DECLARATION
OF WAR
Kristol
and Kagan rip into Bush from the word go:
"The
profound national humiliation that President Bush has
brought upon the United States may be forgotten temporarily
when the American aircrew, held captive in China as this
magazine goes to press, return home. But when we finish
celebrating, it will be time to assess the damage done,
and the dangers invited, by the administration's behavior."
Readers
of this column know that I am hardly a fan of George W.
Bush, but even I have to ask: The administration's
behavior? But what about the Chinese? It was, after all,
their "behavior" that brought down the spy plane.
Many trace Kristol's vitriol to the Bush-McCain split
in the GOP – and the swift rejection of his application
for a job with the new administration – but that
is less than the half of it. Kristol's real problem with
the Bushies, and with Colin Powell in particular, is ideological.
Kristol and Kagan, as I noted in several previous columns,
have long proclaimed that nothing
less than "world hegemony" (albeit of a "benevolent"
sort) must be the goal of US foreign policy, and it is
little wonder that the diplomatic solution so far pursued
by Team Bush is viewed by them as a sellout. As the anointed
mouthpieces of the Donald Rumsfeld-Paul Wolfowitz-neoconservative
axis within the administration, their withering critique
of the President's handling of the crisis is a public
declaration of war – not only against the President
but against Colin Powell, the man Kristol once urged to
run for President.
AMERICAN
OLYMPUS
In
the world inhabited by Kristol and Kagan, the US spy plane
was on a "routine mission" of eavesdropping on telephone
conversations, intercepting email, and picking up other
electronic communications, when it was rudely interrupted
by Chinese fighter jets. There is some dispute, of course,
about what happened next, but to the ideologues of Imperium
over at the Standard "it doesn't matter." Like
Zeus, lord of the heavens, the US has the unquestionable
right to listen in to the conversation of ordinary mortals,
and, not only to eavesdrop, but to directly intervene
with a thunderbolt or two if and when this divine right
is ever questioned. The Chinese planes, avers the Standard,
were "unusually aggressive" and the cause of the alleged
collision was the "extremely dangerous maneuvers of the
Chinese pilot." But if Chinese reconnaissance planes were
70 miles off the California coast, should the behavior
of American pilots be described as "aggressive" if they
engaged in maneuvers designed to drive the intruders away?
I hope American fighter planes would be aggressive
in warding off such an outrageous and obvious threat –
do I really want Jiang Zemin reading my email?
– but any maneuvering engaged in by them could only
be fairly described as defensive, i.e. responding
to Chinese aggression.
RULES
OF THE ROAD
Is
a double-standard at work here? Not to Kristol and Kagan,
who liken the incident to a run-of-the-mill traffic accident:
"There are common sense rules of the road for how the
game is played. The Chinese pilot was recklessly violating
those rules, like the guy who tailgates two inches off
your bumper going 75 miles an hour. In circumstances such
as these, it doesn't matter who bumps whom. Blame for
the accident falls on the one who deliberately created
such a dangerous situation."
AN
ACCIDENT – OR A PROVOCATION?
Yes,
but what if you've been eavesdropping on the guy's cell-phone
conversations with his mistress, intercepting his mail,
and making obscene phone calls to his rebellious teen-aged
daughter, all the while sitting in your car right outside
his house? Are you then surprised that he comes out after
you, and, after a car chase, corners you on a dead-end
street and hauls your ass out of the drivers seat? Blame
for this "accident" falls on the one who deliberately
created a dangerous provocation – dangerous, most
of all, to himself.
THAT'S
GRATITUDE FOR YOU
In
their consistently absurd attempt to portray the Chinese
as the aggressors in their own sphere of influence –
a mere 70 miles from their shores – Kristol and Kagan
portray this incident as the prelude to an attack on Taiwan.
In the morally and logically inverted world of the Weekly
Standard, those who defend their own shores are the
aggressors, while the poor put-upon crew of the spy plane
was just conducting "routine" business-as-usual. It is,
of course, "routine" for the US to consistently violate
the sovereignty and dignity of other nations: Bill Clinton's
rape of Yugoslavia (and, I hear, a few others) comes immediately
to mind. Oh, those crafty Chinese, who "want the United
States to get out of the South China Sea. Why?" According
to the Standard, it's because they're getting ready
to invade the separatist province of Taiwan. There is,
however, a much simpler explanation, and that is rising
resentment of a foreign policy that considers the Pacific
Ocean an American lake. How anyone could be so ungrateful
as to resent American hegemony, especially when it is
so damn "benevolent," Kristol and Kagan do not want to
understand.
SLAVES
AND MASTERS
In
a day-by-day analysis of the Bush administration's response,
the Standard says that, at first – when Bush
was "visibly angry" – the Bushies seemed to be "holding
firm." It was only when the whole matter was turned over
to Colin Powell that the sellout began. How? By expressing
any sort of "regret" over the death of Wang-Wei, the Chinese
pilot who went down in the collision, Powell was supposedly
engaging in what was understood by "the whole world" as
"a partial capitulation to the Chinese demands for an
apology." Oh horror of horrors, he even "used the word
'regret' twice," and worse, "removed the issue of
blame" by calling the collision a "tragic accident." There
is no tragedy allowed for in the worldview of these proud
self-described "hegemonists" – only victory and defeat,
masters and slaves, superpowers and the completely disempowered.
The former – like the US – are allowed to enforce
a 200-mile defense perimeter, within which all foreign
military aircraft can and will be intercepted, while the
latter – China, and other second, third, and fourth-class
powers – are allowed a meager 12 miles for a thin
ribbon of breathing space. These are the real "rules
of the road."
THE
ORIENTAL MIND
The
amazing argument at the core of the Standard's
jeremiad is the idea that this is all some kind of ritualized
"humiliation" visited on us on account of the peculiar
sadism of the Oriental mind:
"The
broader purpose of the Chinese demand was to inflict upon
the United States a public international humiliation.
This, of course, is the flipside of China's face-conscious
culture. In such a culture, to lose face is not only embarrassing.
It is dangerous. It is a sign of weakness that invites
repeated exploitation by those who have witnessed it."
S&M
AND FOREIGN POLICY
In
describing their caricature of Chinese culture –
and isn't the desire to save "face," otherwise known as
preserving one's dignity, a universal human trait? –
Kristol and Kagan are projecting their own attitudes
onto an entire culture. This sadomasochistic concept of
foreign affairs, which divides the world between the Hegemon
and the hegemonized, resembles nothing so much as Kristol
and Kagan's own widely touted thesis.
CRACKPOTS
But
it wasn't just Powell who was selling out, according to
the Standard. Dubya showed troubling "signs of
cracking" when, in a speech to the American Society of
Newspaper Editors, he declared that "our prayers go out
to the pilot, [and] his family." He also repeated the
"r"-word, regretting that "one of their airplanes has
been lost." If anyone is "cracked," it's Kristol and his
copilot, who seem to believe that simple expressions of
human sympathy are an affront to the cold majesty of American
predominance. To any ordinary human being, such an expression
is reassuring in a leader: it affirms their humanity.
But to the acolytes of the S&M school of foreign policy
it's a worrisome sign of a possibly fatal "weakness."
Yes, the air is pretty rarefied up there on the neoconservative
Olympus, and quite possibly a little too thin.
Taking on themselves the role of Chinese mandarins –
or, at least, their own rendition – Kristol and Kagan
interpret the rules of "face" as they supposedly apply
to international affairs:
"This
defeat and humiliation, as another president once said,
must not stand. Whether or not the American hostages are
released, President Bush and members of Congress must
begin immediately taking steps to repair the damage already
done. It is essential that the Chinese be made to pay
a price for their actions. Angry words and congressional
resolutions of disapproval are now worse than useless.
Unless backed by deeds, they will only confirm Beijing's
perception of American weakness."
NEEDLESS
TO SAY
Nothing
in the Standard's editorial, as far as I can see,
rules out any form of retaliation, including an
outright invasion: by the logic employed here, to rule
anything out would itself be seen as a sign of "weakness"
that will only embolden the Chinese to engage in further
"aggression." Oh no, we don't want war, they aver, but
if we don't begin the cycle of revenge and retaliation
anew – if, in short, we don't restart the cold war,
this time with China as the main antagonist – then
war in "inevitable." "Needless to say," Kristol and Kagan
write, "we do not seek war with China. That is what advocates
of appeasement always say about those who argue for standing
up to an international bully. But it is the appeasers
who wind up leading us into war."
KING
OF THE PLAYGROUND
China,
an "international bully"? Was it China that bombed a pharmaceutical
factory in the Sudan just to get Monica Lewinsky out of
the headlines? Gee, I could've sworn that was Bill
Clinton. Now, I could be wrong, but I don't think those
were Chinese bombs raining down on Belgrade, pulverizing
their own embassy. Again, I'm willing to be corrected,
but I seem to recollect that Bill Clinton had something
to do with all that. Are Chinese soldiers stationed all
over the globe, does the Chinese navy patrol the oceans,
thousands of miles from home: do they unseat and
install the rulers of small countries virtually at will?
Does Beijing enforce crippling "sanctions" on "rogue"
nations, covertly and overtly seeking "hegemony" on every
playground, from Colombia to the Middle East?
REVOLT
OF THE PALEOS
The
neoconservative view of the US as a hegemonic power is
a theme that was widely denigrated on the right, especially
by those rebels against convention who called themselves
"paleoconservatives." The idea that we had to dominate
the world, said their leader, Patrick J. Buchanan, was
an example of "hubris": the US must be "a republic, not
an empire," as he explained in the title of his famous
book. Under the aegis of this post-cold war insight, Pat
and the paleos raised the banner of a "new Americanism,"
one that sought to reclaim the Old Right's legacy of anti-imperialism
and restore the Old Republic. Buchanan opposed the Gulf
war, the Kosovo war, and hotly contested NATO expansion:
for this he was denounced as an "isolationist," and worse,
and excoriated by Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard
crowd for being an "America-Laster" and born-again "peacenik."
But now that it has come down to China as the preferred
bogeyman in a new cold war, I am sorry to report that
Buchanan has been recruited into the neoconservative ranks.
PAT,
SAY IT AIN'T SO!
As
one of the guests on today's Crossfire [April 10],
Buchanan underwent an on-air conversion – or, rather,
re-conversion – joining with liberal Democratic congressman
Robert Wexler, of Florida recount fame, in an effort to
paint the Bushies as "soft on China." Asked about Kristol's
Weekly Standard piece, Pat answered: "I think Mr.
Kristol's exactly right on that." His usually calm demeanor
gone, in a paroxysm of emotion he declared: "If they smack
you across the face, you smack 'em back twice." But who
smacked whom first? Isn't the specter of US military intrusion
into the South China Sea a slap in the face, not only
to the Chinese but to the Vietnamese and all the nations
of the region? While Taiwan's current government may welcome
US intervention – although there
was a demonstration on Taiwan against the US the other
day – this is hardly a universal sentiment.
THE
TWO BUCHANANS
I
have a theory about Pat Buchanan: there are really two
of him. What really came out on Crossfire, and
on an earlier episode of The McLaughlin Group,
was Buchanan the emoter, as opposed to Buchanan the thinker.
For Buchanan the writer of books is very different from
Buchanan the commentator and public figure. Sitting at
his desk, pounding out A
Republic, Not an Empire, his comprehensive history
of American foreign policy that became a bestseller and
the center of a furious controversy, Buchanan was able
to think clearly and lucidly about the consequences of
our foreign policy of global intervention. But in the
glare of the public spotlight, his reason leaves him,
and emotions take over. How else could he evade the trenchant
question posed by the heroic Novak (who is a consistent
noninterventionist): "Do you really want another
cold war, Pat?" Pat looked flustered. He got angry, and
started bellowing about "Communist China" and how "all
Asia" will see that we have been "humiliated" and are
therefore "the declining power." Earth to Pat Buchanan:
America is not in Asia. Why, then, should we aspire to
be an Asian power, let alone the predominant one?
ABOUT-FACE
What
is really tragic about Buchanan's betrayal – and
that's what it is – is that he knows better. One
has only to consult A Republic, Not an Empire,
an excellent book, to see just how wrongheaded Buchanan
is on this question. As Rep. Drexler sat there demanding
that the US sell Aegis weaponry to Taiwan, and pledge
to defend it, Buchanan said nothing. Yet, in his book,
he wrote that "we should end our role" as "a frontline
fighting state in Asia." While we might sell them weapons,
and become "the arsenal of democracy," he said, "Asian
soldiers, sailors and airmen must do the fighting." Buchanan
also advocated the dissolution of all treaties that require
us to go to war in case of an invasion of Thailand, Australia,
or the Philippines, since "no vital interest of ours is
at risk in these nations." Back in 1990, Buchanan was
saying "America, Come Home," and calling on the US to
get out of Korea. He ran for President – three
times! – on a frankly noninterventionist platform.
I supported him all three times, on that basis. Now, suddenly,
he has done a complete about-face – and, worse still,
apparently sees no inconsistency.
NO
REGRETS
As
Bill Kristol and Pat Buchanan – bitter political
enemies up until this moment – join hands in reviving
the cold war, and ushering in a new era of conservative
militarism and globalism, I can only keep myself from
gagging long enough to note, defiantly, that I will never
regret personally nominating Buchanan for President in
2000 at the Reform Party's Long Beach convention. Back
then, he was an opponent of war and hadn't let his anticapitalist
economic views dominate his thought: he opposed the Kosovo
war, and valiantly opposed the Gulf war, and for that
noninterventionists owe him a great debt. He was willing
to take the heat, and the ensuring smear campaign, because
he is a principled man. But now he has quite simply gone
astray: the foreign policy scholar has given way to –
what?
SULLIVAN'S
SMEAR
Andrew
Sullivan has a viciously inaccurate theory about this,
and that is that Pat is a racist. In a snippy little item
on his website
entitled "A White Knight for Russia," Sullivan points
to Pat's
very interesting piece for the Washington Post
(sharing the "spotlight," on Antiwar.com today, along
with George Szamuely's article on Russia for the [UK]
Observer) and snaps:
"Here
comes Patrick Buchanan to the defense of his Orthodox
Christian brethren. In one of the weirdest op-eds I've
read in a while, Pat argues that in order to fight a war
with the Chinese, we're dumb to antagonize Russia. Forget
the premise for a minute – the rationale is what
matters. "By 2025, Iran will have as much people [as Russia].
Russians today are outnumbered by Chinese 9 to 1. east
of the Aral Sea, the ratio is closer to 50 to 1," Buchanan
argues. His point? Defend the white people!"
IN
DEFENSE OF BUCHANAN
Yet
race is never referred to in Buchanan's piece: it is Sullivan
who comes out with the phrase "yellow peril." But no matter
how much he tries, Sullivan cannot put words in Buchanan's
mouth. He absurdly turns Buchanan's plea against the (quite
possible) "dismemberment" of Russia into a racist screed
against "Persians" (who are nowhere mentioned in the article)
and "those Arabs," as well as Chinese. But Buchanan has
championed the Arab cause, and, on account of it,
was smeared and reviled as an "anti-Semite" by Sullivan's
neocon pals. Citing demographic trends in Russia –
a rapid and radical decrease in the population –
and the rising birthrate of its neighbors doesn't make
you a racist. What makes Sullivan's the weirdest op-ed
I've read in a while – and since my job dictates
that I must read at least several dozen a day, that is
saying a lot – is that, in giving Buchanan
the back of his hand, he is simultaneously telling us
that he really agrees with Pat's "underlying point."
"I see no reason to antagonize Russia," avers Sullivan
– but apparently he sees plenty of reason to antagonize,
and smear, Buchanan.
TWO
WARS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE
Buchanan's
Washington Post piece, "Why Rile Russia?", shows
Buchanan at his best – and at his worst. He is at
his best when presenting the arguments against the bipartisan
interventionist consensus: why extend NATO to the gates
of Moscow, when there are forces in the world far more
dangerous and destabilizing than the nonexistent threat
of Russian revanchism? But the piece begins, and ends,
with an ominous hint of possible war with China. In making
his point, he proffers Lincoln's advice to his secretary
of state: "One war at a time." He asks: "Why are we driving
Russia into the arms of China?" But they don't have to
be driven very far. The Russians, like the Chinese –
and like Buchanan himself – opposed the Kosovo war
as an intolerable and immoral violation of Yugoslavia's
national sovereignty. In the Russian, Chinese, and Buchananite
view, America was the aggressor in that war. Now, suddenly,
Buchanan is switching sides – without realizing that
all the arguments used to demonize China can and will
be used by the War Party to demonize the Russians. The
US will wind up, in the end, with two enemies for the
price of one: this is the kind of "bargain" we can do
without.
HAIL
RUSSIA?
George
Szamuely's
spotlighted article in today's edition of Antiwar.com
makes several excellent points. With his usual lucidity,
Szamuely takes us through the post-cold war history of
Russian foreign policy: he correctly shows how Russia
gave up its empire without firing a shot, and now finds
itself pressed from every side by the US and its client
states in the Caucasus. The US recognition of a terrorist
chieftain of the Chechens is just as outrageous as Szamuely
claims, and Russia's role as the defender of the Serbs
during the Kosovo war was and is admirable. Yet the opening
paragraph of his article is a case study in a certain
kind of wrongheadedness: "As we enter upon a new Cold
War, the time has come for all those who value freedom
to change sides. Today the aggressive, imperial power
bent on imposing its hegemony on the world is the United
States. And the power upholding the sanctity of international
law is Russia."
SWITCHING
SIDES
As
if opposing our own rulers' delusions of empire ever meant
supporting the government of another state! Since Szamuely
is not a libertarian, he has no problem with backing one
government against another. The irony here is that, in
this way, the cold war mentality – of governments
locked in struggle, rather than all governments waging
a constant war on their own people – lives on in
Szamuely. To him, it is merely a matter of switching sides.
Interestingly, after hailing Russia as the great defender
of small nations and the idea of national sovereignty,
he immediately goes into a description of the power behind
the burgeoning Russo-Chinese alliance. But then why in
that case isn't China, and not Russia, the main locus
of opposition to US domination, and, therefore, the champion
of "freedom" in the world? Szamuely may wax nostalgic
for Slobodan Milosevic, that old Commie, but hailing the
Chinese Communist Party as the great defender of "freedom"
would be a little much, even for him. In an odd way, Szamuely,
like Kristol and Buchanan, proves that the spirit of the
cold war, far from having spluttered out, is flaring up
with renewed vigor. If the cold war were truly over, then
it wouldn't be either necessary or possible to switch
sides. But the only "side" that noninterventionists can
take is the side of peace and liberty – one that
necessarily sets them in opposition to most governments
in the world, and makes it impermissible to act as apologists
for any of them. Yugoslavia was victimized by Milosevic
as well as NATO, albeit not in equal measure. To oppose
the perpetual bombing of Iraq is not to support the rule
of Saddam Hussein, just as opposing confrontation and
war with the Chinese is hardly an endorsement of Jiang
Zemin's authoritarian regime.
THE
DOPPELGANGER
China,
like Russia – and Iraq, for that matter – is
a place where political and economic freedom such as exists
in the West has no precedent; it is culturally alien,
and if and when it takes root it will have to be at gunpoint,
as in Japan. Whether or not we are prepared to go that
far to enforce the rule of global "democracy," without
regard for cultural or historical differences, and local
variants, is a question that has bedeviled the post-cold
war West. Whether we are prepared to engage in a land
war in Asia, for the third time, and risk a similar (or
even more disastrous) outcome, is the question we face
when it comes to China. If the red flag of "Communism"
is enough to turn the noninterventionist Buchanan into
a raging bull, snorting with rage and lunging at the Chinese
"enemy," then here is the proof that the Other Buchanan,
the Buchanan doppelganger, Buchanan the Emoter,
has taken over almost completely. For Marxist-Leninism
is hardly the motive force that drives the Chinese; in
any case, they are far too "xenophobic" (i.e. inward-looking
"isolationists") to have ever taken much of an interest
in promoting their own system abroad. Even during the
heyday of Maoism, these alleged "proletarian internationalists"
never seriously tried to export Mao's Thought, and, unlike
the Kremlin, never subsidized or much encouraged Maoist
revolutions in foreign countries. China's territorial
ambitions are rooted in irredentism, that is, the idea
that the old Chinese nation must be reunified – including
not only Taiwan, but the lands lost to the Russians in
Central Asia. Chinese foreign policy theoreticians have
yet to announce their goal of establishing "world hegemony."
Yet Buchanan now finds himself aligned with those Americans
who have.
