Page 3 of 5 OBAMA, CHANGE AND CHINA, Part 2 A dangerous balance
By Henry C K Liu Part 1:
The song stays the same
advocacy of action, requiring the government to prove such advocacy in each
instance rather than presenting evidence generally about the Party.
Additionally, the court found the evidence insufficient to link five of the
defendants to advocacy of action, but sufficient with regard to the other nine.
The accusation was that "they conspired ... to organize as the Communist Party
and willfully to advocate and teach the principles of Marxism-Leninism", which
was equated with meaning "overthrowing and destroying the government of the
United States by force and violence" at some unspecified future time.
Still, one would be hard put to find any reference to the
government of the United States in any original texts of "Marxism-Leninism" any
more than one could find it in the Holy Bible.
On February 9, 1950, Senator McCarthy gave a Lincoln Day speech to the
Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, waving a piece of paper
that he claimed contained a list of 205 known communists working for the State
Department. The Korean War broke out four months later in June 25, 1950. The
accusation immediately attracted national media attention in a heightened
incendiary anti-communist atmosphere.
As a response, the Senate created the Tydings Committee to investigate
McCarthy's charges. After extensive hearings, the committee concluded in its
final report that those accused on McCarthy's list, including many China
experts such as Owen Lattimore, John Patton Davies Jr, John Stewart Service,
John Carter Vincent and Phillip Jessup, were not communists. But the report was
attacked by McCarthy as partisan whitewashing and failed to receive official
acceptance by the whole Senate even after three voting tries. All of the
accused were thereafter removed by government and blacklisted for academic
employment.
Robert McNamara, defense secretary under presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon B
Johnson, attributed the Vietnam debacle to the thorough purge of China experts
by McCarthyism. He wrote in 1995: "The irony of this gap - Asian experts - was
that it existed largely because the top East Asian and China experts in the
State Department - John Patton Davies Jr, John Stewart Service and John Carter
Vincent - had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without
men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we - certainly I -
badly misread China's objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a
drive for regional hegemony."
McCarthy and Kennedy
Being of Irish Catholic roots, McCarthy enjoyed close links with the powerful
Irish Kennedy clan, which commanded prominent visibility among US Catholics.
McCarthy became a close friend of Joseph P Kennedy, an anti-Communist zealot
typical of new money in US society, and was a frequent guest at the Kennedy
compound in Hyannis Port, reportedly dated two of Kennedy's daughters, Patricia
and Eunice, and was godfather to Robert F Kennedy's firstborn, Kathleen. Young
Robert F was tapped by McCarthy as a counsel for his anti-communist
investigatory witch-hunting Senate Committee, working along side the brilliant
and infamous Roy Cohn, who had been an important member of the prosecution team
for the spy trial of Julius and Ethal Resenbergs. Conservative Jews in the US
during the Cold War were eager to prove their loyalty to America and to counter
the anti-semantic image of communism as a Jewish conspiracy by their energetic
persecution of the Jewish left.
Joseph P used his vast national network of contacts to build support for
McCarthy among Catholic voters and to raise contributions for McCarthy's
campaigns. He had presidential plans for his sons and saw anti-communism as
natural political opening in the 1950s. John F Kennedy served in the Senate
with McCarthy from 1953 until McCarthy's death in 1957 without once criticizing
him because "Hell, half my voters in Massachusetts look on McCarthy as a hero",
according to Kennedy historian Arthur Schlesinger.
The controversial conviction of senior State Department official and
establishment figure Alger Hiss gave popular credence to anti-communist claims
that the New Deal had been tainted with communist sympathizers if not outright
car-carrying party members, and that US foreign policy, particularly on China,
had been compromised by communists under Democratic administrations. The
blue-blooded effete establishment with its noblesse oblige, traditionally
resented by the parvenus and nouveau riches, became the convenient targets of
working-class anti-communism all through the Cold War.
Even General George C Marshall, war hero, secretary of state under Truman and
Nobel Peace Prize winner for the Marshall Plan, who had been sent to China to
avert a pending civil war by trying to broker a coalition government between
the communists and the nationalists, was attacked by McCarthy of having blocked
an imminent Chinese Nationalist military victory over communist forces.
Historians have since recognized the fact that communist victory in China had
been fundamentally due to the political responsiveness of the CCP rather than
military superiority. Nevertheless, in 1952, Dwight D Eisenhower, while
campaigning for president, denounced the Truman administration's failures in
Korea, campaigned alongside McCarthy, and refused to defend Marshall's foreign
policies or personal integrity.
The anti-China ideological bias of the Democrats
All Democrat administrations since Truman, from Kennedy to Johnson, to Carter
and to Bill Clinton, had been on the defensive against charges of being "soft"
on communism. During the 2008 primaries, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
showed similar preemptive defensive postures on China, the only communist
nation of consequence after the Cold War.
In his 1960 presidential campaign, Senator John F Kennedy sent a message to the
conservative Chinese-American Businessmen's Committee meeting in Chicago, part
of the China Lobby: "In the words of our Democratic platform, 'we reaffirm our
pledge of determined opposition to the present admission of Communist China to
the United Nations' - a pledge we have made both to the people of the United
States, and to the people of China."
In his inaugural address on January 20, 1961, Kennedy proclaimed: "Let every
nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price,
bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in
order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." That policy promptly
led the US into the Vietnam War, which ended up changing US political culture
more than assuring the survival and the success of liberty in the world.
As president, Kennedy set a policy that kept China out of the United Nations,
thereby greatly weakened the effectiveness of the world organization to keep
peace around the world for 12 years. US foreign policy under Kennedy was driven
by a gravely flawed Domino Theory about the spread of communism, denying the
indigenous, nationalist struggle about Western capitalistic imperialism in Asia
as Chinese communist expansionism.
The Kennedy administration defense secretary placed particular emphasis on
improving military capability to counter wars of national liberation as its
prime anti-communist targets worldwide. As McNamara wrote in his 1962 Defense
Department annual report: "The [enemy] military tactics are those of the
sniper, the ambush, and the raid. The political tactics are terror, extortion,
and assassination." In practical terms, this meant training and equipping US
military personnel, as well as such allies as South Vietnam for counter
insurgency operations. Politically, suspension of civil liberties was deemed as
a necessary tactic to preserve freedom. US policy in Asia deprived itself of
popular support both at home and abroad.
Lyndon B Johnson, who was trapped into continuing Kennedy's hawkish foreign
policy by the tragic circumstances under which he became president, but adding
a Texan macho hubris, allowed a foreign war in a small country in a distant
land that most American never heard off to torpedo his liberal domestic
programs of Great Society that would move American society closer to its
founding ideals.
In Johnson's mind, encouraged by a young strategist named Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Vietnam was a necessary proxy war against an expansionist China to disprove
Chinese claim that the US was a "paper tiger". Calling a macho Texan a paper
tiger was like waving a red flag in front of a raging bull. LBJ said about
Operation Rolling Thunder, a series of sustained air attacks against the
Democratic Republic of North Vietnam, the most intensive blanket bombing
campaign in history: "I didn't just screw Ho Chi Minh, I cut his pecker off."
While antiwar activities were heating up on US college campuses, LBJ proudly
showed the press he received a telegram from the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Gang
offering to go to Vietnam to kill Communists.
Nixon's opening to China
Nixon's policy on China was pragmatic, realistic and long-range. As executed by
Henry Kissinger, the Nixon policy did not try to change China, accepting it as
it was, an emerging power with a communist government and socialist ideology,
but with a long history and deep national pride. The policy recognized that
communist nations of different history and culture are not naturally blessed
with solidarity any more than capitalist countries are.
The so-called communist block was created more by anti-communist hostility
mentality and self-deceiving propaganda in the West rather than by overriding
ideological unity. Kissinger engineered a diplomatic path to normalize US-China
relations in the context of US-Soviet détente. Nixon in one bold stroke put
right decades of wrong Republican policy on China. Tragically, Nixon's
geopolitical opening to China was interrupted by the Watergate scandal. Formal
normalization failed to be concluded in Nixon's second term as agreed to by
both sides and had to be left to Jimmy Carter to complete the process.
Carter's foreign policy in general and China policy of 1977-81 in particular
was engineered by Brzezinski, the Democrats' answer to the brilliant Republican
geopolitical strategist Kissinger, who under Nixon had consistently left
Democratic traditional foreign policy fixations in the ideological dust with
path-opening initiatives of detente and opening to China. Carter's diplomatic
recognition of China was accomplished on the coattails of the Nixon/Kissinger
opening.
Carter unilaterally withdrew the US from the Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan
in 1979 to satisfy a Chinese precondition for diplomatic normalization, as
agreed to by Nixon/Kissinger. But to placate obstinate Congressional
opposition, he put in its place the Taiwan Relations Act. The shift moved US
commitment to defend Taiwan from a bilateral treaty to a more rigid framework
of US domestic law. The Taiwan Relations Act has since become a major obstacle
in further improvement of US-China political relations and a key road block in
resolving the Taiwan question peacefully between parties across the Taiwan
Strait.
Brzezinski and Islamic terrorism
Carter's China policy was dominated by Brzezinski's anti-Soviet fixation.
Brzezinski masterminded the arming of the ujahideen in Afghanistan to
destabilize the Soviet-supported Taliban government to induce Soviet military
intervention. Brzezinski conspired to bring about a Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan to give the rival superpower its own Vietnam War that would
contribute to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But the strategy
unexpectedly created Islamic terrorism that came back to haunt the US in the
form of 2001 9/11 terrorist attacks.
It was a classic "blowback", a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a
since-declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the democratic
nationalist government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran to install the Shah whose
aggressive secularization and Westernization programs led to the successful
Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Blowback, a firefighting
phenomenon, is a political metaphor for the unintended consequences of US
covert geopolitical machination. Brzezinski now is reportedly again advising
the Obama administration on foreign policy, hopefully not with another grand
strategy with blowback consequence.
The China policy of George H W Bush
In 1990, the Republican president George H W Bush was trying to find a new,
meta-Cold War geopolitical rationale for preserving close bilateral ties with
China. Bush tried in vain in one press conference the Kissinger theme of China
as a counterweight to the growing economic power of an increasing unruly Japan,
with whom the US was having economic and trade friction. Ironically, less than
a decade later, China replaced Japan as the America's top interconnected
economy with growing trade friction.
On February 7, 1990, Lawrence Engleburger, undersecretary of state in the Bush
Sr administration, testifying before the Senate
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
