AN ALTERNATIVE TO CLINTON’S FAILED CHINA POLICY: ‘STRATEGIC CONTAINMENT AND TACTICAL TRADE AMBIGUITY’

(Washington, D.C.): In recent days, China’s increasingly
belligerent behavior toward Taiwan and its contemptuous dismissal
of American remonstrations have established one fact
convincingly: The Clinton Administration’s policy toward Beijing
— which has recently been mutated from a stated policy of
“strategic ambiguity” to one of “strategic clarity
and tactical ambiguity” — has been an abject failure.

Such an outcome is hardly surprising given that the Chinese
were certain to view a policy of “strategic ambiguity”
against the backdrop of the three years of Clinton appeasement of
Beijing. The appalling magnitude of the Administration’s
appeasement is becoming more apparent day-by-day. For example, Ken
Timmerman — a distinguished investigative journalist
and long-time friend of the Center for Security Policy — has
just published a major exposé in the new issue of the American
Spectator. It reveals Secretary of Defense William Perry’s
personal involvement in myriad, and profoundly troubling,
sweetheart deals with Communist China. (Excerpts
from this important article are attached.)

Diverse observers of the scene — from Washington Post columnist
Jim Hoagland to the editorial boards of the London Economist
and Wall Street Journal — have increasingly embraced a
view long held by the Center for Security Policy ⁽¹⁾: Communist China is
fast becoming a threat to vital U.S. security interests in East
Asia and beyond. As Mr. Hoagland put it in a powerful op.ed.
article last Sunday:

“This conflict [between China and Taiwan] will not go
away after the March 23 election. Beijing’s enemy is
democracy on Chinese soil. The tyrants cannot rest, or bother
to let Americans smooth their feathers, while Taiwan
demonstrates that one China exists in order and prosperity
under democratic rule while the other does not. One
has to go. Washington should do everything it can to
make sure that it is the Beijing regime that goes.”
(Emphasis added.)

Meanwhile, The Economist devoted its lead editorial
this week to the theme of “Stay Back, China.” It said,
in part:

“…Helping America to hold China to the rules of
peaceable behavior is the only way to preserve the stability
on which the region’s continued prosperity depends….China
will see the point of talking only if it is convinced that it
stands to lose less by talking than by gunfire. By contrast,
appeasing China over Taiwan will only feed China’s appetite
for trouble.”

In a similar vein, the Wall Street Journal
editorialized today:

“The Clinton Administration’s limp responses to
[various Chinese] ploys have emboldened Beijing to escalate
the provocations….Presidents get themselves — and the
country — into fixes like this by giving the wrong signals
to potential adversaries….If you want to avoid major
affronts be intolerant of small affronts. Bill Clinton has
not done that. And so in the Taiwan Strait he now faces a
challenge that can be ignored only at a very significant cost
to the United States’ role as the main guarantor of peace and
stability in East Asia. What’s he going to do now?”

What We Should Do Now

If President Clinton remains unable to send the right
signals to the Communist China, Congress must go beyond adopting
the Cox Resolution urging a defense of Taiwan against Chinese
aggression. ⁽²⁾ It is
time for the United States to adopt a policy towards Beijing that
might be called “strategic containment and tactical trade
ambiguity.”

The strategic containment aspect would be predicated
on the reality that China is engaged in a massive offensive
military build-up — with an onerous strategic component directed
against the United States. It would feature:

• Revitalizing and institutionalizing both bilateral and
  multilateral security arrangements with states — other
  than China — in the region.
• Restoring controls on strategic dual-use technology
  transfers to China.
• Staunching large-scale diversion of Western financial
  flows — particularly official credits and credit
  guarantees — to the Chinese military and security
  services, and their associated industrial enterprises.
• Reviewing at once U.S. and Western equipment and
  technology dedicated to the vital Chinese energy sector.
  Such reviews should be conducted by Congress and
  multilateral institutions in order to establish whether
  steps need to be taken to inhibit the growth of this
  large revenue-generating sector with the potential
  substantially to fuel Chinese military expansion and
  potential regional adventurism.

With respect to tactical trade ambiguity, the
potentially positive political spin-offs of expanded U.S.-China
commercial relations can continue to be tested — for the
moment — with the maintenance of Most Favored Nation
status. Nevertheless, U.S. Section 301 trade legislation
empowering Washington to respond to continued and blatant Chinese
trade-related abuses should be exercised robustly. Moreover,
Clinton Trade Representative Mickey Kantor’s solid recommendation
earlier this month — i.e., that Section 301 be deployed against
governments (including that of China) condoning or actively
participating in bribery by foreign companies at an estimated
cost of $45 billion annually to U.S. firms — should be
implemented at once.

The Bottom Line

By adopting a nuanced approach to trade in the context of
strategic containment, China can be put on unmistakable notice:
Beijing will retain its coveted access to the U.S. market —
giving rise to a $40 billion trade surplus for Beijing annually
— only to the extent that it demonstrates substantially improved
and non-hegemonic behavior. Should China persist in implementing
the Maoist maxim that power only flows from the barrel of a gun,
however, then that access will likewise have to be substantially
reduced.

At the end of the day, the United States simply cannot persist
in a policy defined by strategic appeasement and the tactical
subordination of all other equities to U.S. exports and other
commercial interests as pursued by the Clinton Administration
and, for that matter, by the Bush-Baker team before it. The
stakes are sufficiently great that America must once again be
guided by the sort of principles, values and moral compass that
helped hasten the demise of one communist tyranny — and must now
be brought to bear to contain and potentially roll back another.

– 30 –

1. See, for example, the Center’s Decision Briefs
entitled The Ultimate ‘China Card’: Right
Response to Odious Chinese Behavior is Recognition for Taiwan
(No. 94-D 54,
26 May 1994); and Export
Decontrollers make the ‘Counter’ in U.S. Counter-Proliferation
Policy Stand for Counter-Productive ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_60″>No. 94-D 60, 14 June
1994).

2. See the Center’s recent Press Release entitled
Center’s Cox Leads Congressional Effort to Discourage Chinese
Aggression Against Taiwan ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-P_23″>No. 96-P 23, 5 March 1996).