NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
February 23, 2002
Unpleasantness
That you can't win if you don't play and you can't win every day are two of the profundities known to Olympic competitors and the Bush administration. For the latter it was not a great week in the Far East or Europe or Afghanistan for that matter -- where the Pentagon is beginning to admit mistakes as the dispositions of warlords become more confusing; and where Hamid Karzai's knock-together government shows internal stresses increasingly acute. "That's enough peace now back to the power struggle is the message coming from Mr. Karzai's Pashtun allies, and each ethnic faction within the Northern Alliance, as they trade charges about mysterious deaths (such as that of Abdul Rahman, who was the civil aviation minister). Afghanistan is, after all, ungovernable, and you can only try. The visit of President George W. Bush to Japan, South Korea, and mainland China, went outwardly smoothly. But in both Seoul and Beijing, there were important setbacks. For the first time, Mr. Bush mysteriously wimped out" on an important threat. Under pressure not to collapse the little that is left of the South Korean president Kim Dae-jung's Sunshine policy of detente with the North and I believe on the basis of an understanding with China Mr. Bush stated that the U.S. has no intention of making an armed attack on the Northern regime. That he had in fact no such intention goes almost without saying. But having included North Korea in his fightin' words about "the axis of evil" he was now giving some of the show away. My understanding of the Chinese understanding is that the Chinese promised to help extract concessions from Chairman Kim Jong-il or whomever holds his strings. The Chinese are the only external power with the slightest influence over North Korean behaviour and it may have seemed worth a rhetorical concession to solicit their help. What the U.S. wants for starters is shipments of missiles and of technology and parts for weapons of mass destruction to be stopped from North Korea to Iran and all other irresponsible regimes in the Middle East. But the vagueness and tepidity of the subsequent Chinese undertaking might help to explain Mr. Bush's apparent discomfort at Thursday night's state banquet in Beijing. Faced with a charm offensive by President Jiang Zemin who danced with both Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice between courses and then volunteered his parody of an Italian tenor singing O Sole Mio Mr. Bush declined either to dance with or sing to anyone in return. Moreover Mr. Jiang was denied the barbecue invitation to Crawford Texas for which he was almost publicly angling. You may think these are small matters but not in affairs of state. In case anyone hasn't noticed yet the style of Mr. Bush's administration is coat-and-tie. The president is consciously trying to overcome the impressions left by both his saxophone-swinging predecessor and the absurdly buoyant Madeleine Albright former secretary of state. He tells his aides they will not look chummy with the representatives of any unelected regime. (The same kind of cordial stiffness is still shown with President Musharraf of Pakistan and Vladimir Putin only got as far as Crawford because he was actually voted in.) Mr. Bush was deadly serious in his remarks to the students at Tsinghua University about human rights and religious freedom stressing to them as he is said to have done with President Jiang privately that I, for instance, am a religious believer . He was extremely pointed in quoting from Chinese textbooks which give defamatory accounts of the United States. And in final statements and communiques he departed from standard diplomatic practice by making little attempt to paper over differences between the sides. It was interesting that Mr. Bush decided to make his principal statement of the tour not Reagan-style at the North Korean border but in his remarks to the university students. He was telling them and through them the large Chinese live TV audience that his State Department went to some length to demand that "we are what we are". The chief disappointment in Beijing was the lack of any Chinese undertaking to reduce let alone stop its own large shipments of arms to Iran and long-range missiles to Pakistan. Intra-official talks were frosty and the Americans left without feeling that the Chinese fully appreciated the likelihood of further U.S. sanctions against Chinese companies and individuals participating in this trade. For their part the Chinese seem to be playing for time as they prepare for the leadership succession from Mr. Jiang to Hu Jintao. They are meanwhile loathe to rock or even to paddle any of their boats. In contrast with the Europeans who have no boats but are rocking wildly. I have been quite struck in the last several weeks speaking to people within the Bush administration by their assessment of diplomacy on the Western front. All expect relations with continental Europe and even with Canada to deteriorate seriously over the coming months or even years. The amount of outrage even in the placid State Department for what they think is European hypocrisy; and for anti-American remarks such as those made by Chris Patten on behalf of the European Union or by the French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine; or even for what our own prime minister Jean Chretien said about Iraq in Moscow -- is startling. All three of these statesmen have since backpedalled; Mr. Patten actually apologizing for going over the top in his remarks about Guantanamo Bay; M. Vedrine calling the American editor of the Paris Herald-Tribune around for a chat to explain that words like "simplistic" aren't really meant to be insulting; and Mr. Chretien his usual bundle of arguably canny incoherence. Notwithstanding my sense is that the Bush administration is expecting to receive a great deal of heat and is putting on layers of asbestos. "I don't think they have made very accurate calculations of the cost of sacrificing American goodwill said one such insider of the trio named above. We are smoldering like that fire was under the WTC said another, and they just don't get it." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top