| NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Hardly a day passes anymore without a headline somewhere trumpeting a story of how the United States, as the world's sole superpower, keeps throwing its weight around to the detriment of all those nations on the receiving end of American bullying. Nothing could be further from the truth. U.S. allies are indeed suffering from neglect. But everywhere else you look, some dictator or second-tier power is pulling Bill Clinton's chain. The situation is somewhat different with China. There, despite strains in the U.S.-Sino relationship, Washington and Beijing are operating very much in sync these days. Yet the overall picture is one of endemic U.S. weakness.
Nowhere has the picture of superpower impotence been sharper than in Kosovo, when the NATO allies stood by helplessly as Russian soldiers muscled their way into the province. America of old may have won the Cold War, but a few weeks ago it didn't even have the courage to confront a ragtag remnant of the Soviet army or the enfeebled government that sent them. U.S. officials only made a bad situation worse by pretending that the Russian invaders had a right to be there. In Asia, meanwhile, North Korea has rightly interpreted six years of kid-glove handling by the Clinton administration as a green light for ballistic missile tests without much fear of punishment. The most dramatic example of how overrated America's supposedly invincible superpower status is can be seen today around Taiwan. By law at least, the United States is obliged to defend Taiwan and in a uni-hegemony world you'd think that would be ample deterrence. Instead, we have China openly threatening to 'use force' against the island if it sees fit, and accompanying that threat with what Beijing wants us to believe are ominously serious military exercises. In case anyone doesn't get the message, China chose last week to announce to the world that it has neutron bombs - the ideal weapon for obliterating the pesky people on Taiwan with radioactive fallout that won't knock down any valuable real estate. What does the Clinton administration have to say about all this? Well, it is saying almost the same things Beijing is; and even when U.S. officials aren't echoing Beijing's line they are in effect reinforcing it. You might call it a case of one hand whitewashing the other. Take Taiwan. Whose fault is it that China is saber rattling at Taiwan, and shaking markets across Asia? Not China , it would seem, which is merely reacting to provocative remarks by Taiwan's President Lee Teng-hui to the effect that the island can't negotiate successfully with Beijing unless the two sides meet each other on a equal, state-like level. While Washington has not exonerated China , it has had no unkind words for Beijing either. In a gesture that almost certainly was meant to underline official sentiment, President Clinton rang Chinese President Jiang Zemin this weekend to assure him that the U.S. fully backs Beijing's One- China policy. It is becoming increasingly clear that President Lee spoke when and how he did because Taipei has been under heavy-duty pressure from the U.S. - applied chiefly by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Stanley Roth - to begin discussing reunification with Beijing. The question of how Taipei can hope to negotiate anything from a position of diplomatic nothingness does not seem to concern Mr. Roth or his masters. With hindsight, in fact, it would appear that Mr. Clinton's decision last year to get 100% behind China 's assertion of absolute sovereignty over Taiwan was intended to construct just such a box around Taipei. President Lee may have knocked down one wall 11 days ago, but he's not out of the box. Perhaps the most alarming example of mutual massaging can be found in Sino-U.S. reactions to the Cox report prepared by the U.S. Congress, which details China 's theft or acquisition by other unsavory means of American nuclear and military technology over the years. Predictably, when Beijing released its evaluation of the Cox report last week, the line was that the whole thing is a pack of lies. What wasn't available on the Internet, China insists, Chinese scientists invented all on their own, including the neutron bomb. As suspect as Beijing's version of the story may be, you won't find anyone in the Clinton administration rushing to challenge China 's account. In fact, China 's whitewash is splashing over some things the U.S. administration also would prefer to obscure. The key unanswered question from the Cox report is why the Clinton administration ignored, or at least tried to hide, evidence of Chinese espionage when it came to light three years ago. So any sand Beijing can kick into the eyes of U.S. congressmen and others about the Cox report helps the Clintonites too. But even that doesn't explain the mind-boggling comments of U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen when he was asked about the implications of the Cox report and Chinese espionage for U.S. security. China 's neutron bomb, a weapon so vile that the U.S. decided not to deploy it? Not news, said a blase Secretary Cohen, and what's the difference if they built it or stole it. China 's increasingly sophisticated nuclear arsenal? Oh, we already know China has nuclear weapons, Mr. Cohen pooh-poohed. That's not the problem. What we should worry about is other countries that want to develop or get nuclear weapons. Strange talk, coming from America's defense chief and about a nation known to be an energetic marketer of advanced weapons to rogue states. So strange, and yet so typical in a way, that a group of four American defense and foreign policy heavyweights - two Democrats and two Republicans - are proposing to help sort out the disarray. In a statement about to be issued by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, William Perry, Caspar Weinberger, Richard Perle and Sam Nunn call upon the U.S. Congress and President Clinton to establish a 'B Team' to review Washington's policy options toward China. It is hard to disagree with the idea that the United States needs to do some serious thinking about China. Unfortunately, what looks like honest confusion to some observers is appearing more and more like something instead calculated to ignore honest advice. Dow Jones News Service (Copyright (c) 1999, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.) |
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