Clinton Legacy Watch #49: Rogue States by Any Other Name… North Korea Still a Threat; China is a Country of Concern’

(Washington, D.C.): Last week, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offered fresh proof that the Clinton-Gore foreign policy can accurately be characterized just as President Clinton did offhandedly to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow earlier this month: “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” In an NPR radio interview on Friday, Mrs. Albright declared that the United States government would no longer use the term “rogue states” to describe what were henceforth to be characterized as “countries of concern.”

This is no mere semantic adjustment. It is a substantive as well as symbolic step, designed to clear the way for Mr. Clinton’s end-game effort to build a dubious legacy by normalizing relations with every bad actor on the planet.

Ignoring North Korean Capabilities in Favor of Wishful Thinking About Its Intentions

The first beneficiary of this linguistic/material sleight-of-hand is North Korea. Immediately following the charm-offensive-masquerading-as-a-summit-meeting between the Kims of North and South Korea in Pyongyang last week, the Clinton-Gore Administration announced that it was lifting economic sanctions against the Communist regime.

Those increasingly persuaded that President Clinton and his subordinates have displayed a sustained disregard for security matters can only feel confirmed in their assessent. After all, whether acknowledged as such or not, the clear implication is that a single meeting — however distorted its public relations impact in South Korea and elsewhere in the West — has actually precipitated a significant, to say nothing of a permanent, change in North Korea’s intentions (not to mention its formidable military capabilities). This is foolish in the extreme, and may prove to be recklessly so.

Even more troubling are indications that the Clinton-Gore Administration hopes that by no longer seeing North Korea as a “rogue state,” or calling it that, will enable the President to finesse his increasingly problematic approach to building a limited national missile defense. In the first seven years of their tenure in office, neither Mr. Clinton nor Vice President Gore evinced a serious commitment to defending America against missile threats. To be sure, as a lengthy (if grossly imbalanced) report in the New York Times yesterday makes clear, the Administration has been willing to pay lip-service to the need for such protection whenever it became politically necessary to do so. This was especially evident in the 1996 election and in the run-up to the 2000 campaign.

The Administration would like nothing better than to find a pretext for deferring a decision on deploying missile defenses — if it could do so without exposing Al Gore to undue political risk. The desire to find a way out has only grown in the face of: a mass revolt on the part of the Veep’s ideological base (which shares his historic, intense hostility to missile defenses); an aggressive campaign by Putin to divide the U.S. from its allies; discomfort on the latter’s part about an American missile defense plan that will provide them with no protection; and questions about the limited utility and high costs of an Alaska deployment designed primarily with ABM Treaty considerations in mind. The Administration’s hunt for a deus ex machina has become all the more intense in the wake of ridicule heaped on recently revealed efforts by Administration lawyers to reinterpret the Treaty in such a way as to construe the start of construction on a new radar on Shemya Island to be compatible with an accord that clearly prohibits such activity.

If the aforementioned considerations explain the Clinton-Gore team’s willingness to write-down the threat posed by North Korea’s missile program on the basis of a summit meeting and highly perishable promises from Pyongyang not to continue flight tests of its long-range Taepo Dong missiles, they do not justify such revisionism. More to the point, even if the North Korean government fell tomorrow and its missile program was genuinely and permanently terminated, the United States would still need a defense against other states whose behavior and/or military programs indisputably must make them “countries of concern.”

Mother of All Rogue States: China

As an important hearing conducted Wednesday by the House Armed Services Committee made clear, the United States ignores at its peril the fact that Communist China is a nation that increasingly must qualify as a “country of concern.” Among the highlights of this event were the following excerpts from the testimony delivered by Dr. Arthur Waldron, a world-renowned Sinologist who is a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania.

• Absent some systemic change in China, we can expect a steady level of military tension with Beijing with the real possibility of a crisis.
• China is carrying out a massive military buildup not because it faces threats or dangers — it does not — but rather because it remains a communist dictatorship and needs enemies. It is in the leadership’s best interest to give [the Chinese military] what they want, which is the best and most advanced of everything.
• China is spending tens of billions of dollars every year on enormously costly military and military-related programs, ranging from a manned space program to extensive nuclear warhead development to the perfection of new generations of mobile, solid-fueled ballistic missiles, to submarines to aircraft to aircraft carriers, not to mention communications, satellites, electronics, and so forth.”
• U.S. pressure prevents Taiwan from developing missiles, and Japan has none. But China’s missile program gets a free pass…when all is said and done, what drives the entire arms race in Asia is China’s missile program. See to it that China cannot use free world finance for military plans….There is no reason for the rest of the world to finance a Chinese military buildup aimed outward.”
• As in Europe, our security in Asia depends above all upon our alliances….At present, China is working very hard to cut our alliance ties in Asia….The recent Korean diplomacy, in which China clearly had a major role, prepares the way for a campaign to end South Korea’s close alliance status with the United States. That, in turn, will bring the Japanese alliance into doubt….I find it all deeply worrying.
• At the same time that China is attempting to cut US alliances, she is building up a network of her own. Internationally, she is cultivating Russia by pouring money into the floundering ex-Soviet arms industry, and receiving in return technology that greatly increases her military where withal….Such behavior undermines alliance cohesion, while the military gains China is making, through Russian and Israeli as well as Western European transfers, are definitely non-trivial….
• China’s dubious claims to most of the South China sea would be strengthened and Singapore would undoubtedly join the tilt. Under such conditions, the U.S. would be well-nigh excluded from Asia, just as we were in the late 1930’s and 1940’s when Japan had hegemony there….What I am describing here is a possible Chinese hegemony over the Asia region…the fact that China is actively pursuing this course is very worrying.”

Further grounds for “concern” about China — notably, its ongoing proliferation to Pakistan and other “rogue states” — are illuminated in an important op.ed. article by Edward Timperlake and William Triplett William, authors of the best-sellers Year of the Rat and Red Dragon Rising, which appeared in yesterday’s Washington Times. It noted, in part, that:

• For some time, the American intelligence community has known that Chinese communist nuclear and missile arms smuggling has been increasing dramatically. By whatever means, this month private information from the Administration relating to Chinese nuclear weapons and missile sales to Pakistan has made its way to MSNBC, the Washington Times and the Far Eastern Economic Review.
• What we now know: 1) American military and intelligence officials now estimate Pakistan’s nuclear strike capability is five times that of India. This represents an American reassessment in the order of 500 percent. 2) right now, Communist China is secretly building a second M-class ballistic missile plant in Pakistan. When this comes on stream, it will be able to increase Pakistan’s nuclear missile stockpile by an additional 100 percent. And 3) if Chinese arms smuggling to Pakistan is fivefold what we originally estimated, how good are our estimates of Chinese nuclear arms sales to North Korea? Iran? Syria? Libya? Iraq?

  What about our estimates of Chinese germ warfare sales to Iran and other places? All our current estimates of Chinese proliferation to terrorist nations and others have to be labeled, “Suspect. To be re-assessed.” (Emphasis added.)

We Are Going to Share Intelligence With Whom?

Incredibly, it is against this backdrop of incoherence about U.S. policy towards threatening “countries of concern” and growing alarm about Clinton-Gore mishandling, if not outright malfeasance, with respect security issues, that the Administration has just unveiled a new “intelligence-sharing” initiative with Communist China.

In Beijing last week, the President’s “drug czar,” General Barry McCaffrey, announced that he and his Chinese counterpart had just signed a new cooperation agreement aimed at improving U.S.-PRC efforts to combat the drug trade. With this initiative, the United States is repeating similar, well- intentioned but seriously misguided efforts — notably in the latter day Soviet Union and Russia: Equipping governments and institutions tied to drug traffickers with intelligence, training and other information that is likely to make it more difficult to counteract their cultivation, transhipment and/or smuggling operations.

The Bottom Line

The Clinton pursuit of a legacy that will bind his successor and the Nation to policies of appeasement and an attendant unpreparedness to deal with real and growing threats from what remain “rogue states” cries out for congressional oversight and sustained debate in the coming election season. To those with a sense of history like Dr. Waldron, this behavior bears ominous similarities to what proved to be the last inter-war period:

The pattern is so similar to what occurred before World War II: the cutting of Japan’s alliance with Britain, the substitution of a weak multilateral system, an international tilt toward China that left Japan feeling cheated — and finally, of course, Japan’s catastrophic decision that, because the international community was unwilling to take her security needs seriously, therefore she had no choice but to act unilaterally.

By allowing feckless and irresolute U.S. leadership to contribute to the weakening, if not the actual severing of important alliance relationships, and the emboldening, if not actually the empowering, of potential adversaries, the United States risks transforming the present age of peace and prosperity into another interlude book-ended by terrible conflicts.

Unfortunately, the Congress — under intense election year pressure from Archer-Daniels- Midland and other agribusinesses (who may or may not speak for the classic American family farmer but whose immense lobbying resources have repeatedly been put at the disposal of causes that are contrary to larger national interests) — is poised to deny itself the moral standing to criticize such dangerous Administration policies. The House of Representatives is expected shortly to adopt legislation that would not only effectively remove the “rogue state” label from nations like Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Libya. By ending embargos on trade in food and medicines with these countries, this initiative would inevitably communicate as well that these states are no longer even “countries of concern.” To its credit, the Republican leadership has until recently tried to resist these steps; its reported, reluctant willingness now to accommodate the lobbyists and the Members of Congress under their influence may be expedient politics in the short-term but threatens real and long-term strategic harm to the Nation.

Like it or not, American interests and security are at risk from nations that wish us harm. They may choose to inflict or threaten such harm with missile-delivered weapons of mass destruction — and the United States simply can no longer afford to be defenseless in the face of that prospect. Building an effective, global missile defense is a necessary, but hardly sufficient, corrective step. The Nation must also attend, though, to threats to its homeland posed by other means of delivering chemical, biological and/or nuclear weapons. It must reinvigorate its alliances. And it must pursue policies designed to resist and undermine, not appease, hostile despotic regimes and other potential adversaries. To do so, however, those entrusted with safeguarding our security must recognize and portray accurately the nature of rogue states and other countries of concern.