WELCOME TO THE N.S.C., DR. HALPERIN: WILL YOU GIVE DEMOCRACY THE SHAFT ELSEWHERE — AS HAS BEEN DONE IN VIETNAM?

(Washington, D.C.): At a Washington
forum last night, a senior National
Security Council official announced that
Dr. Morton Halperin would be finding work
in the Clinton Administration, after all.
Unable to secure Senate advice and
consent to become the Assistant Secretary
of Defense for Democracy and Peacekeeping
because of serious concerns about his
judgment and record with respect to both
issues, Halperin will apparently be put
in charge of at least one of them in the
White House: According to NSC Staff
Director Nancy Soderberg, Halperin
will become a Special Assistant
to the President and the National
Security Council’s Senior Director for
Democracy.

It is fitting that this unmistakable
expression of contempt by the Clinton
Administration for the Senate and for the
promotion of genuine democracy
should be announced on the same day Mr.
Clinton lifted the trade embargo against
communist Vietnam. (In fact, in her
remarks last night Ms. Soderberg, a
former member of Senator Ted Kennedy’s
staff, coupled the Halperin revelation
with a bit of crowing about the
President’s decision concerning the
embargo taken earlier in the day.)

After all, the President’s willingness
to provide economic life-support to the
communist regime in Hanoi — in the face
of its relentless, systematic and often
brutal repression of basic human rights
and political freedoms in Vietnam —
makes one thing abundantly clear: Mr.
Clinton’s commitment to real
democracy, like so much else, is a
rhetorical one. To be sure, the rhetoric
is often lofty; in the end, however, it
is empty.

‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’

This should be no surprise, given the
influence exerted on him by the likes of
Morton Halperin, Strobe Talbott, Anthony
Lake and Peter Tarnoff. These
individuals, and many others in the
Clinton Administration, consistently
misunderstood the greatest struggle for
democracy in history — the Cold War.
Many of them routinely expressed sympathy
for freedom’s enemies in Moscow, Havana,
Warsaw, Managua, Luanda, Kabul, Phnom
Penh and, of course, Hanoi. Even
if Mr. Clinton himself had a more
reliable moral compass, he would be
unlikely to stay on course in defining
American support for democracy, given the
wayward instincts of those to whom he has
entrusted responsibility for
policy-making in this area.

The same mindset that prompted the
Administration to prop up the Vietnamese
communists is at work elsewhere, with no
less ominous implications for democracy.
Thanks to the Clinton team:

• Communist North Korea is
  being offered economic and
  political ties in exchange for
  agreeing to severely limited —
  and utterly ineffectual —
  inspections of some of
  its nuclear-related facilities.
  As with Hanoi, such U.S.
  concessions to Pyongyang will
  perpetuate a brutal totalitarian
  regime, deferring perhaps
  indefinitely the realization
  of democracy there. What is more,
  North Korea’s unchecked sales of
  ballistic missiles and other
  military hardware to Iran and
  Syria, among other pariah states,
  is likely to endanger democracy
  elsewhere (notably, in Israel).
• In the name of a vague
  and thus far dangerously futile
  “peace process,” two of
  the Middle East’s most notorious
  despots are gaining political and
  other benefits from the United
  States. Hafez Assad of
  Syria and the PLO’s autocratic
  leader, Yaser Arafat, nonetheless
  continue to exhibit negligible
  interest in yielding absolute
  control over their respective
  constituencies — even as they
  persist in behavior that is
  inimical to genuine peace in the
  region.
• Gerry Adams, the
  political front-man for the
  terrorist Irish Republican Army
  is afforded a bully pulpit in
  this country from which to
  legitimate his anti-democratic
  organization and revile Britain.
  As a result of this propaganda
  field day, serious new strains
  have developed in the U.S.-UK
  “special relationship”
  — traditionally, America’s most
  important strategic alliance in
  the defense of freedom.
• China is receiving
  invaluable U.S. technological
  assistance in its effort to
  modernize the offensive potential
  of its armed forces even as the
  United States maintains the $20
  billion trade deficit that helps
  underwrite such a military
  build-up.⁽¹⁾
  Apart from seeking cosmetic
  changes in Beijing’s odious human
  rights record, the Administration
  seems indifferent to, if not
  actually willing to reward,
  the continuing lack of democratic
  reform in China. Notwithstanding
  current and future posturing on
  the question, it is a sure bet
  that Mr. Clinton will ultimately
  overlook the PRC’s deplorable
  disregard for human rights and
  grant the Chinese a renewal of
  Most Favored Nation status.
• The unravelling of
  democratic and free market change
  in Russia also appears to be
  getting the
  “see-no-evil”
  treatment. Russian
  reformers correctly charge Strobe
  Talbott and the Clinton
  Administration with
  “stabbing us in the
  back.” Matters will get
  worse as the so-called centrists
  — read, warmed-over Soviet
  apparatchiks — are embraced by
  this White House despite their
  clear determination to undo
  market and pluralistic political
  reforms.
• Fragile democracies in
  Eastern Europe and the
  “near-abroad” are being
  hung out to dry as the
  Administration effectively
  accommodates Russian demands to
  retain a sphere of influence in
  the region. Moscow’s
  veto of NATO membership for the
  Visegrad nations can only
  embolden the enemies of freedom
  who seek to do in Poland, Hungary
  and elsewhere what their
  counterparts in Russia are doing
  — namely, to exploit economic
  dislocation so as to facilitate a
  return to power.
• Serbia’s quintessential
  anti-democrat, Slobodan
  Milosevic, continues to
  consolidate his control over a
  Greater Serbia via brutal
  “ethnic cleansing.”
  The lack of Western military
  responses to these Mussolini-like
  predations, to say nothing of
  reports that regular Yugoslav
  army forces are now being
  introduced into the war in
  Bosnia, merely serves to invite
  further intensification of the
  conflict there. It also emboldens
  others in the region — and
  beyond — who recognize the
  utility of playing the ethnic
  card to undermine and ultimately
  destroy democratic states.

Life-Support for Castro,
Too?

Interestingly, in the immediate run-up
to President Clinton’s announcement
ending the trade embargo against Vietnam,
CNN broadcasted a report
revealing that unnamed NSC officials want
next to lift the embargo on Fidel
Castro’s Cuba. A recently
concluded congressional staff trip to
Havana may have been the first step
toward repeating the successful Vietnam
strategy quarterbacked by Sen. John Kerry
(D-MA) and utilizing congressional and
business delegations to conjure up
political support for new U.S.
concessions.⁽²⁾

If the same cynical calculus is
reached by White House operatives that
led them to ignore the steadfast
opposition of POW families, veterans
organizations and Vietnamese-Americans to
lifting the embargo on Vietnam — namely
that key constituencies can be
disregarded without undue political costs
— it is predictable that the
Administration’s democracy mavens will
gladly do for Havana what they have just
done for Hanoi.

The Bottom Line

As things stand now, the legacy of the
Clinton Administration is likely to be
that — even as it and its friends have
sought to rewrite the history of the Cold
War — the fruits of that epic struggle
for freedom and democracy will be largely
squandered around the globe. Those who
would have lost the Cold War can be
forgiven for trying to downplay their
past mistakes. One might overlook as well
the laughable efforts by the likes of
Morton Halperin, Strobe Talbott and Tony
Lake to deprecate the accomplishments of
those, such as Ronald Reagan, who
rejected their advice and were proved
right.

What is utterly unacceptable,
however, is that such individuals
continue to pay lip service to the
importance of promoting democracy — and
are entrusted with accomplishing it on
behalf of the U.S. government — at the
same moment that they are engaged in
policies antithetical to that objective.
In fact, the Administration is engaged
around the globe in actions that will
prevent democratic institutions from
being established where they do not now
exist and endangering them in many places
where they have begun to take root.

President Clinton will ultimately have
the responsibility for the terrible
consequences sure to flow from his dismal
personnel choices and misbegotten
security policies. This will be the more
pointed in light of his apt criticism of
President Bush in the 1992 campaign:

“From the Baltics to Beijing,
from Sarajevo to South Africa, time
after time, George Bush has sided
with the status quo rather
than democratic change — with
familiar tyrants rather than those
who would overthrow them — and with
the old geography of repression
rather than a new map of
freedom.”

It is, however, the people of the
United States — and their counterparts
elsewhere who aspire to freedom and
democracy — who will have to pay the
price for these fresh, and tragic,
mistakes.

– 30 –

1. See the Center
for Security Policy’s recent Decision
Brief entitled, ‘Inquiring
Minds Want to Know: Does Bill Perry Have
What It Takes to Make Sound Defense
Policy? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_13″>No. 94-D 13, 2
February 1994).

2. The Center has
obtained a secret video of Sen. Kerry
meeting in Hanoi in December 1992 with
Vietnam’s communist president and former
minister of defense Le Duc Anh. In it,
the Vietnam veteran and former anti-war
activist told his host that “All we
need to lift the trade embargo is to show
the American people that there is a process“
for resolving the POW-MIA accounting — not
real results as President-elect
Clinton once promised. He promised that,
“I can assure you that we will not
make public anything embarrassing to your
government.”