Clinton Legacy Watch # 44 : A Lot is ‘Going South’ South of the Border

(Washington, D.C.): “What the President
meant to say is….” Any seasoned bureaucrat has had
to employ a variation on this theme from time to time. Usually, the reason is because the
occupant of the Oval Office has misspoken in some minor way, deviating unintentionally from
the government’s chosen line on a point of policy.

Who Will Be ‘Running the Canal’?

Rarely — if ever — however, have all the President’s flacks and all the President’s bureaucrats
had such a monumental challenge as the Clinton spinmeisters now face in walking-back a
statement the Commander-in-Chief made last week concerning Communist China and the
Panama Canal. On November 30, Mr. Clinton dismissed concerns about a Chinese company’s
acquisition of ports at both ends of the strategic waterway saying, “I think the Chinese
will in
fact be bending over backwards to make sure that they run it in a competent and able and
fair manner….I would be very surprised if any adverse consequences flowed from the
Chinese running the Canal.”

The problem for Mr. Clinton is that this is no small mistake in which he innocently
substituted
“the Chinese [will be] running the Canal” when he really meant to say they will run two ports.
The President is, after all, on record as a great admirer of how well the Chinese run strategically
located ports. He personally held four meetings to try to help secure port facilities for COSCO,
the PRC’s merchant marine, at the former U.S. Navy base at Long Beach.

Indeed, the problem is not simply that it is the Panamanians who are supposed to be
“running” the Canal after next week’s hand-over ceremony. Rather, it is that
Mr. Clinton’s
remarks, as delivered in all their insouciance, are entirely consistent with his well-documented,
“see-no-evil” attitude towards Communist China in particular and, more
generally, toward the unraveling security situation in much of the Western hemisphere — to
which Beijing is significantly contributing.

With regard to the former, a President who has authorized the sale to China of an array of
militarily relevant technologies (for example, supercomputers, jet engine hot sections,
sophisticated machine tools and fiber optic telecommunications gear) and failed to respond
vigorously to the PRC’s theft or diversion of others (notably, ballistic missile- and nuclear
warhead-related know-how and equipment) is perfectly capable of viewing with equanimity the
prospect that the Chinese will fill the vacuum of power we are creating with our withdrawal from
Panama.

‘Going South’

Worse yet, Mr. Clinton has been Neroesque in his attitude towards ominous developments in
Latin America and the Caribbean — and the Chinese role in exacerbating, or at least taking
advantage of, them. Consider a few of the things “going south” south of the border:

• Colombia is in the throes of civil war, a war in which it seems likely the
  axis between drug
  traffickers and Marxist revolutionaries will at a minimum achieve the country’s de
  facto
  partition, if not the overthrow of its democratically elected government. Interestingly,
  Colombia’s revolutionary organization known as the FARC is said to be seeking Chinese
  permission to open a liaison office in Beijing.

• Since neighboring Panama has no armed forces, Colombian money
  launderers, drug-smugglers, guerrillas and others operate from and through its territory with
  impunity. This
  greatly exacerbates the climate of corruption that is rampant in Panama (and much of the rest
  of the region), making especially problematic the prospects for stability so critical to the
  Canal’s reliable operations once the U.S. presence comes to an end.

• Colombia’s neighbor to the east, Venezuela, is undergoing its own
  momentous political
  transformation at the hands of its new president, Hugo Chavez. The
  implications if the
  United States’ largest source of foreign oil were to adopt a constitution that greatly
  consolidates power in Chavez’s hands, at the expense of pluralistic democratic institutions,
  are likely to be all the more serious in light of his travels. During recent state visits to China
  and Cuba, Chavez announced respectively his admiration for and his intention to
  emulate Mao’s and Castro’s revolutions.

It is worth noting that both energy-starved Beijing and economically destitute Havana
have a keen interest in exploiting Venezuela’s oil resources and/or wealth. Both
would be especially pleased to do so at American expense. It is no accident then that
the huge, state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) is
making a
play for Venezuelan oil (even as it is seeking to exploit reserves in Sudan and Iraq).
And one can only assume that Fidel and his Chinese friends are delighted at Chavez’s
declared intention to nationalize foreign oil companies’ holdings in Venezuela.

• Ecuador, which also shares a porous border with Colombia, is in the throes of an
  economic
  meltdown. When Quito recently defaulted on bonds bearing the name of the man who
  engineered an earlier bail-out — then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady — the Clinton
  Administration, in its wisdom, decided to make an example of Ecuador. Evidently, because
  they lacked nuclear weapons and/or major sponsors among multinational corporations, the
  Ecuadorans have been denied the sort of emergency interventions that countries like Russia,
  Mexico and Indonesia have received. Meanwhile, thanks to improving military-to-military
  ties with China, the U.S.-trained and -equipped Ecuadoran military are providing “aggressor”
  units to help teach the People’s Liberation Army how to defeat our armed forces.

• The eased — and increasingly unpoliced — access to the United States’ market and territory
  afforded by NAFTA is making Mexico once again a transhipment point of
  choice for
  Colombian cocaine and heroin and Chinese and others’ alien-smuggling operations. Systemic
  corruption, rampant poverty and growing popular anger at the political elite may mean
  Mexico is approaching a pre-revolutionary situation.

• President Clinton’s hapless efforts to prevent Puerto Rican displeasure at
  the U.S. military’s
  use of the vital Vieques live-fire training range from harming the campaigns
  being waged by
  his wife and Vice President Gore is giving rise to the worst of both worlds: Navy and
  Marine battle groups unprepared for combat operations and increasingly expensive
  bribes for unappeasable separatists.

The Bottom Line

The reality is that these and other cancerous situations in our backyard have gone largely
unaddressed while they metastasized on the Clinton-Gore Administration’s watch. The
squandered opportunity for democratic consolidation and free market economic growth in
the Western hemisphere will be among the most malevolent aspects of the Clinton legacy —
a legacy made all the more reprehensible for Mr. Clinton neither meaning nor saying
that
he stands by the Monroe Doctrine when it comes to Chinese penetration of our
neighborhood.