Early Returns on ‘Chinagate’
(Washington, D.C.):
As congressional investigators begin to sift through the detritus of President
Clinton’s appeasement of Communist China, they will be seeking to learn the extent of the
damage it may have caused to the national security. Specifically, a select House committee
chaired by Rep. Chris Cox(1), Republican
of California, and four different Senate committees(2)
will be grappling with the implications of unauthorized and/or ill-advised transfers of strategic
technologies that have reportedly contributed to the reliability and accuracy of China’s
nuclear-armed ballistic missiles — thirteen of which are believed to be targeted upon American
cities.
Lessons to Be Urgently Learned
No matter what else comes to light in the course of these investigations, three important
lessons
can already be drawn. It is imperative that Congress take these lessons from the unfolding
“Chinagate” scandal to heart — and quickly initiate corrective action.
- Deploy Missile Defenses
First, the perfidiousness of whatever steps the U.S. government or American companies
may have taken to enhance — with or without permission, intentionally or unintentionally —
China’s ballistic missile capabilities is greatly compounded by the Clinton
Administration’s
determination to leave the Nation undefended against a missile attack. In fact, even as
revelations about Chinagate began to hemorrhage forth, the Clinton-Gore team prevailed upon 41
Senators to filibuster bipartisan legislation — co-sponsored by Republican Thad
Cochran of
Mississippi and Democrat Daniel Inouye of Hawaii — that would make it the
policy of the United
States to deploy effective national missile defenses as soon as technologically possible.
How hollow rings the principal argument of the Democratic Senators who ran interference for
the
Administration: “There is no threat — we will have at least three years of warning before it
materializes.” Remember that two-and-a-half years ago, a senior People’s Liberation
Army
officer signaled that Beijing was willing to attack Los Angeles if the U.S. interfered with the
Chinese campaign of intimidation against Taiwan. Is a more clear-cut
“warning” needed —
or likely to be forthcoming?
In short, there is no more time to waste. The need for deployed missile defenses is evident to
all
but those willing to see it further exacerbated. The United States must get on at once
with the
task of adapting the Navy’s AEGIS fleet air defense system to provide the sort of capability
that would most quickly and at least cost begin providing effective anti-missile protection
against Chinese missiles — both for our forces and friends overseas and for our people
here at
home.(4)
- Restore National Security Export Controls
We need learn nothing more about the extent to which the Clinton Administration has
subordinated national security interests to considerations of trade with China (and its ilk) to draw
a second lesson: The Nation’s export control processes need to be tightened up and the
ability restored to the Defense and State Departments to veto commercial transactions that
threaten those interests.
It is not enough, however, to give the national security agencies the authority to block sales of
militarily-relevant (or “dual-use”) technology. The staff of those agencies must be
willing, as
well as able, to do so.
Unfortunately, under the Clinton Administration, the senior Defense Department
leadership
has all too often been part of the problem when it comes to dual-use technology transfers to
China. For example, former Secretary of Defense William Perry
created and co-chaired a so-called “Defense Conversion Commission” with his Chinese
counterpart. This entity served as a
mechanism for facilitating the sale of many American strategic technologies to the People’s
Liberation Army. And Mitch Wallerstein, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of
Defense
responsible for evaluating such transfers, spent much of his professional life prior to his arrival at
the Pentagon arguing for the evisceration of national security-minded export control regimes.
Given such policy predilections in the Defense Department’s hierarchy, is it any wonder that
such
technologies as a factory full of machine tools used to manufacture F-15s and
B-1 bombers,
advanced U.S. jet engines suitable for powering Chinese long-range cruise
missiles and
supercomputers valuable to the PRC’s nuclear weapons program have been
approved for sale to
China with the Pentagon’s blessing? Should we take any comfort from the claim that
the Defense
Department approved the presidential waiver necessary to launch a Loral satellite aboard Beijing’s
Long March rocket — notwithstanding that agency’s reported conclusion that the company had
harmed national security by helping China’s ballistic missile program?
- Create a Robust U.S. Space-Launch Industry
Finally, it is already evident that the United States can no longer afford to deny itself a
robust commercial space-launch industry, then rationalize risking assistance to a potential
adversary’s missile program on the grounds that — given inadequate domestic capacity — their
launch services must be employed. The U.S. has at hand reusable launch technology that
could, if aggressively exploited, rapidly give this country the world’s most reliable and least
expensive space launch capability.
The beauty of such an approach — based upon the vertical launch/vertical landing technology
pioneered a few years ago under the Pentagon’s DC-X program — is that it would also afford the
Defense Department a Military Space Plane capable of operating from austere pads, with minimal
crews, short turn-arounds and maximal flexibility. Both the national security and the country’s
economic vitality in the 21st Century will depend critically upon such a robust
domestic space
launch capacity. The Administration’s decisions to kill the DC-X and to veto the
follow-on
Military Space Plane program must be reversed at once.
The Bottom Line
These lessons — and the corrective measures taken in response to them — can help deny the
present government in Beijing the strategic power and financial life-support required to thwart the
Chinese people’s desire for political liberties (so evident in Hong Kong’s voting this weekend), as
well as for economic opportunity. Such steps may also make it possible to avoid the future
U.S.-China conflict portended — and enabled — by the Clinton policies of appeasement now being
laid
bare by the “Chinagate” scandal.
– 30 –
1. The Center for Security Policy was honored to present
Representative Cox its 1997 ‘Keeper of
the Flame’ Award in October of last year. For excerpts of the Congressman’s stirring remarks
about U.S. policy toward China on that occasion, see Chris Cox: Keeper of the
Flame (No. 97-P
162, 31 October 1997).
2. The first of these hearings occurred last week when the Senate
Governmental Affairs
Committee’s Subcommittee on International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services took
powerful testimony about the technology nexus between space launch activities and ballistic
missile programs from two members of the Center’s Board of Advisors, Drs. William
Graham
(former Science Advisor to Presidents Reagan and Bush) and William Schneider
(former Under
Secretary of State).
3. For more about the Cochran-Inouye bill, see the Center’s
Decision Brief entitled Senate
Should Vote to Defend America ‘As Soon As Technologically Possible’ (
1998).
4. For more on the AEGIS option, see the blue-ribbon commission
report (“Team B Study”)
sponsored by the Heritage Foundation. It can be accessed via the World
Wide Web at the following
address:
g/heritage/nationalsecurity/teamb. Please note that if you “click” on
Heritage’s site, you will leave the Center for Security Policy’s site.
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