changed nearly as much as the hardliners would like us to believe.
I am sure there are people who wanted to meet the news of a successful Chinese spying attempt (which, it turns out, was deliberately leaked by the Chinese, for purposes of their own) with aggressive and public retaliation. I am sure they were told that the potential gain from such a move was insufficient to justify its negative impact on the primary goal of US policy toward China at that time, which was and is to draw China into the kind of economic linkages that would create real mutilateral influence. I would have to agree with this calculation.
Did you read the article referenced in this post?
Message 9861235
There is a great deal more to this whole spy scandal, and the timing of its release, than meets the eye. The whole thing simply reeks of politics.
Still waiting for your specific ideas on what policy toward China ought to be. Remember: long-term objectives and short term maneuvers, with an explanation of how the short-term maneuvers are expected to achieve the long-term objectives. |
