Message to Beijing’s Communists: It’s Time for them To Go

(Washington, D.C.): The Communist Chinese are exacerbating the crisis precipitated by the latest in a series of escalating acts of aggression against American personnel, allies and interests in East Asia. While the Bush Administration has properly rejected Beijing’s outrageous demands for an apology and compensation following the loss of the pilot and aircraft that crashed into the U.S. EP-3, America must make sure that its policy towards the PRC is not held hostage, along with its 24 airmen and women.

The Center’s President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. wrote an essay which appeared in National Review Online on Tuesday recommending specific, strategic steps the U.S. government should now be taking. These measures should be implemented at once.

The tendency in official Washington in the wake of incidents like Chinese interference with a U.S. military-surveillance aircraft is to try to “contain” the damage. Diplomats and policy-makers tend to concern themselves narrowly with the immediate task at hand expediting the release of the 24 Americans now held hostage and their EP-3 that was, at least until its arrival in China, chock-a-block with sensitive intelligence-collection gear.

Were the Bush administration to confine itself to such tactical responses to the present crisis, however, it would be making a grave error. American policy should be guided instead by the far-reaching strategic considerations brought to bear by this episode: China is engaged in a determined effort to accelerate what it perceives to have been the United States’ waning influence in East Asia over the past decade and to assume the role of regional overseer. Neither American interests nor those of our regional allies nor, for that matter, those of the Chinese people will be served by accommodating Chinese aggression.

What is needed is for Mr. Bush to adopt a response geared toward the pattern of behavior displayed by the downing of our plane. Such a response would involve a number of measures:

For starters, the president should use this occasion to make clear to the American people that the PRC is acting in an increasingly belligerent manner not only toward U.S. military vessels, aircraft, and personnel, but also toward allied democracies in the Western Pacific and East Asia. Taiwan is the most obvious, but hardly the only friend of this country to have been threatened by Beijing. Philippine territory has been taken over by armed Chinese forces; the PRC appears to be abetting the turmoil fracturing Indonesia; and Vietnam continues to fear that China will once again lash out in its direction.

Then there are the countries increasingly at risk from China’s ballistic missiles and/or weapons of mass destruction especially the weapons that the PRC is selling to rogue state clients around the world. Israel, India, South Korea, Japan, Europe, and even the United States are within range of missiles built, deployed or sold by the PRC, or adapted from its technology with Chinese help. Senior People’s Liberation Army officers have even taken to explicitly threatening American cities like Los Angeles with devastating attacks. Mr. Bush needs to talk about these threats as well as his commitment to defend the American people, their forces overseas, and their allies.

The president should establish clearly that the United States is going to remain a force to be reckoned with in East Asia. This message is a necessary corrective to the impression left by his predecessor, and is vital to stopping the geopolitical equivalent of tectonic shifts that have led some in South Korea, Japan, and even Taiwan to opt for appeasement of Beijing over resistance. The president needs to demonstrate that we will continue to monitor aggressive Chinese behavior through all means available and that we will maintain an increased U.S. military presence in the region for the foreseeable future.

We must also increase the ability of our friends in East Asia to provide for their own defense. First and foremost, this means approving the package of arms sales sought by Taiwan and deemed by the Bush Pentagon to be required for the island’s security in the face of the growing threat posed by offensive PLA forces arrayed against the Republic of China. Aegis air-defense destroyers, Patriot anti-missile systems, and submarines must all form part of the deal whether the Chinese ultimately return our EP-3 and its crew or not. Until such systems are delivered, however, the United States should adapt its own Aegis ships as quickly as possible so as to provide some interim missile defense for Taiwan pending the delivery of her own self-protection capabilities.

Most important, President Bush should adopt the same strategic course Ronald Reagan that implemented two decades ago against the monstrous Communist empire of his day the Soviet Union. This would entail a strategy not of containment, but of “roll-back,” aimed at denying the odious regime in Beijing the political legitimacy, the financial underwriting, and the military advantages of “partnership” with the United States and thus increasing the costs of PRC-repression tactics at home and adventurism abroad.

No Olympics should be held in China as long as authoritarianism rules. No Chinese government entity or state-owned company engaged in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, espionage, abuses of human rights, or religious freedoms should be able to secure funds on the U.S. capital markets from unwitting American investors. And the PLA should be denied the considerable espionage opportunities that arise from so-called military-to-military contacts and should no longer be able to acquire nuclear weapons-relevant supercomputers, missile technology, and other potentially deadly equipment from the United States.

Have no doubt: Helping the Chinese people liberate themselves from Communist despotism will be more difficult than was the job of taking down the USSR. The extent of China’s penetration of the West is far greater than was true of the Soviet Union; Beijing’s influence and agents are much more widespread. Still, part of the reason that Beijing attacked our plane was in furtherance of its classic social- engineering campaign whereby external threats (even manufactured ones) are used to promote support for the regime and to suppress dissent. The fact that the Chinese are growing increasingly restive is the best hope for making common cause with them in achieving a transformation of China. It is also the best hope for avoiding a conflict with the United States that China’s leaders clearly seem determined to foment.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy under President Reagan. He is currently the president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington.