On The Right - Pat Buchanan's China policy; Allied Pilots ordered to pay for sick-out; debate over Columbine High School shootings - Column

National Review, May 31, 1999 by William F. Buckley Jr.

True Grit NEW YORK, APRIL 20

Whatever one's reservations about Pat Buchanan-for-President, you've got to acknowledge the true grit of his rhetoric. One of these days, because that's the way world leaders are treated, the Clinton Library will publish in three volumes (four?) the foreign-policy pronouncements of William Jefferson. Backwards reels the mind in contemplation of this mass of contradictions and ambiguities; pity the poor political-science grad students who will have to go through it.

Here is the way Pat Buchanan handles foreign policy.

The setting, San Francisco's Commonwealth Club, the most active forum in the United States, which on a typical day sponsors a dozen events. The subject? "A Time for Truth About China." Here we go, and with only an occasional interruption, the objective here being stylistic rather than polemical:

-Buchanan says he doesn't want war with China or even confrontation, and reminds the audience he was with Nixon when the China curtains parted in 1972.

-But we are dealing with a country that ten years ago, fearing such disestablishment as was going on in Eastern Europe and Russia, decided to move in the tanks.

-But although it's correct to engage China, it's not correct to embrace its government as friend and partner given that it is an expansionist power hostile to our ideals. (Question: Expansionist power? Taiwan and Tibet don't count because China considers them as we would Hawaii and Alaska.)

-In the last decade we have sought to mollify China. Since 1990, Peking has been allowed to run up a trade surplus of $274 billion with the U.S. And the U.S. has supported World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans and has given China access to our supercomputers.

-Meanwhile, we have cut our defense spending, as a percentage of GNP, in half.

-China has meanwhile sold missiles to Iran and nuclear technology to Pakistan and occupied Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands "astride" Japan's oil lifeline.

-China has fired missiles towards Taiwan intending intimidation.

-It has developed 18 ICBMs, 13 of them aimed at the U.S.

-China proceeds with cultural genocide against Christians, and this is inconsistent with business-as-usual.

-Clinton was a lamb when he visited China but now calls for condemning its human-rights policies in the U.N.

-China has expanded to 200 the missiles targeted on Taiwan. Forty-five missiles (Buchanan quotes Atlantic Monthly writer Paul Bracken) are all that is needed to paralyze Taiwan and threaten U.S. bases in Asia.

-China is clearly preparing for another crisis to force Taiwan back to the embrace of the Motherland. If the U.S. attempted to intervene, China "intends" to put at risk every U.S. warship and base between the Asian coast and Guam.

-We have been making policy on the basis of myths, the first of them that trade with China will dulcify Peking policy. That doesn't work: There was plenty of trade between North and South during our Civil War.

-The national greed for business in China is deluded. We sell more to "tiny Singapore." What do we sell to China, other than aircraft? Cotton, live animals, starches, fibers, meat, cereals, wood pulp, raw hides, skins, oil seeds, animal and vegetable fat, and fertilizer.

And then: "Now, I understand what China is doing; what I don't understand is what America is doing. U.S. trade policy today is impossible to defend in terms of U.S. strategic interests."

So what should we do? "Until China closes its concentration camps, stops coercive abortions, and ceases its persecution of Christians, Tibetans, and dissidents, Congress should suspend Most Favored Nation status and impose on all Chinese imports the same taxes China imposes on goods from the U.S.A." We should block the transfer of any new high- tech military technology, veto new loans to China from the World Bank, reject the admission of China to the World Trade Organization, and work for the admission of Taiwan.

We should rebuild our navy, develop our anti-missile technology, and declare that China's veto will not prevent us from giving that technology to Taiwan. If China doesn't halt its own missile buildup, we should initiate an embargo, which "would bring an instant currency and economic collapse in China."

The peroration was . . . full-throated.

There are, of course, reservations. If imports from China were forbidden, we'd have the equivalent of a $57 billion levy on American consumers. A central problem with our Taiwan policy is that Taiwan also insists it is a part of mainland China. A policy of no trade with countries in which human rights are violated means, e.g., no further trade with Singapore.

But it is 100-proof pleasure to hear a presidential candidate speak out so plainly on foreign policy questions.

The Pilots Are Really Sick NEW YORK, APRIL 16

The judge who ruled against the Allied Pilots Association was very weepy about where the dictates of his conscience took him. "What my oath requires me to do makes me sick to my stomach because a lot of decent men and women pilots are going to be hurt by this." Thus Judge Joe Kendall of Dallas on his ruling that American Airline pilots should come up with $46 million to reimburse the airline for damages done in ten days last February when, lo! they all got a mysterious illness that kept them from work.