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Trade as An Engine for Democracy in China: The Big Lie

(Washington, D.C.): Despite last week’s resolution by the European Parliament opposing Beijing as the site of the 2008 Summer Olympic games, the International Olympic Committee is poised to announce its selection of the PRC. This is due, in no small measure, to the Bush Administration’s deplorable decision to “remain neutral” on the question.

Perhaps, as William Safire suggests in his column in today’s New York Times, the Administration was moved not to oppose the Chinese Olympic bid — despite their persecution of American citizens and U.S.-based scholars, their reckless action against a U.S. military aircraft and detention of its crew, their offensive build-up and threatening behavior towards Taiwan, etc. — because of bad intelligence served up by the CIA.

If so, a presidential announcement that the United States does, in fact, oppose any Olympics in China until the Communist Party’s misrule there is ended should only be the beginning of an overhaul of American policy towards the PRC. Mr. Bush should also adopt the recommendations of a congressionally driven, blue-ribbon commission charged with reviewing the assumptions and results of U.S. intelligence with respect to Communist China. According to a report by Bill Gertz in the Washington Times, this panel has reportedly concluded in a sharply critical classified assessment that a sort of pro-Beijing “group think” is skewing the hiring and products of analysts in the Nation’s intelligence community. Specifically, this mindset appears to be dismissive of the growing body of evidence that China is consciously preparing for a potential conflict with the United States.

There can be no doubt, however, that at least one other misperception is at work in the Bush position on the Olympics, and China more generally — namely, that doing business with the PRC will transform its despotic government. Fortunately, a corrective to this illusion is also at hand, in the form of a cover article by Lawrence Kaplan published in the 9 July edition of The New Republic. Mr. Kaplan’s essay establishes persuasively that increased Western trade with and investment in China is not having any appreciable positive effect on the repressiveness of the Communist regime, its strategic ambitions and/or movement to a full free-market economy.

Excerpts from:

Trade Barrier

By Lawrence F. Kaplan

The New Republic, 9 July 2001

On February 25, business professor and writer Li Shaomin left his home in Hong Kong to visit a friend in the mainland city of Shenzhen. His wife and nine-year-old daughter haven’t heard from him since. That’s because, for four months now, Li has been rotting in a Chinese prison, where he stands accused of spying for Taiwan. Never mind that Li is an American citizen. And never mind that the theme of his writings, published in subversive organs like the U.S.-China Business Council’s China Business Review, is optimism about China’s investment climate. Li, it turns out, proved too optimistic for his own good. In addition to rewarding foreign investors, he believed that China’s economic growth would create, as he put it in a 1999 article, a “rule-based governance system.” But, as Li has since discovered, China’s leaders have other plans.

Will American officials ever make the same discovery? Like Li, Washington’s most influential commentators, politicians, and China hands claim we can rely on the market to transform China. According to this new orthodoxy, what counts is not China’s political choices but rather its economic orientation, particularly its degree of integration into the global economy. The cliche has had a narcotic effect on President Bush, who, nearly every time he’s asked about China, suggests that trade will accomplish the broader aims of American policy.

Bush hasn’t revived Bill Clinton’s recklessly ahistorical claim that the United States can build “peace through trade, investment, and commerce.” He has, however, latched onto another of his predecessor’s high-minded rationales for selling Big Macs to Beijing–namely, that commerce will act, in Clinton’s words, as “a force for change in China, exposing China to our ideas and our ideals.” In this telling, capitalism isn’t merely a necessary precondition for democracy in China. It’s a sufficient one. Or, as Bush puts it, “Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.” As Congress prepares to vote for the last time on renewing China’s normal trading relations (Beijing’s impending entry into the World Trade Organization will put an end to the annual ritual), you’ll be hearing the argument a lot: To promote democracy, the United States needn’t apply more political pressure to China. All we need to do is more business there.

Alas, the historical record isn’t quite so clear. Tolerant cultural traditions, British colonization, a strong civil society, international pressure, American military occupation and political influence–these are just a few of the explanations scholars credit as the source of freedom in various parts of the world. And even when economic conditions do hasten the arrival of democracy, it’s not always obvious which ones. After all, if economic factors can be said to account for democracy’s most dramatic advance–the implosion of the Soviet Union and its Communist satellites–surely the most important factor was economic collapse.

And if not every democracy emerged through capitalism, it’s also true that not every capitalist economy has produced a democratic government. One hundred years ago in Germany and Japan, 30 years ago in countries such as Argentina and Brazil, and today in places like Singapore and Malaysia, capitalist development has buttressed, rather than undermined, authoritarian regimes. And these models are beginning to look a lot more like contemporary China than the more optimistic cases cited by Beijing’s American enthusiasts. In none of these cautionary examples did the free market do the three things businessmen say it always does: weaken the coercive power of the state, create a democratically minded middle class, or expose the populace to liberal ideals from abroad. It isn’t doing them in China either….

China’s market system derives…from a pathological model of economic development. Reeling from the economic devastation of the Mao era, Deng Xiaoping and his fellow party leaders in the late 1970s set China on a course toward “market socialism.” The idea was essentially the same one that guided the New Economic Policy in Soviet Russia 50 years before: a mix of economic liberalization and political repression, which would boost China’s economy without weakening the Communist Party….

The reason isn’t simply that government repression keeps economic freedom from yielding political freedom. It’s that China’s brand of economic reform contains ingredients that hinder–and were consciously devised to hinder–political reform. The most obvious is that, just as the state retains a monopoly on the levers of coercion, it also remains perched atop the commanding heights of China’s economy….

Washington’s celebrations of the democratic potential of the new Chinese “middle class” may be premature. “Entrepreneurs, once condemned as `counterrevolutionaries,’ are now the instruments of reform….[T]his middle class will eventually demand broad acceptance of democratic values,” House Majority Whip Tom DeLay insisted last year. Reading from the same script, President Bush declares that trade with China will “help an entrepreneurial class and a freedom-loving class grow and burgeon and become viable.” Neither DeLay nor Bush, needless to say, invented the theory that middle classes have nothing to lose but their chains….

But middle classes aren’t always socially moderate, and they don’t always oppose the state. Under certain conditions, late modernizing economies breed middle classes that actively oppose political change. In each of these cases, a strong state, not the market, dictates the terms of economic modernization. And, in each case, an emerging entrepreneurial class too weak to govern on its own allies itself — economically and, more importantly, politically — with a reactionary government and against threats to the established order….

In China, which killed off its commercial class in the 1950s, the state had to create a new one. Thus China’s emerging bourgeoisie consists overwhelmingly of state officials, their friends and business partners, and — to the extent they climbed the economic ladder independently — entrepreneurs who rely on connections with the official bureaucracy for their livelihoods. “It is improbable, to say the least,” historian Maurice Meisner writes in The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry Into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, “that a bourgeoisie whose economic fortunes are so dependent on the political fortunes of the Communist state is likely to mount a serious challenge to the authority of that state….the members of China’s new bourgeoisie emerge more as agents of the state than as potential antagonists.”
* * *

Beijing requires foreign investors in many industries to cooperate in joint ventures with Chinese partners, most of whom enjoy close ties to the government. These firms remain insulated mainly in three coastal enclaves and in “special economic zones” set apart from the larger Chinese economy. Moreover, they export a majority of their goods — which is to say, they send most of their “seeds of change” abroad. At the same time, their capital largely substitutes for domestic capital (foreign-owned firms generate half of all Chinese exports), providing a much-needed blood transfusion for China’s rulers, who use it to accumulate reserves of hard currency, meet social welfare obligations, and otherwise strengthen their rule.

Nor is it clear that U.S. companies even want China to change. If anything, growing levels of U.S. investment have created an American interest in maintaining China’s status quo. Hence, far from criticizing China’s rulers, Western captains of industry routinely parade through Beijing singing the praises of the Communist regime (and often inveighing against its detractors), while they admonish America’s leaders to take no action that might upset the exquisite sensibilities of China’s politburo. Business first, democracy later….

…[T]he best measure of whether economic ties to the West have contributed to democratization may be gleaned from China’s human rights record. Colin Powell insists, “Trade with China is not only good economic policy; it is good human rights policy.” Yet, rather than improve that record, the rapid expansion of China’s trade ties to the outside world over the past decade has coincided with a worsening of political repression at home. Beijing launched its latest crackdown on dissent in 1999, and it continues to this day. The government has tortured, “reeducated through labor,” and otherwise persecuted thousands of people for crimes no greater than practicing breathing exercises, peacefully championing reforms, and exercising freedom of expression, association, or worship…Nor is it true that linking trade and human rights will necessarily prove counterproductive. When Congress approved trade sanctions against Beijing in the aftermath of Tiananmen, China’s leaders responded by releasing more than 800 political prisoners, lifting martial law in Beijing, entering into talks with the United States, and even debating among themselves the proper role of human rights. As soon as American pressure eased, so did China’s reciprocal gestures.

Turning a blind eye to Beijing’s depredations may make economic sense. But to pretend we can democratize China by means of economics is, finally, a self-serving conceit. Democracy is a political choice, an act of will. Someone, not something, must create it.

Honesty is the Best Policy: Bush Must Do With The A.B.M. Treaty as He Has Done to the Kyoto Protocol

(Washington, D.C.): In an extraordinary op.ed. article published last week in the Washington Post, syndicated columnist Robert Samuelson breaks ranks with virtually every other journalist on the planet. In contrast with the conventional wisdom that global warming is an imminent catastrophe that can and must be remedied by U.S. adherence to the Kyoto Protocol, Samuelson declares forthrightly that “we don’t know” whether climate change portends, literally, a planetary melt-down. He actually commends President George W. Bush for renouncing the Protocol on the grounds that its required reductions were arbitrary, not based on science and, if implemented, would likely be gravely injurious to the U.S. economy.

Even more extraordinary, Samuelson assails those in power at home and abroad (and, by implication, his colleagues in the media) whom he says have engaged in a systematic distortion of the facts regarding global warming and Kyoto. In his view, this explains their vehement antipathy towards, and condemnation of, Mr. Bush:

Bush has discarded all the convenient deceits. He has brought more honesty to the global warming debate in four months than Bill Clinton did in eight years — and this, paradoxically, is why he is so harshly condemned. He must be discredited because if he’s correct, then almost everyone else has been playing fast and loose with the facts.

The Samuelson essay is noteworthy in its own right. It is even more valuable, however, insofar as the paradigm it describes (i.e., that of an American president whose straightforward view of the facts is seen as an affront to elites in Europe and his own country) also applies to another delusional international accord — the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty — that should be dealt with in the same way as Mr. Bush has treated Kyoto.

Like the Global Climate Change protocol, the ABM Treaty is a fraud. The other party was liquidated a decade ago; first the Soviet Union and then Russia massively violated its terms; and it clearly disserves American interests in the post-Cold War world. Mr. Bush, who has talked about “setting aside” and “going beyond” the ABM Treaty must now act in the same forthright and legally efficacious way he did with respect to the Kyoto Protocol: Announce that the United States will no longer be bound by it, and begin deploying the kind of effective missile defenses it prohibits within at most six-months’ time.

The Kyoto Delusion

By Robert J. Samuelson

The Washington Post, 21 June 2001

The education of George W. Bush on global warming is simply summarized: Honesty may not be the best policy. Greenhouse politics have long blended exaggeration and deception. Although global warming may or may not be an inevitable calamity (we don’t know), politicians everywhere treat it as one. Doing otherwise would offend environmental lobbies and the public, which has been conditioned to see it as a certain disaster. But the same politicians won’t do anything that would dramatically reduce global warming, because the obvious remedy — steep increases in energy prices — would be immensely unpopular.

By rejecting the Kyoto protocol, which would commit 38 industrial countries to control greenhouse emissions, Bush has discarded the convenient deceits. He has brought more honesty to the global warming debate in four months than Bill Clinton did in eight years — and this, paradoxically, is why he is so harshly condemned. He must be discredited because if he’s correct, then almost everyone else has been playing fast and loose with the facts.

Bush says that the Kyoto commitments were “arbitrary and not based on science.” True. Under Kyoto, the United States would cut its greenhouse gas emissions 7 percent below their 1990 levels by the years 2008 to 2012. Japan’s target is 6 percent, the European Union’s 8 percent. Russia gets to maintain its 1990 level, and Australia is allowed an 8 percent increase. Developing countries (Brazil, China, India) aren’t covered. These targets reflect pragmatic diplomacy and little else.

Because so many countries are excluded, it’s also true — as Bush indicates — that even if Kyoto worked as planned, the effect on greenhouse gases would be almost trivial. In 1990, says the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), global emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, totaled 5.8 billion tons of “carbon equivalent.” The EIA predicts that if nothing is done, emissions will rise 34 percent to 7.8 billion tons by 2010. With Kyoto, the increase would be only 26 percent to 7.3 billion tons. The reductions of industrialized countries would be more than offset by increases from developing countries.

Finally, Bush is correct when he says that reaching the Kyoto target would involve substantial economic costs for Americans. Strong U.S. economic growth has raised emissions well above their 1990 level. To hit the Kyoto target would require a cut of 30 percent or more of projected emissions. Under the Clinton administration, the EIA estimated that complying could raise electricity prices 86 percent and gasoline prices 53 percent. Higher prices are needed to induce consumers and businesses to use less energy (the source of most greenhouse gases) and switch to fuels (from coal to natural gas) that have lower emissions.

Europeans boast they’ve done better, implying that America’s poor showing reflects a lack of will. By 1998, the 15 countries of the European Union had reduced greenhouse emissions 2.5 percent below the 1990 level. But the comparison is bogus, because Europe’s performance reflects different circumstances — and luck. Through 1998, only three countries (Germany, Britain and Luxembourg) had reduced their emissions, and these improvements were mostly fortunate accidents. The shutdown of inefficient and heavy-polluting factories in eastern Germany cut emissions. And in Britain, plentiful North Sea gas propelled a shift from coal. Generally speaking, slow population and economic growth — meaning fewer cars, homes and offices — helps Europe comply with Kyoto. From 1990 to 2010, the European Union’s population is projected to rise 6 percent compared with a 20 percent U.S. increase.

The Clinton administration expressed alarm about global warming even while delaying effective action. Under Kyoto, countries can buy “rights” to emit greenhouse gases from other countries where — in theory — reductions could be more cheaply achieved. Called “emissions trading,” this approach was championed by Clinton. But as David Victor of the Council on Foreign Relations argues in his book “The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol,” the scheme is an unworkable sham. Some countries — notably Russia and Ukraine — got emissions targets well above their needs. So they could sell excess emission “rights” to Americans. The result: The United States wouldn’t cut its emissions and neither would Russia or Ukraine. Because Europeans distrusted this and other U.S. proposals, the final negotiations over Kyoto deadlocked last year.

As Bush says, we know that global temperatures are rising — but we don’t know the speed or the ultimate consequences. On all counts, his candor seems more commendable than the simplifications and evasions of his critics. And yet, his policy has stigmatized him as an environmental outlaw and earned him ill will in Europe and Japan. These are high costs. What went wrong? Just this: People say they like honesty in politicians, but on global warming, the evidence is the opposite. People prefer delusion. Kyoto responded to this urge. People want to hear that “something” is being done when little is being done and, in all likelihood, little can be done.

Barring technological breakthroughs — ways of producing cheap energy with few emissions or capturing today’s emissions — it’s hard to see how the world can deal with global warming. Developing countries sensibly insist on the right to reduce poverty through economic growth, which means more energy use and emissions. (Much is made of China’s recent drop in emissions; this is probably a one-time decline, reflecting the shutdown of inefficient factories. In 1999 China had eight cars per 1,000 people compared with 767 per 1,000 for the United States. Does anyone really believe that more cars, computers and consumer goods will cut China’s emissions?) Meanwhile, industrialized countries won’t reduce emissions if it means reducing living standards. There is a natural stalemate.

Because this message is unwanted, politicians don’t deliver it. Someone who defies conventional wisdom needs to explain his views well enough to bring public opinion to his side. Bush has, so far, failed at this critical task. Ironically, he might have fared better if he had stuck with Clinton’s clever deceptions.

Truth and Consequences for Saddam

(Washington, D.C.) At his press conference last Thursday, President Bush reiterated a commitment he has made repeatedly in recent months: Saddam Hussein will not be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

As the President put it: “The primary goal is to make it clear to Saddam that we expect him to be a peaceful neighbor in the region and we expect him not to develop weapons of mass destruction. And if we find him doing so, there will be a consequence.”

Consequence Time

Unfortunately, there is now compelling evidence that Saddam not only is developing WMD, but that he has some. More worrisome still, it appears his arsenal includes more than just chemical and biological arms. Dreadful as these are, the Butcher of Baghdad may also have acquired atomic and perhaps even thermonuclear weapons, as well.

It has been universally recognized that, given the well-established state of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programs before Operation Desert Storm and the international inspections that followed it, Saddam could resume production of various toxic chemical agents and strains of lethal viruses in fairly short order once he forced the withdrawal of inspectors with a mandate to conduct intrusive on-site monitoring. (This actually was the best-case assessment; given the comprehensive secretiveness and inveterate deviousness of the Iraqi regime, it is entirely possible that its covert programs in these areas were actually never suspended.)

Going Nuclear

Of even greater concern, however, was the prospect that — left to his own devices — Saddam would quickly reconstitute his bid to build at least crude atomic weapons. If a report in the Sunday Times of London is accurate, however, Saddam already has as many as three such weapons and perhaps as many as three of the far more powerful thermonuclear ones.

The Times article, entitled “Was this Saddam’s Bomb?” draws upon a wealth of circumstantial evidence and debriefings of Iraqi defectors by investigative reporter Gwynne Roberts. It features heretofore unpublished — and alarming — revelations by a man going under the alias of “Leone” who is described as “a military engineer who was a member of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission. Simultaneously…he worked for the Republican Palace in Baghdad.”

According to Leone, the Iraqi despot had more than one nuclear program. As the Times put it: “After [Iraq’s] defeat in the ensuing Gulf war, UN arms inspectors discovered an Iraqi crash program to build a nuclear bomb, known as PC3. But, according to Leone, they missed the most successful part of the programe. [Leone said,] They thought they had stopped the Iraqis from building the bomb, but they overlooked the military organization code-named Group Four. This department is a comprehensive section that was involved in assembling the bomb from the beginning to the end. It was also involved in developing launching systems, missile programs, preparing uranium, purchasing it on the black market, smuggling it back into Iraq.'”

Roberts was able to get confirmation of key parts of Leone’s story from other sources — including scientists who had also been involved in Saddam’s closely guarded WMD programs who managed to escape with their lives from Iraq. They validated his claim that in the years prior to the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein acquired perhaps as much as 50 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from South Africa via Brazil. His cadre of Western-trained physicists then secretly used some of this material to fashion a relatively unsophisticated Hiroshima-style “gun-type” atomic device. It was placed in a natural tunnel near Lake Rezazza some 150 kilometers southwest of Baghdad and, on September 19, 1989, it was exploded, unleashing a force equivalent to approximately ten thousand tons of TNT.

The Iraqis went to extraordinary lengths to conceal preparations for and evidence of this underground test. For example, the sorts of above-ground activity that might have been detected by spy satellites were masked as part of an agricultural project. The explosion itself was “decoupled” so as to reduce the chances that even nearby seismic monitoring stations would pick up and recognize the resulting tremor, which registered 2.7 on the Richter scale. And political prisoners were given the deadly job of cleaning up the radioactive residue of the test; they were subsequently liquidated by Saddam’s security forces as were all external signs of and access to the tunnel.

Lessons from Saddam’s Bomb

These revelations have a number of profound implications. For one thing, they strongly suggest that Saddam is already in possession of radiological, atomic and perhaps nuclear weapons. He may also have the capability to deliver such weapons — either by aircraft or perhaps via ballistic missile — to targets perhaps as far away as Israel and American troops or population centers in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait (whose liberation from Iraqi occupation occurred 10 years ago this week).

For another, Leone’s charges validate President Bush’s opposition to the fatally flawed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was rejected by a majority of the U.S. Senate in October 1999. As National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice put it in a White House press briefing on Thursday: “The President made clear when he was running for President that he did not believe that the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty furthered the non-proliferation goals that we do think are extremely important because it was not verifiable, because it didn’t include certain parties, and because it certainly did nothing about the states that we are most concerned about….” Any further thought of resuscitating this treaty should now be moot.

The Bottom Line

Finally, these revelations — taken together with other evidence that Saddam is back in the weapons of mass destruction business — oblige Mr. Bush to make good his threat that there will be “consequences.” Fortunately, many of his senior advisors (including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense-designate Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of State-designate Richard Armitage, Under Secretary of State-designate John Bolton, Under Secretary of Defense-designate Dov Zakheim and a number of others said to be under consideration for top posts [notably, Zalmay Khalilzad, Jeffrey Gedmin and Douglas Feith]) have developed a blue-print for such consequences.

Specifically, in a February 19, 1998 open letter to President Clinton, they called for the United States, among other things, to: “recognize a provisional government of Iraq based on the principles and leaders of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) that is representative of all the peoples of Iraq”; “restore and enhance the safe haven in northern Iraq to allow the provisional government to extend its authority there and establish a zone in southern Iraq from which Saddam’s ground forces would also be excluded”; and “lift sanctions in liberated areas.” In short, we must now help with the liberation of Iraq.

For, as a practical matter, the only hope for effectively addressing Saddam’s determination to stay in the WMD business is to put him and his ruling clique permanently out of business. Mr. Bush is putting into place the team with a plan to do it. There isn’t a moment to lose in effecting these “consequences.”

Space power: What is at stake, what will it take

On the day that nineteen distinguished retired U.S. military commanders warned President Clinton that a U.S.-Russian agreement expected to be signed later in the week in Brussels is inconsistent with his declared space policy — and with the Nation’s national security and economic interests — the Center for Security Policy convened the latest of its High-Level Roundtable Discussions to address “Space Power: What is at Stake, What will it Take.”

The discussion brought together over 80 past and present senior military officers, executive branch officials, industry leaders, members of the press, and congressional staff members. The Roundtable featured important contributions by its lead discussants: Senator Bob Smith (R-NH), a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee; Major General Brian Arnold, USAF, Director, Space and Nuclear Deterrence, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition; Dr. Lawrence Gershwin, National Intelligence Officer for Space; Richard Fisher, Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation; Dr. Marty Faga, former Director of the National Reconnaissance Office; Ambassador Henry Cooper, former Director, Strategic Defense Initiative Organization; Dr. James Schlesinger, former Secretary of Defense and Energy, and Director of Central Intelligence; and General Charles Horner, USAF (Ret.), former Commander, U.S. Space Command, and a member of the Commission on National Security Space Management and Organization, chaired by Secretary of Defense-designate Donald Rumsfeld.

The present Rumsfeld Commission is scheduled to release its report on 11 January and its findings are expected to address many of the points covered in the CSP Roundtable. In fact, it seems likely that the highlights of last month’s event, summarized in the following pages, will represent a sneak preview of the Commission’s deliberations and conclusions.

This is especially the case in light of news reports that Communist China has completed ground tests of a microsatellite it calls a “parasite satellite” said to be capable of attaching itself undetected to and, upon command, disabling or destroying satellites at all altitudes. Such a development is not unexpected (see the discussion that follows of China’s space control program); its announcement should, nonetheless, serve to concentrate the minds of U.S. policy-makers on the urgent need to establish American space power capabilities.

Senator Smith Calls for U.S. Space Control

Sen. Smith — who has, during his tenure in the Senate, established a reputation as one of the Nation’s most thoughtful and indefatigable advocates of space power — keynoted the Roundtable with a forceful call for safe, reliable and affordable U.S. access to and control of space. Sen. Smith said in part:



  • “I believe that space power is absolutely critical to the future security of this nation. I cannot emphasize that enough. [Yet,] I think when you look at…the resources and how they are allocated, it does not support the concept that space power is critical to the future security of this nation. Our resources don’t even come close, not even close, to supporting that concept.”


  • “Over the last 40 years…this nation has grown to be the world leader in space, thanks to the ingenuity and hard work of many Americans….But many of you have heard me in the past express my own personal dismay that our military focus over the years has been limited more to information superiority, not true space power, and there is a difference between information superiority and true space power.”


  • “The space systems we have today provide remote sensing, navigation, communications and other support services to all of our land, air, and sea forces. And don’t misunderstand me, I do support information superiority. It’s very important. It’s critical. We all witnessed what happened in Desert Storm and without information superiority, that could have been a disaster.”


  • “But there are two other types of programs that are missing if we are to achieve true space power: Number one, we have lacked space control technology and capabilities. We don’t have space control capability, in my view. If we intend to maintain our information superiority, we need a strong space control program to protect our assets and to deny our adversaries the use of their own systems.”


  • “Having shown the world the utility of space systems, it would be pretty naive to think that our adversaries are just going to be sitting around idly and not developing their own space-based information capabilities and the tools and techniques to counter the current U.S. space advantage….We see a proliferation of reconnaissance navigation and communication satellites in countries all around the world. China is involved in that, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Iran, Russia. We have witnessed operations on a massive scale to deceive our intelligence assets prior to the India and Pakistan nuclear tests. We continue to read in the press about our adversaries developing rapid access to space capabilities and anti-satellite weapons, as well.”

    • KE-ASAT and Other Space Programs


  • “That’s why for years I have pushed…for programs like [Kinetic Energy Anti-Satellite Weapon] KE-ASAT. KE-SAT is a low cost, low risk, near-term — near-term, I emphasize — space control capability to use as a last resort to deny an adversary the use of space. Without an anti-satellite capability, today’s foreign and commercial surveillance satellites could easily detect our now famous dogleg in the desert that allowed the U.S. to quickly end the Desert Storm operation with very few casualties.”


  • “Without KE-ASAT, this nation will not have the satellite negation capability to deter satellite operators from sharing or selling our adversaries sensitive intelligence of the U.S. military, resulting in longer wars and more lives lost.”


  • “Since 1993, almost alone, I have had to put back in the budget, year after year after year, the money for KE-ASAT. We’ve spent $350 million on that program. We have another 40 or 50 million to spend to finish the job, to have the three kill vehicles tested. Yet, what’s happened? I have been attacked, personally attacked by Members [of the Senate], some in this Administration, for supporting this program. Many in the program have been attacked, have been investigated, have been harassed. That’s what has happened in this Administration, and I believe it’s a deliberate bias against space activity, military space activity.”


  • “The bottom line is we need a comprehensive space control program and we don’t need it tomorrow. We need it now, right now.”


  • “And [second,] we have lacked a flexible power-projection capability that leverages the advantages of space and space flight — programs like space-based laser and the space plane. A space-based laser will someday provide precision strike at the speed of light. It could potentially engage not only targets in space, but also targets in the air, on the ground, and on the sea. But we’re not spending the dollars that we need to spend on that program.”


  • “A military space plane promises low-cost, rapid access to space for a variety of space control and information superiority missions. Can you imagine being able to launch that and getting anywhere in the world in about 45 minutes? Yet…it was line item vetoed by the President of the United States two years ago, one of three items, and only three military items that were line items, only three, space plane, KE-ASAT, and Clementine, all line item vetoed….Luckily, the Supreme Court found the line item veto unconstitutional and the budgets Congress put in place for these programs were restored. However, the money was still not spent, for the most part. It was basically ignored.”


  • “The Administration was not able to kill these mandated space programs, but they did their best to ensure that the needed space power technologies were not pursued and that the program management was muddled, and it happened in KE-ASAT and it’s happening in the space plane and it’s happening in Clementine.”


  • “The annual budgets repeatedly shortchange space programs. The annual realignment of funds at the end of each fiscal year disproportionately takes money from space programs to fund other service activities. And I’m not dumping on any other service activities. They are necessary, many of them, but you do have to prioritize. People without space background are promoted ahead of people with space background. Treaties have negotiated away our space advantage. We kneel at the alter of the ABM treaty, in spite of the fact that we know that the ABM treaty is restricting — is restricting our ability to do what we need to do.“

    • Space Commission


  • “You shouldn’t be surprised if we’re not accessing space in this Administration….That’s why I established, with language in last year’s budget, the Commission on National Security Space Management and Organization, commonly referred to as the Space Commission….the Commission has 13 nationally-recognized space experts. I met with Donald Rumsfeld [Chairman of the Commission]. I have a great amount of confidence in him.”


  • “I just want a fair look, and today’s military space efforts, in my view, are primarily led by the Air Force. And despite…a lot of rhetoric by the Air Force leadership and civilian leaders to the contrary, the Air Force, as a whole, not individually, some are very outspoken, has not shown me that space is a priority.”


  • “I have explicitly asked the Space Commission to look at the creation of a separate space force. Maybe that’s a little premature, but let’s get it on the table, let’s talk about it. A solution as Draconian as breaking off a separate space force may be necessary to overcome the ingrained bias that we see right now against space, and it may be the only way to ensure that funds that have been allocated for space are spent for just that and not just ignored or buried somewhere in the budget or put somewhere else.”

    • Space Management


  • “The problems are not just in the military and the Executive Branch, however. The way we manage space here on the Hill also needs to be looked at….There are six committees in the Congress that oversee space: House/Senate Armed Services, House/Senate Intelligence, and House/Senate Appropriations. If the U.S. is to maintain its current lead in national space security at the lowest possible cost to taxpayers, we need to better coordinate activities among these committees. The kinds of things that need better coordination are three, real quickly: mix of tactical and national reconnaissance, the mix of space and airborne reconnaissance and the way we do tasking, processing, exploitation and dissemination.”

    • Conclusion


  • “Whoever controls space will control the destiny of earth and when you look at the options out there, I would ask you, who do you want it to be, Iran, Russia, Iraq, China? I don’t think so.”


  • “For those who doubt and say we can’t militarize space, I would say to you, do you want somebody else to do it?…It will be no different than the militarization of earth by the United States of America. As witnessed by World War II, when Tom Brokaw said “The greatest generation did what it did,” we use it wisely, we use it cautiously, and we only use it when we have to for the protection of earth, and that’s exactly what we’ll do in space. Exactly what we will do in space.”

Global Utilities

The Roundtable’s next heard from the Director, Space and Nuclear Deterrence, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Maj. Gen. Brian Arnold USAF. Gen. Arnold’s address, entitled “What is at Stake: Global Utilities,” provided the participants with an overview of some of the threats faced by U.S. space assets and the different ways they could be protected. Highlights of Gen. Arnold’s presentation include the following:



  • “The Air Force has taken great strides to look internally at whether or not we want to continue to be a strong advocate for space….From the Chief of Staff of the Air Force on down, we are ready to step along to continue that path and we have some ideas.”

    • Global Utilities


  • “…[There are] various civil, military, as well as international space capabilities…that our economy [is] relying on day in and day out, from environmental to imaging, to location, to timing. And all of these are critical to our national infrastructure, to our national security, and our nation has become very dependent on all these capabilities.”


  • “The importance of space to the nation is clear….We were recently talking to folks from Aerospace Industries Association of America…and they are forecasting out around at 2005 to see the commercial investments go as high as $160 billion a year. While the low-earth-orbit market has flattened out, clearly the investments are going in that direction and have far exceeded the government investments since 1997.”


  • “The United States’ unimpeded access to space is vital to national interests — the word vital’ meaning that we are willing to do whatever it takes to maintain that access.”


  • “For the war-fighter, virtually everything we do [makes use of space] — from intelligence to reconnaissance, surveillance to warning, to timing, getting over the target, to our precision guidance weapons that you saw so well used in Operation Allied Force to limit the collateral damage to put a single weapon on a single target, to the weather, to assessing the battle damage after the fight, to the communications, to the leased communications that we took from the civilian economy…and going even further to computer network defense and computer network attack, which uses a lot of space assets. These are all vital to the war fighter, as well as to our civilian economy. So space affects every one of us one way or another.”

    • Threats to U.S. Space Utilities


  • “Clearly…the evolving threat is coming along. You can see commercial imagery. The remote sensing is there. If you have access to the web, you can purchase it. As long as you have the money, you can get imagery of virtually any place in the world.”


  • “You could have threats to the space asset, the satellite itself, or the links, the up-link and down-link, or to the ground station, the ground opportunities. Clearly, you could have everywhere from a low power laser attack, to a medium, to a high power attack. So you can go anywhere from temporary denial, to disrupting for a short period of time, to degrading a sensor or a part of the satellite, to essentially destroying it.”


  • “Looking at the linkage, a lot of our linkages are unprotected and very fragile. One good example is the GPS signal….It doesn’t take a whole lot to jam that type of a signal. So, therefore, we are interested in doing things like modernizing our GPS systems…because it is such a key element to our war fighting capabilities, as well as to the Nation.”


  • Against the ground systems, this is where we probably are most vulnerable, because a lot of our ground stations are located overseas. So from the low tech end to the high tech end, to the commercial systems, they’re all tied to how well we do our job in both the national security, as well as our national economy.


  • “…There is no specific treaty prohibiting attacks on space systems, links or operations. A lot of people say that there are, but there are not. There are outer space treaties. The 1967 treaty bans orbital weapons of mass destruction, but not…for example, an ICBM coming through the atmosphere. It bans military presence in operations on celestial bodies, but not weapons in space.”

    • Protection of U.S. Space Utilities


  • So how do we protect our systems? Well, first of all, we break down space control into several basic areas. First is situational awareness. This is called space surveillance….You ought to know what’s out there, or if you’re flying in space, you ought to know what’s out there, what the bad guys are up to, what the good guys are up to, and what are all the things that can affect your systems. That’s called space surveillance.


  • The second one is prevention. That’s preventing the bad guys from getting at your valuable resources. Protection is the key piece that I’m talking about today, and that’s protecting your vital assets.


  • Then, finally, negation. As I mentioned earlier, negation can be anywhere from a very temporary denial to a degrade, all the way to a destroy.

    • Organizational Requirements


  • “At the national level, this country needs a national vision on space. We would offer that to perhaps go back to a National Space Council. Others might say a very strong interagency working group. But whatever it is, we need a very smart group of people at the very top that can direct civil, commercial, international, DOD and intelligence communities on exactly what this country wants to do.”


  • “We need a commitment to funding for space. If space is of that much importance for this country and for the world, it needs additional resources. We’ve talked earlier about how we’re trying to recapitalize the Navy, the Army and the Air Force, and, clearly, of all the Air Force assets, I would ask you to name me one that we do not need today.”


  • “Another thing we would recommend is a very strong space caucus in the Congress, just like you have an air power caucus, you have a naval power caucus. It seems to us very smart to have a space power caucus to focus on the key arguments that you would want us to face.”


  • “Moving down to the Pentagon level, we would offer to you a defense space council, headed by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, as well as the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and we would offer to you that they could bring in the DCI, to make sure we have “black” and “white” space matched correctly, we have proper vetting, at that level, and then that group could…be tied to the National Space Council.”


  • “We’re very concerned about the industrial base for radiation hard’ parts, a vanishing vendor, if you will….Right now, we are down to just a couple of vendors that produce these parts, these rad hard parts, and that is a policy issue that needs to be addressed….Critical infrastructure, like MILSTAR, we [Electro-Magnetic Pulse] EMP harden, we do that traditionally, but if you’re going to rely on commercial communications systems, what’s the rationale for not putting rad hard parts on those systems, other than there’s not a good business case? We need some kind of policy that states that.”

Threats to U.S. Equities in Space

The next section of the Roundtable amplified on the issue of emerging threats to American interests and assets in space. Under the ground-rules of this portion of the discussion, Dr. Gershwin spoke on a not-for-attribution basis. Accordingly, the following are presented as highlights of the exchanges that occurred during and after his remarks and those of Richard Fisher, not as verbatim quotes attributable to either lead discussant or the other participants.



  • Competitors and adversaries surely realize the degree to which access to space is critical to both U.S. economic and military power, and we will certainly make strides in countering U.S. space dominance over the next 15 years.


  • International commercialization of space will reduce the current U.S. edge in space support to both civil and military, and intelligence activities. Potential adversaries will continue to develop counter-space systems, pursue related technologies and expertise, and seek new techniques and tactics to reduce and counter U.S. space capabilities, with implications for both U.S. military and U.S. economic security.

    • Commercialization of Space


  • Commercial and civil space services will offer both developing countries and non-state adversaries access rivaling today’s major space powers in such areas as high resolution reconnaissance and weather prediction, global encrypted communications, and precise navigation. For example, foreign military platforms increasingly will incorporate GPS navigation receivers. When combined, such services will provide adversaries capabilities for precise targeting of U.S. or allied force deployments and global coordination of operations.


  • As higher resolution imagery becomes increasingly available on the global market for the next five years at least, foreign intelligence and military consumers will become more familiar with the utility of such high-resolution imagery, which, up until now, has been very much a U.S. unitary advantage. Such high-resolution imagery, for example, provides exploitable information on a range of military targets for which poorer resolution imagery does not. This is not just LANDSAT we’re talking about. This is really one-meter, good stuff.


  • Sales of U.S. one-meter commercial imagery probably has already sensitized foreign governments to the value of such imagery for military or intelligence missions. For example, U.S. vendors of IKONOS high resolution satellite imagery, recently announced a commercial alliance to provide the Turkish armed forces with high resolution imagery to support the Turkish military’s operational needs, and Turkey is one of just many countries that are taking advantage of the availability of commercial imagery for both military and intelligence needs.


  • Widespread availability of both meter and sub-meter resolution imagery eventually will erode U.S. space advantages by encouraging foreign efforts: first of all, to use commercial imagery for reconnaissance against U.S. and allied military forces, and against U.S. defense research and development; second, to increase investment in training foreign intelligence analysts to conduct detailed imagery analysis, something, again, which is today pretty much a unilateral U.S. advantage; and, third, to improve the denial and deception activity of foreign adversaries to hide or obscure their own critical targets and thwart U.S. and other reconnaissance.

    • Counter-Space


  • Our potential adversaries will understand U.S. strategic and economic dependence on our own access to space and will view counter-space operations as an important options for countering U.S. space superiority.


  • Over the next 15 years or so, a number of potential adversaries are likely to develop capabilities to disrupt, degrade, or defeat U.S. space assets, in particular, through denial and deception, anti-satellite technologies, such as electronic or cyber warfare, or with attacks against U.S. ground facilities.


  • Denial and deception is a problem that is growing as global awareness of U.S. intelligence capabilities improve. It is one of the least technologically demanding, yet often highly effective tools to counter U.S. space-based intelligence collection, as well as the U.S. military weapons targeting. Foreign countries are interested in or are already experimenting with a variety of technologies that could be used to develop counter-space capabilities. These efforts could result, for instance, in improved systems, such as, of particular concern, space object tracking, signal jamming, and directed energy weapons.


  • Countries lacking or wishing to augment advanced capabilities to attack satellites or data links could develop plans and capabilities to disrupt U.S. use of space by attacking our ground facilities that are supporting U.S. space operations, most likely using some sort of special operations forces.


  • Two countries [warranting] mention in particular are Russia and China. Russia inherited a variety of counter-space systems and R&D efforts from the Soviet Union and these were well documented in the 1980s, certainly when the Soviet Union was still around. Although economic programs almost certainly have curtailed their programs, Russia remains among the world’s most advanced and comprehensive — retains among the world’s most advanced and comprehensive counter-space capabilities, including the doctrine for its employment. They understand the idea.

    • China


  • China has an extensive space program of its own and is conscious of the importance of space dominance and could emerge over the next 15 years as a leading threat to U.S. space operations. China is making an enormous investment in space infrastructure and has several new space systems under development, including space launch vehicles, satellites, and manned space systems. Chinese military theorists have written a great deal about the U.S. use of space during the Gulf War, and China’s Air Force Academy recently increased the number of courses offered in space war theory.


  • Such things as space object surveillance and identification, jammers, low power lasers, are all in the business of being advertised widely in the open market. Such open availability and transfers have the potential to accelerate foreign system development and provide countries a rapid ramp-up in their counter-space abilities.


  • The threat is probably far more simple and far more elegant and may be far more imminent than we realize. [Examining] the broad scope of PLA modernization, the systems that they’re purchasing from the Russians, the capabilities that they are building themselves, the utter and total concentration on Taiwan and the degree to which they understand the taking of Taiwan would be, for them and for Asia, a major turning point in the global power balance.


  • What we can expect is a very quick war of decision that will combine space systems used to direct precision-guided missiles, cruise missiles, air-launched munitions against hundreds of targets on Taiwan for the purpose of either intimidating the leadership in Taipei, to back down and agree to unification, on Beijing’s terms, or, if they have to use these things, to utterly decimate the Taiwan force and within one or two days, at the most, well before the United States can even mobilize to come to any kind of rescue.

    And as part of that, if you take out enough of our satellite support network upon which our Asian forces depend, what will that tell the person in the White House about the inevitability of defeat and how much more will that complicate our response? And it’s not just the ASAT angle that would blind us and even further delay our response. It’s all the active systems that they’re working on, as well, to go after us and prevent our response. This could all come together well before the end of this decade.



  • China…understands space power and is rapidly developing both the infrastructure and wherewithal to challenge American current space information dominance. The Chinese understand very clearly how we used our own space power during the Gulf War, during Kosovo, and they understand that disruption of our space systems is utterly critical if they are to have any chance at all in prevailing in the conflict for which they are preparing; that is, the coming conflict over the future of Taiwan.


  • In 1998, Hantyen Satellite Corporation and Britain’s University of Surry Space Technologies signed a contract to co-develop micro satellites. Within two years, the first Chinese micro-satellite was launched.


  • The PLA is also…very concerned about being able to jam our satellites, as well as long developed the capabilities and techniques to try to hide what is important for them from overhead view.


  • In addition, the PRC is putting together its own ground-based global space tracking network. It has started operation of a space track facility on the island of Tarowa in the nation of Carabaos in the South Pacific. Just last week, we find out that a contract has been signed with Namibia, in Africa, to create another space tracking facility. They have space track capabilities on ships, but I expect that more nations, perhaps Brazil or France, Pakistan, will be joining their space track network in the future.


  • The other side of the developing Chinese space capability is their great efforts to use space on behalf of their own force, on behalf of their own national economic and military objectives. In August…Xinhua announced that China will be putting up an eight satellite imaging constellation for electro-optical 4 radar satellites. This will give the future commander of the Taiwan campaign a twice revisit capability. The PLA already has access to communication satellites and is developing satellite communication vehicles, one of which was revealed at the last Zhuhai show to support missile units.


  • On Halloween day, China launched its first navigation satellite, the BAIDO. Navigation satellites, their own access to GLONASS, access to GPS, in combination with their new imaging network will be used to provide precision targeting to the hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles that they’re building now and targeting on Taiwan, future land-attack cruise missiles, and even to target American forces in Asia.


  • Foreign technology is critical to China’s continued progress in space. Russian technology pervades their program. In terms of potential future space warfare activities, access to Russian technology, both ASAT and laser programs are probably already providing the PRC with the shortcuts that they are looking for to build their capability.


  • A nightmare scenario that some of us have looked at is if you had a case where it was a crisis over Taiwan or Korea, where we were prepared to deploy, the usual strategy today would be a couple aircraft carrier battle groups and air expeditionary forces….you might be confronted with a very rapid Chinese ability to sort of co-orbit with a number of our critical communications and military support satellites, of which there are not terribly many of them, and very suddenly take those out, either temporarily or permanently. That would pretty well devastate our ability to deploy forces.


  • As we look to the future, what really seems to be the significant approach, when we look at it from an operational standpoint, is the ability to do sorties, whether it’s a radar system that we’re talking about in the future or even a weapon. Weapons for space control or even force application, if we move in that direction, will be far more acceptable if they’re not placed in space permanently, but they are something that you can sortie the capability to do space control, whether it’s offensive or defensive, or sortie the capability to do force application. Manned fighters and bombers would be a lot less acceptable if our strategy was that we sort of keep them up permanently on the borders of a potential adversary, and we don’t do that.


  • There are unclassified papers that the Chinese have published about reusable launch vehicles beyond space plane… of two-stage-to-orbit and fully reusable launch vehicles, and the diagrams of the mission profile are 100 percent similar to the Kissler airbag/parachute-recovery concept of operations. With this sort of reusable launch vehicle capability, they would have a far more robust ASAT or surface-to-surface missile architecture, because you would recover the vehicle like an airplane and put it back together and launch it again.


  • China’s activities in space, they are asymmetric, as we call it, response, is a form of warfare that they’ve been at for 3,000 years. So to them it seems very natural and space is just one other component. How do you take out a big bully who’s got a lot of iron on target and who’s got a lot of military capabilities? Well, from their response, which has been much like water flowing, is take the path of least resistance in the way of stopping that type of projection. And their information activities, their activities in information operations are one very strong component, part of their space program…[aimed at] seeing how they can try and nullify U.S. advantages in their arena.

Roger Robinson, Chairman, William J. Casey Institute of the Center for Security Policy concluded this section of the discussion with several important points on the record:



  • “An emerging dimension of China’s ability to militarize space and challenge our assets there is that of finance or the funding side. We have been looking at China in this regard — that is, the national security dimensions of their use of our capital markets, our and bond markets, over the past four years, in what we call a capital markets transparency initiative, and have come up with some troubling findings. There are firms, state-owned firms, in particular, that are very close to the Chinese PLA, as well as their military intelligence capability, that are attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in our markets.“


  • “Hundreds of thousands of Americans are unwittingly engaged in this process. The People’s Republic of China, in its own name — no cut-outs, no subterfuge, just the government itself — has thus far borrowed $4.2 billion on our bond market. No questions asked as to where the money is going or how it’s being used; no discipline, no stated purpose for the use of funds. And we can be fairly confident that, at minimum, there is an indirect link with many of the programs that [have been discussed today, particularly their more advanced systems, and I would guess their space-based systems, as well, or those that they are aspiring to acquire.”


  • “We have keeping close tabs on this and we found that it’s escalating at an alarming rate. China has attracted totally about 25 billion in our markets thus far, with, again, never a question asked about any of the firms, no vetting for national security concerns, human rights, not to mention human rights and other concerns.”


  • “But even our core security interests have been ignored by all of the underwriters and the purchasers of these instruments, who normally would engage in more comprehensive due diligence, but national security has never been part of that mix.


  • “There is a cavalcade of literally hundreds of Chinese state-owned companies, many of the wrong sorts, from our point of view — or the parent company, affiliates and subsidiaries are certainly the wrong sorts — are planning to, in effect, fund programs of the type described from unwitting U.S. investors, and I would argue that they can’t live without our capital markets.”

U.S. Space Power Policy versus U.S. Space Power Capabilities

The Roundtable next focused on what systems and organization the United States required in order for it to exercise space power. This section was led by Dr. Marty Faga, who served as a member of the Defense Science Board’s recent Task Force on Space. Dr. Faga summarized some of the Task Force’s most important recommendations:



  • “[Defense Science Board (DSB) task force on space] observed that we possess space superiority today and noted that DOD defines superiority as that degree of dominance in space of one force over another, which permits the conduct of operations by the former, and its related land, sea and air forces at a given time and place, without prohibitive interference by the opposing force.”


  • “We see our advantage lessening, not just for what we may be failing to do, but for what others are doing; that is, potential adversaries are gaining understanding and they are attempting to gain capability. They are attempting to acquire systems that would disrupt, deny, degrade or destroy U.S. systems, and budget limits on our side are hampering U.S. modernization and introduction of new space concepts.”


  • “There is exploitation of our systems by people who can freely use GPS for whatever purpose they may choose. Adversaries are gaining access to the use of space through their own systems. They may be able to attack our ground facilities and infrastructure. They could in the future make attacks directly on satellites, perhaps, and a failure to react to these specifically in the budget and the modernization programs will obviously affect our ability to respond.”


  • “We suggested several courses that ought to be taken: 1) a protective course that would implement defense of space control capabilities that ensure that U.S. space systems perform as we plan for them to; 2) a preventative course to implement offensive space control to preclude an adversary from using U.S. or other space systems for their purposes; and 3) a modernization and new initiative course to pursue modernization, better access to space, and more effective capabilities.”


  • “A few of the key observations that we made were: U.S. policy states that access and use of space is central to U.S. national security interests and interference is viewed as an infringement on sovereign rights. The task force thinks that superiority depends largely on the deterrent value of protection and that we need to demonstrate an ability to respond, along with political, legal and economic needs, but to demonstrate the ability to apply force, if it were necessary. The U.S. should declare that it will take all appropriate self-defense measures and it would defend against use of space hostile to U.S. national security interest. We observed that there is no reasonably foreseeable threat in space against satellites, but that many nations could impinge on individual systems by terrorism, by electronic attack, and other means.”


  • “We recommended a strategy of space systems inherently designed to counter near-term attack through redundancy and robustness and hedge programs to apply within the lead time of intelligence warning to counter longer-term threats.”

Dr. Faga was followed by Amb. Henry Cooper, former Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization and former Chief Negotiator at the U.S.-Soviet Defense and Space Talks in Geneva. The following were among the main points made by Dr. Cooper in discussing the impediments to U.S. space power:



  • In 1983, Frank [Gaffney] and I worked together on a space policy report, which was in response to an amendment [by then-Senator Paul Tsongas]. Congress, at that time, demanded that we halt the testing of the F-15 ASAT until we were prepared to enter negotiations on a comprehensive ban of all anti-satellite testing and deployment. It was our objective to go through and explain why this was not a good idea and, of course, reverse the constraint that Congress had imposed. We made the case and…the test went off very well, I believe it was in 84, against a non-cooperative target.


  • But no good deed goes unpunished. Congress killed the program anyway. Now we have a reverse situation, where at least some in Congress want to build a kinetic energy ASAT, as Senator Smith told us this morning. He’s a principal lead in it, and it’s the Administration that is not pursuing that diligently.


  • In any case, I would just point out that in spite of all this, the space technologies matured most rapidly out of the SDI program. In the latter days of the Reagan Administration in 1988, the President vetoed the authorization bill, basically because it was putting a cap on how we could spend resources on space-based interceptors.


  • It’s interesting to me that the most explicit discussion so far today of the successor technologies to those that were leading technologies in the SDI program are being pursued by Surry and the Chinese, not by the Pentagon and certainly not by the Air Force, to my knowledge, unless it’s a deep, dark ” black” program. And I think this is evidence, again, of the prejudice that exists within the community against the SDI efforts of Ronald Reagan. Unfortunate, but I believe it’s true.


  • Why do we have this great political headwind that I am describing to you? I believe that it was at least heavily influenced by what I [call] the collective guilt complex of at least an influential segment of the scientific community that had been associated with the Manhattan Project and was, for sure, not going to permit the technology cutting edge in the United States [to]have such an event again. In 1946, Oppenheimer referred to it by saying “The physicists have known sin,” and this propagated.”


  • “I think we have to figure out how to reorganize the Federal bureaucracy that deals with space to rectify the dysfunctional arrangements, which I believe were deliberately put into play in the 1950s. I don’t think these things just happened. I think that they were part of a reasoned approach to the problem. And we have to build the best systems we can, of course, and somehow or other, we’ve got to get free of a lot of these trappings of the arms control history that Gen. Arnold mentioned earlier that constrain our ability to move ahead today. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll get the Pearl Harbor that President Eisenhower [had worried about in the 1950s].“

A highlight of the discussion that followed were remarks by Christopher Lay, a Senior Analyst at SAIC and long-time member of the Center for Security Policy’s National Security Advisory Council:



  • “Just having a reusable, whether single-stage-to-orbit or whatever kind of space launch vehicle, that’s only part of the answer. [You are still in trouble] if you have that system and you remain reliant only on the two existing launch facilities in Florida and California, both of which I think anybody would agree are highly vulnerable to a dedicated effort to cripple them or take them out, we haven’t solved the problem. We need to really think seriously about a variety of alternative launch facilities and, also, a launch infrastructure that’s really more suited to so-called launch-on- demand, which the Air Force has talked about at various times as a future requirement.“


  • “What that means, and it has to do with the way payloads are integrated on launch vehicles, the way satellites are designed and built or whatever you’re going to put in space, but it’s really what I call a launch infrastructure issue — geography, location, alternative means, maybe some air- launch capability, maybe even a sea-launch via submarine, whatever. But this issue of kind of being confined to these two, admittedly, very grand facilities, but if a cruise missile or even something more simple than that were directed in the right place, at the Kennedy Space Center or at Vandenberg, we’re really in trouble. We can’t reconstitute.”

Dr. Schlesinger on the Importance of Space Power

During a working lunch, Dr. James Schlesinger offered remarks on the importance of the United States continuing to exercise dominance in space. He argued that the vulnerability of U.S. space assets would jeopardize not only the United States’ ability to prosecute wars, but it could also undercut public support for American foreign policy in general:



  • “The United States, at this time, is not just any other country in the United Nations. It is the one to whom others in trouble turn, hoping that we will pull their chestnuts out of the fire, and we have been doing that with some frequency.”


  • “[Even as there has been] this growth of the American role in the world, the public has basically tuned out with respect to foreign policy. In the old days, there was the Soviet threat out there — a single permanent foe, well-equipped militarily and ideologically abhorrent to the American people — on which the public could focus.”

    “So [today] we have a public that’s turned off and, at the same time, the responsibilities that have either been thrust upon us or we have seized have grown immeasurably, and the consequence of that is that in order to continue the foreign policy role that we have taken on, we are going to have to avoid what the public wishes desperately to avoid — and that is casualties.”



  • “The public is willing to tolerate the foreign policy established by our governing elites only so long as casualties remain low. And what permits us to fulfill this role, quite simply, is our space capabilities. Without those space capabilities, we could not fulfill the international role that we have while keeping casualties low.”


  • “Our position depends upon space, space sensors, space communications, space intelligence, and, also, guiding our weapons accurately from space.”


  • “All of this is a marvelous achievement, but it creates for us a potential vulnerability and that is if we are somehow or other cut off or our ability to utilize space is reduced, we are going to be engaged around the world in ways that the U.S. public will not particularly tolerate, in that we are likely to come home with large numbers of bodies in bags. The consequence is that the public will be turned off. So our international role might come crashing down. And the moral of the story is that we have to protect the usage of space.”


  • “There has been some discussion…of ballistic missile defense and we have at least a hypothetical program to begin to deploy interceptors at some point during the decade ahead in Alaska. But one should recall that the deployment in Alaska is only a first stage, dealing with a relatively primitive foe, and that others will discover ways or develop ways of circumventing that deployment, unless we continue to upgrade it. And one of the things that will be essential for upgrading any ballistic missile defense will be the use of space and, most notably, space sensors.”


  • “Finally, let me throw out that war games that I have participated in start with somebody firing a launcher up into space with a nuclear weapon aboard, and nuclear weapon technology is spreading slowly, happily, but slowly spreading around the world, and that the weapon in space will, over time, if not instantly, degrade our space assets. So over time, we are going to have to learn to protect those assets better against such possibilities. Part of the protection is hardening, part of the protection is redundancy, and part of the protection should be reconstitution of space capabilities.”


  • Those who are interested in asymmetrical attacks are particularly interested in those capabilities, freely or at low cost, available from space that might inflict damage on us; for example, guiding a weapon onto a U.S. military base overseas during a moment of crisis. A particularly juicy target, of course, is the Global Positioning System itself, which has a very weak, very weak signal, and that signal must be upgraded in strength. At the present time, that signal can be jammed very readily and the Russians, whom we have encouraged to learn free market ways, now have on the free market a commercial jammer that you can purchase. This would have devastating effects since our whole civilian economy has gone over to use of GPS.


  • “Some years ago, in an exercise called “Eligible Receiver,” the National Security Administration (NSA) demonstrated that they could turn off all of the power on the east coast simply by information warfare, not by jamming…, but by information warfare and breaking into the computers that control the flow of power on the East Coast, or they could have done it in the Midwest or even in Texas, which has a separate system, or on the West Coast, which has had two power blackouts over the course of recent years. Now, those of you in this room who…remember the 1967 blackout in New York City may recall the panic that ensued at the time of that blackout. So I ask you, in a moment of crisis, if somebody is able to turn off power on the East Coast or the West Coast or generally nationwide, what the response would be of the American public?”


  • “One must recognize that the Internet, that the financial community, all of these things are dependent upon the signals from space, and that creates the vulnerabilities and it is for that reason that we must convey to the Congress and to the general public, through the medium, regrettably, of the media, the high degree of dependency and get support for keeping us well out in front by the techniques of hardening, protection, reconstitution of our own capabilities, and being able to cut off others from employing those assets from space to do damage to the interest of the United States, particularly our bases overseas.“


  • “One of our problems in the civilian area is that when you go out and talk to industry, they don’t trust the government. And when you talk to the people in the financial community about sharing information, the response is, yes, but we don’t want it to be shared with the FBI or we don’t want it to be shared with the IRS. And so we’re going to have to develop a technique in which people in the private sector repose sufficient faith that they are willing to discuss the problems that are emerging with regard to hacker attacks. If you can’t deal with hacker attacks, you’re not going to deal with the attacks of some hostile power overseas. That mutual distrust is something that will have to be overcome if we are going to be able to help on the civilian side.”


  • “Another problem that we have is that as the people in the civilian community tend to think about information warfare as attacking their own firms or their own corporate world, and that the consequence is that they will be the victims of fraud. When you think about the larger possibilities of a massive information warfare attack, they say, well, that’s the responsibility of the government to solve.”


  • “Unless we are able to slow down the combination of capabilities that permit others to attack our bases overseas, a U.S. military establishment that is dependent upon overseas bases is somewhat vulnerable. You think of major engagements of the United States and the dependency upon a string of bases, say, off the coast of East Asia, that is quite worrisome, and we ought to be thinking now of ways of getting around that problem.”


  • “It is not just the national enemies that are taking advantage of these new technologies. I suppose I should have mentioned that earlier. But the criminal activities around the world, you can use the GPS system to drop — from aircraft, drop drugs off our shores at a specified point and that through GPS guidance, we get a motor launch that comes out from shore and picks up those drugs and so forth.”


  • “I think we are going to have to look increasingly at anti-satellite vehicles. We are going to have to look at a whole range of things that, for reasons of the hopeful arms controllers, we have been reluctant to look at in the past. That was a reflection of the fact that others were having — were achieving access to these technologies more slowly than one might have feared, but that era is passing.”

Organizing for Space Power

The final portion of the Roundtable involved a very animated discussion led by the former Commander of U.S. Space Command, Gen. Charles Horner. Among the most stimulating of Gen. Horner’s remarks were the following:



  • “The commercial space advantages we have are probably 99 percent based upon research and development that’s done for military space, national security space, panels, gyros, materials, launch vehicles.”


  • “I think one of the major problems we face with regard to national security space is the vulnerability of our technology base — the industrial support of space. R&D is drying up. Private companies are using their own initiative money to bid proposals, because business has gotten so hard that it doesn’t make any sense to do R&D when you don’t know whether you’re going to be in business the next year or not. And, also, there’s a constant problem with regard to attracting new, young, bright people to the space sector. Now they go to the dot-coms, as I understand it.”


  • “We saw that just recently in the Discoverer-2 [space-based radar] program. Now, you can get any kind of answer you want as to why Discoverer-2 failed or was canceled, but one of them was not military utility and another one was not technical capability. So its failure is evidence of dysfunctional relationships, in my view.”


  • “I [have] called for a space architect. I was very frustrated trying to build a unified command, integrated program list, priority list, to say these are the things that representing all the other unified commanders, this is what we want to see space go after.”


  • “It’s interesting that in the relationship between the Department of Defense and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, that cooperation is fundamental and vital to smooth working relationships between the national security space agencies. And I would challenge you to point to the meetings that have occurred in the recent years and the agendas that were discussed in those meetings. I am not aware of any.”


  • We need more public awareness and discussion. I went before the Senate Armed Services Committee and I said — I was, at the time, the Commander of Space Command, and I said that my experience in the desert, in Desert Storm, was that space had become fundamental to warfare, particularly the way we like to fight wars, and that as space became more important to warfare, space control would become more important to warfare, at which time one Senator attacked me, which didn’t bother me, but said You just want to shoot down a satellite.’

    “I said, No, sir, I didn’t say that, but if people are dying on the battlefield, we’ll have to know what to do and how to do it and get on with it.’ And finally he was brought under control by John McCain, who is a dear friend, and so we got all done and everything. That Senator is now the Secretary of Defense and he’s talking about space control. So I guess what goes around comes around.”



  • With regard to the relationship between the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the Pentagon — we’re primarily talking Air Force space. I think we have to have a coming together there. We have a lot of very talented people in the NRO and they have a history of doing some very exciting things in space. You would hope you would be able to transfer that into the Air Force space, bring our cultures together, so that you could take advantage of what the NRO has in terms of streamlined acquisition procedures, and so on and so forth, and make them work together.”


  • “There is no doubt, in my mind, we are going to have to do space control in the future, and so we ought to be honest and open about it in order to both build deterrents, because if you keep everything in the dark, there’s no deterrence, and, also, to get the American public aware of this.”


  • “I think we have to come to grips with ballistic missile defense in space. It’s going to happen. There are some impediments and treaties and the treaties and arms control things cause us a lot of problems in space. Frank [Gaffney] mentioned the one about launch notification. In and of itself, probably not a bad thing, but the trouble is it even goes to the point where, in the future, if you launch an air-to-air missile, you want to shoot down a MIG, you have to give the Russians 24 hours notice, under some interpretations of this particular treaty, and, of course, we find that ridiculous.”


  • “With regard to research and development, I think that there is a general awareness that we must increase our research and development funds across the military, and certainly space is one area where they have a lot of leverage.”


  • “The space warriors of a decade or so from now are not going to be necessarily the people that have grown up in space today, because there is a different mind set from — and if anything, I mean, one of the things that I think the fighter pilot mind-set is probably a little closer to where we need to go than the space geek mind set.”


  • “We need to have space people who understand what other people are doing to make their efforts integrate, to make their efforts of most use. But I think the other issue, the one we’re arguing, is we need people in space to provide leadership in space to promote space doctrine, not doctrine that uses space, and, of course, that’s the one that people hope that a space service would solve. Just like the Air Force cannot be ignorant of how the Army, Marine Corps, and Navy think, and now that the Navy no longer is out there in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific, they can no longer be ignorant of how the Air Force and the Army think, and the Marine Corps. So yes, there has to be an integration there, but we also have to create people who are different.

    • Discussion


  • “If we had a clear understanding of what the post-Cold War world is, what the policies are, we could devise strategy, which would then lead to forces, and that’s probably what we need to do with the new leadership coming into the White House….That would help with a lot of these issues. Then we’d know how much allocation of funds we need to put on space.

    “If you just leave it up to the Air Force, you get a third of the defense budget to do whatever you want to with it, it’s got to trade off B-2 against Discover-2. They’re not equipped to make that decision.”



  • “Quibbling over who supplies the money is kind of irrelevant to me. The issue is we have to make a national commitment, I think, in the future to say that we have a opportunity, and I think most of the people here seem to have agreed that we can have a space dominant strategy in the decades ahead, but we’re not going to get there unless we take some number of years, maybe it’s five, maybe it’s ten — it’s certainly not more than ten — and do things.”


  • “We’re going to have to take some chances here on research and development. This isn’t to deploy these things, but to go out and demonstrate them. I mean, they never did the question mark thing if they didn’t have an airplane. They had to cut a hole in an airplane. So somebody had to buy them an airplane.

    “So I think in order to do these things in space, somebody’s going to have to buy us the necessary prototypes to go demonstrate that we can do it and if we don’t do this, all this is moot.”



  • “The Chinese things we saw earlier today, about two years ago, they offered those — the University of Surrey, they offered them to us to finance them and go do these things so they could sell the capability. For various reasons, we chose not to do that. So now you see them on Chinese boosters. So there is a point of seizing the day when you have an opportunity to do it. This was an opportunity to get some foreign technology and have it here, and it’s relatively small money. That micro-sat or nano-sat that they showed earlier, that cost about 700,000 dollars, and that technology is now someplace we don’t want it. In the future, we need to be proactive on these kind of things.”


  • “When you get a corporation to extend itself out to the design capability and is just about ready go on contract, and we say, Oops, we’re sorry, we don’t want to buy that anyway,’ they have already gone through that and they’ve invested a whole bunch of infrastructure, all the way maybe to developing a set of jigs to go build this item and then we turn around and change the whole course of the way they’re going.

    “So if you look at recent articles on Fortune magazine talking about industrial base unwillingness to invest in military projects because of the uncertainty out there, so we’ve got to be able to strengthen that to the point where we say we’re on board with you, we want you to go develop radiation hard parts, because we’re going to procure X thousands. And then they can see there’s a business case there. They can go out and get the backing for that and they can make that investment and they go off and do that.

    “But right now, it’s tenuous, at best, and we’ve got to be able to stake it, right now, in ’05, I’m going to buy X millions of these parts and do these kinds of things, and then they will go out and do that. Otherwise, they’re going to turn their attention to places where they can make money.”


While no effort was made to forge a consensus on the part of the participants in the High-Level Roundtable, the sentiment among the experts, scientists, military personnel and others present seemed to be that the United States can no longer afford to ignore the growing capability of potential adversaries to exploit the vulnerability arising from the dependence of both America’s military and civilian economy on unencumbered access to and use of outer space. There appeared to be a nearly universally shared hope, moreover, that the Rumsfeld II Commission will catalyze fresh thinking on the part of the new Bush-Cheney Administration about the need for space power — and give rise to an urgent, reorganized, disciplined and far more energetic effort to obtain and exercise it.

What’s Your Line?

(Washington, D.C.): Four years ago, the moderator of tonight’s debate between the presidential candidates, PBS’ Jim Lehrer, found himself in the unhappy position of purveying questions for the 1996 contenders from an audience preoccupied with domestic affairs. At one point, he pleaded for a question about foreign policy; all that was forthcoming was a bank-shot about the trade deficit with Japan.

Tonight promises to be different. For one thing, Mr. Lehrer is asking the questions and there are few in the business more skilled at the task. And second, the evidence that foreign policy is going to become a principal preoccupation for the next occupant of the White House makes vetting Vice President Gore and Governor Bush on the emerging crises in the Middle East, the Balkans, East Asia and our own hemisphere arguably the most important purpose to which tonight’s debate — and those to come — will be put.

Questions Worth Asking

Consider a few of the questions that demand answers from the men who would be President:

  • Do you believe that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat is a reliable partner for peace with Israel given: his continuing incitement of violence — notably, the current mayhem in Israel and the disputed territories; his repeated calls for jihad against the Jewish State; and his encouragement through various means (including school textbooks) of his people’s expectations that the ultimate objective of liberating all of “Palestine” (that is, including Israel proper) will be met?

    This is a particularly important question for the Vice President since — as Robert Pollock pointed out last week in the Wall Street Journal, as a United States Senator in 1986 — Al Gore joined nearly half the Senate in writing then-Attorney General Edwin Meese demanding that Yasser Arafat be indicted for the murders of U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel and Charge d’Affaires G. Curtis Moore in Khartoum, Sudan. A follow up to the Veep might be: Since there is no statute of limitations on murder, do you still believe that Arafat should be prosecuted for this crime?

  • What would you do if Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic conjures up a crisis in Montenegro in order to justify a crack-down on his domestic opposition? The prospects for this — or some other — scenario for intensified repression by Belgrade are growing each day Milosevic refuses to honor the obvious desire of the Serb people to end his misrule and the pariah status to which it has condemned their nation.

    In light of the murderous suffering and economic mayhem Milosevic has sown in the wake of the Dayton accords, do you think the United States was right in legitimating him as an indispensable part of the “peace process” in Bosnia and Kosovo — rather than dealing with him only as the indicted war criminal that he is?

  • How would you propose to deal with the unraveling of hemispheric security as the cancer of Marxist, narco-guerrillas in Colombia begins to metastasize and spread to neighboring countries? In an article on Sunday, the Washington Post reported that, “As the Colombian government, backed by a $1.3 billion U.S. aid package, prepares an offensive against the traffickers and their allies, Colombia’s civil war is seeping into neighboring countries, and things here have suddenly taken a violent turn.” The most vulnerable of these neighbors, Ecuador, is literally being overrun with Colombian rebels in its border towns, but Brazil, Venezuela and Panama are also witnessing dramatic increases in incursions across their porous borders by the rebels and their allies.

    Doesn’t this situation demonstrate the folly of having U.S. forces removed from their forward-deployed positions adjacent to the Panama Canal and will you take steps to reverse that action?

  • What message would you convey to the People’s Republic of China, which may have been emboldened by the Congress’ recent approval of Permanent Normal Trade Relations, to dissuade Beijing from further threatening democratic Taiwan? This question is especially important as the Communist Chinese may be particularly tempted to engage in aggression if they believe a lame-duck President well-established as a “friend of China” would be unwilling to act during the interlude between the election and inauguration day.
  • In recent days there has been much discussion about energy, with each of you mapping out sharply contrasting positions concerning drawing down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and opening up part of the Alaska National Wildlife Arctic Reserve to drilling for oil and gas. The renewed focus thus placed on the importance of domestic sources of energy to our economic and national security, calls attention to a new threat to those interests:

    According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Daniel Fine, the mere threat of a ballistic missile attack against the energy sources of Alaska would, over just 10 days, so dramatically affect trading in crude oil and other commodities that it would cause a net loss to the U.S. economy of between $4 and $6 billion. How would you prevent this outcome given that North Korea is acquiring missiles of sufficient range to make such a threat credible, yet the United States still has no anti-missile defenses deployed to prevent even one such weapon from reaching our shores?

  • A new congressional analysis of U.S. relations with Russia over the past eight years concludes that: “To find a foreign policy failure of comparable scope and significance, it would be necessary to imagine that after eight years of American effort and billions of dollars of Marshall Plan aid, public opinion in Western Europe had become soundly anti-American and Western governments were vigorously collaborating in a strategic partnership’ against the United States.”

    To what extent has U.S. policy toward Russia contributed to the latter’s failure to achieve a transformation to a functioning, viable free market democracy and given rise, instead, to a newly assertive potential adversary actively colluding with Communist China via arms deals, geopolitical activities and diplomatic initiatives inimical to U.S. interests? And what would you do differently in the future?

The Bottom Line

This election is about hiring somebody capable not only of leading the Nation on education reform, tax relief, saving Social Security, providing prescription drugs to the elderly, etc. It is a moment when we will be entrusting someone with responsibility for safeguarding our vital interests and perhaps even our lives in the face of an increasingly dangerous international environment. While the full import of that danger may not become clear until after November, we had better know before then what Messrs. Bush and Gore intend to do about it.

Enriching China Unlikely to Advance U.S. National Security

(Washington, D.C.): In recent days, President Bill Clinton and his National Security Advisor, Samuel Berger, have asserted that U.S. national security requires that China receive Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status. The stridency with which they have adopted this line suggests that — despite the favorable “spin” proponents of PNTR are giving their prospects for success when the House of Representatives votes on that legislation on or about 22 May — they are having trouble overcoming skepticism concerning claims that the American economy will benefit greatly from China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). Unfortunately for the White House and its business and other allies, it is unlikely that a dangerous China will become less so if it has even more resources at the disposal of its military-industrial and security services.

To the contrary, past and present Chinese behavior — notably the following activities — strongly suggests that Chinese hardliners are exercising full control over the regime. They will likely redouble these and other efforts if they are, in effect, rewarded for them by being spared yearly NTR reviews.

A Bill of Particulars

China’s Long-term Strategy seeks to dominate Asia and become a global superpower. It is pursuing these goals with patience and determination. The People’s Liberation Army sees the United States as “the main enemy” and the only impediment to accomplishing this goal.

This strategy was brilliantly dissected recently by Mark Helprin in a recent edition of National Review entitled “East Wind.” Of particular note is Helprin’s discussion of the vital role that economic expansion plays in this strategy as summarized in Deng Xio Peng’s “16 Character” diktat which calls on the Chinese people to “Combine the military and civil; combine peace and war; give priority to military products; let the civil support the military.” No one should be under any illusion: Beijing envisions using its economic expansion to fuel its military buildup and expansionist ambitions.

  • Penetration by PLA- and Chinese government-affiliated entities of our capital markets: The problem posed by China’s economic program is not limited to trade. China is, among other things, making an increasingly aggressive bid to penetrate the U.S. capital markets — one of this Nation’s last great monopolies.

    As incredible — not to say absurd — as it may seem, U.S. pension funds, mutual funds, life insurance, corporate and private portfolios are all seen as sources of cash with which China can put our interests at risk. A case in point is an Initial Public Offering issued by PetroChina, a subsidiary of the PRC’s largest energy company — an entity providing resources that are allowing Sudan’s government to engage in activities from genocide to slave-trading to support for terrorism and the proliferation of weapons mass destruction. For companies like PetroChina, other state-owned and -affiliated “bad actors,” the vast resources of the U.S. debt and equity markets represent “found money” — funds that are undisciplined and largely non-transparent. It must be asked: To what uses will they be put?

  • China’s Military Modernization Program: A principal beneficiary of course is China’s military, which aspires to make what Mao once described as a “Great Leap Forward.” The PRC’s long-term strategy calls for the People’s Liberation Army to achieve a massive modernization program capable of transforming its 1950s and ’60s vintage equipment and tactics into those at the forefront of the 21st Century. In the hope of accomplishing this enormous task as rapidly and as inexpensively as possible, Beijing is taking maximum advantage of technology acquired legally or illegally from us, as well as through a growing strategic axis with Russia.

    Of particular concern is the emphasis being placed by the People’s Liberation Army on a doctrine that envisions using asymmetric means and technologies to counter American military power. Thus we see China pursuing: Information Warfare; weapons of mass destruction and long-range ballistic missiles; advanced nuclear-armed anti-ship missile systems from Russia designed to destroy American carrier battle groups; electro-magnetic pulse weapons; etc., rather than concentrating (for now at least) on building up conventional forces comparable to our own.

  • The PRC’s Regional Agenda: The Chinese are assiduously dividing and intimidating U.S. allies in the region — Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea. They are doing this in a variety of ways, for example, by abetting North Korean belligerence and Pyongyang’s long-range ballistic missile program, as well as by brandishing their own ability to attack even American cities like Los Angeles with nuclear weapons.

    This campaign is designed to impress upon our democratic allies that the United States is a declining and unreliable power and China a rising one in the Western Pacific and East Asia. In the absence of credible American security guarantees, China is running what amounts to a protection racket, impressing upon our friends that Beijing’s help will be needed to counter North Korean and other regional threats.

    The Chinese military is also exhibiting increasing assertiveness around the Pacific Rim and Asia — from Pakistan, to Myanmar, to Malaysia, to Taiwan and the Philippines. It is actively establishing bases, intelligence collection facilities and other dominant positions from which to project power.

  • China’s espionage: The former long-time chief of the FBI’s Chinese counter-intelligence unit, Paul Moore’s made the point in a powerful op.ed. article in the New York Times last August that the PRC is pursuing a comprehensive, patient and deadly approach to intelligence collection against this country. In so doing, he notes, Beijing appeals to and/or coerces overseas Chinese to help in that effort.

    Mr. Moore explained in his essay that such practices make it very difficult to catch, let alone to prosecute successfully someone like Wen Ho Lee, suspected of spying at Los Alamos. Such individuals generally are not doing it for the money, fancy cars or bigger houses. They may not even be aware of exactly what they are doing. This makes for a huge — and possibly insoluble — counter-intelligence challenge.

  • China’s penetration of our hemisphere: This problem has been much in the news lately, from Long Beach and Palmdale here in California to strategic bases at either end of the Panama Canal. There are estimated to be several thousand front companies working for the People’s Liberation Army and/or Chinese intelligence services in this country. The Chinese are also actively engaged in drug, alien and arms smuggling into the US. They are also actively insinuating themselves in an ominous fashion into other parts of the Western hemisphere including: Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico and Cuba.
  • Chinese proliferation: The PRC is the leading exporter of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile technology to dangerous developing nations — nations they see not as we do, as “rogue states” but as clients. Indeed, Beijing sees such trade as more than simply a means of securing vital energy resources from oil-rich countries like Libya, Iraq, Iran and Sudan.

    The Chinese also understand that, by building up the offensive power of these states, as well as that of Cuba and North Korea, their clients can help buy the PRC freedom of maneuver by distracting, tying up and otherwise stressing the world’s one global power, the United States. Proliferation can also prove helpful in increasing pressure on America’s democratic and other allies to seek China’s influence and protection. Israel’s sale of powerful early warning aircraft and other advanced weapons technology is a case in point.

    PRC efforts to increase the forces of instability around the world has even had the effect of augmenting China’s leverage on the United States as we seek its help in controlling such threats.

  • China’s penetration of our political system: Last, but hardly least, there is the matter of illegal Chinese campaign contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaigns. Is it a coincidence or is it cause and effect that Clinton has made momentous changes in granting China access to satellite and missile technology, supercomputers, embraced Beijing’s position on Taiwan, largely ignored the PRC’s violations of human rights (recently it failed to secure votes in Geneva for resolution condemning China’s record), given China access to the WTO, etc.?

    Such behavior on the part of China is all the more worrisome because it comes against the backdrop of significant internal unrest in China. Will Beijing engage in what the political scientists call “social engineering” — using phony claims of “external aggression” as a pretext for imposing greater control at home and diverting public anger from a failed government to foreign “barbarians”? Will China actually accelerate its timetable for using force against Taiwan, leading to conflict with the United States?

The Bottom Line

It is unlikely that the American economy as a whole will, on balance, benefit from granting China Permanent Normal Trade Status. There is, however, no chance that a China engaged in such an ominous array of malevolent activities while it is, at least nominally, subject to close annual scrutiny as part of the Normal Trade Status review process will become less of a threat to U.S. national security once that leverage no longer exists. Representations to the contrary are cynical, reckless and a disservice to the very important debate about PNTR now taking shape.

Nix to Blix: Man Who Certified Iraq as Non-Nuclear is Unlikely to Find — or Even to Seek — Saddam’s Hidden Weapons

(Washington, D.C.): In a hugely disappointing decision yesterday to fill a
senior UN
bureaucratic post, the Security Council spoke volumes about its depleted appetite for further
confrontations with — to say nothing of additional efforts to punish — Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein. The Security Council formally endorsed Secretary General Kofi
Annan’s
recommendation to appoint Hans Blix. a Swedish diplomat with a checkered
record, to become
the first head of the successor to the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM).

Blix was the lowest-common-denominator choice for the job after Russia, China and
France
vetoed his much more conscientious compatriot, Rolf Ekeus. He is a natural choice to run the
sort of Potemkin inspection operation that those three countries clearly have in mind for their
once-and-future client, Iraq. Given Blix’s dismal sixteen-year performance as director general
of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — an organization that had
an uncanny
track-record during his tenure of not finding evidence of nuclear weapons activities prohibited
by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Thus not only Iraq, but Iran, North Korea, Brazil,
Argentina and South Africa were among the nations that succeeded in largely concealing
indigenous or collaborative nuclear weapons programs from Blix’s IAEA.

Unfortunately, as the following, recently published editorials make clear, the Blix
appointment is
only the latest in a litany of serious mistakes made by the Clinton-Gore Administration with
respect to Iraq. If not immediately reversed, these mistakes will have the effect of empowering
and emboldening Saddam — and set the stage for serious grief for the United States and its
regional allies down the road.

Wall Street Journal, 20 January 2000

Saddam Is Reversing Gulf War Defeat

By Andrew J. Bacevich

The wrangling between Secretary General Kofi Annan and members of the United Nations
Security Council over the appointment of someone to head the United Nations
Monitoring,
Verification, and Inspection Commission may yet result in the revival of some
attenuated form
of weapons inspections in Iraq. If it does, spokesmen for the Clinton administration will no doubt
proclaim this yet another triumph of American statecraft. Doing so just might distract Americans
from the real story–namely, how during his seven years of jousting with President
Clinton,
Saddam Hussein has thwarted the U.S. at every turn. The only question is whether to
credit
the outcome to Iraqi cunning or to unvarnished American ineptitude.

U.S. efforts to subvert the Iraqi dictator’s hold on power from within have gone precisely
nowhere. In 1996, Saddam uncovered and proceeded to smash CIA operations based in northern
Iraq aimed at organizing a domestic opposition. Since that debacle–and despite congressional
prodding in the form of the Iraq Liberation Act–administration efforts to galvanize the Iraqi
opposition have been largely confined to hosting taxpayer-supported conferences in pricey
midtown Manhattan hotels.

Administration expectations that international sanctions might put the squeeze on
Saddam
have likewise produced little. Since 1993, the once robust coalition built by George
Bush has
all but evaporated. Today erstwhile American partners jockey for position to cut the best possible
deal with Iraq at the first available opportunity. Iraqi petroleum exports under the guise of
food-for-oil have now reached a post-Desert Storm high, with only the most naïve
believing that the
proceeds serve exclusively humanitarian purposes.

Most significantly, the administration has frittered away America’s dominant
position in
the Persian Gulf through its cavalier expenditure of U.S. military power. When, in the
fall of
1998, Saddam sent U.N. weapons inspectors packing, President Clinton subjected Baghdad to a
modest four-day air campaign. Advertised as a powerful setback to Saddam’s efforts to rebuild
his military machine, Operation Desert Fox amounted to little more than a pyrotechnic display
that covered a stinging diplomatic defeat for the U.S.

In the 13 months since, all but unnoticed by the American public, the U.S. has continued to
bomb
Iraq, unloading some 2,000 missiles and precision-guided bombs against several hundred targets
scattered throughout the Iraqi outback. The targets demolished with impressive skill by
American aviators are devoid of larger military significance. The likelihood that this
haphazard campaign will produce a politically meaningful result approaches zero.
Indeed,
it is not at all clear that the campaign has an identifiable political purpose.

Nominally, the administration remains committed to removing Saddam from power. In
reality,
the lack of resolve shown in the face of Iraqi defiance and the frivolousness of
American
military action tell a different story, namely that the U.S. is learning to accommodate itself
to a Persian Gulf that includes Saddam Hussein. Other nations in the region, or with
interests there, respond accordingly.

Saddam himself can hardly fail to appreciate that events are heading in his direction. Back in
January 1993, when Mr. Clinton became president, observers noted the irony that the victor in
the Gulf War had been ousted from power while the loser had managed to survive. Now it seems
all but certain that Saddam will outlast a second American president as well.

Whereas Saddam emerged from his confrontation with Mr. Bush weakened and
vulnerable, after eight years of Mr. Clinton his position grows stronger by the day. As
the
end of Bill Clinton’s two terms in office approaches, Saddam Hussein can take justifiable
satisfaction at having made significant progress toward his ultimate objective: reversing the
results of the Persian Gulf War.

Andrew J. Bacevich is director of the Center for International Relations at Boston
University.

Jerusalem Post Editorial, 23 January 2000

Iraq Quietly Consolidates

A five-member team from the International Atomic Energy Agency has arrived in Iraq, but
it
would be an illusion to think that close control over Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass
destruction is being reinstated.

The team, led by Ahmed Abuzahra of Egypt, is the first visit to Iraq by monitors from the
Vienna-based IAEA since UN weapons inspectors left the country in late 1998, never to return.
The new inspection is not connected to those mandated by the UN after Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf
War – it is a routine inventory check for nuclear material and is part of the monitoring
procedures required of all signatories to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

The issue of restoring the regime of the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection
Commission remains mired in a dispute between Secretary- General Kofi Annan and members
of the Security Council over who should head it. Russia, China, and France joined in successful
ignominious agreement to reject Rolf Ekeus, who was Annan’s choice for the job. Much
mockery was spent on Saddam’s pompous claims to have won the Gulf War in 1991, but it is by
no means clear that the murderous dictator will not have the last laugh on the issue.

He has held on to power, rebuilt his palaces, and restocked his coffers, and he has
steadily
whittled away the power and credibility of both the UN and the US. Weathering the
ineffective strikes on radar units that paint allied aircraft in the designated no-fly zones, Saddam
has reimposed his will on the outside world just by being cantankerous and devious. He has
been aided magnificently by the incompetent handling of the Iraq desk in Washington and by
misguided states scrabbling to regain commercial influence in Iraq at any cost.

It is easy to forget that while the world public and the media may have grown bored with the
tedium of stories from Iraq, Saddam has been quietly but relentless consolidating his
power
and rebuilding his strength, out of the limelight. It will be no surprise if the Middle
East and
the world gets some other nasty surprise from Iraq, which it should have been expecting but
wasn’t.

What is as puzzling as it is worrying is the apparent invisibility of any Washington
policy
on Iraq — or indeed any attempt to implement whatever shreds of policy ever existed.
Yet,
in the last 12 months, the Americans have managed to drop more than 2,000 bombs and missiles
on Iraq in those no-fly zone confrontations. The best word so far used to describe this military
campaign is “haphazard,” and it would defy the skills of any military analyst to come up with a
coherent explanation of what it is all about.

There have been two main indicators that the failed Western policy to contain
Saddam must
be blamed on American incompetence rather than Iraqi cunning. The first was the
disastrous CIA operation in Kurdish northern Iraq in 1996, which Saddam routed. The second
has been the failure to implement Congress’s Iraq Liberation Act – which was supposed to fund
the overthrow of the dictator by native opposition groups.

President Bill Clinton signed the 1998 act which was supposed to invest $97 million in this
project. Apparently only $20,000 has been disbursed to the opposition groups – enough to buy
some basic office supplies. The London office of the Iraqi National Congress, the main
democratic opposition group, shut down at the end of last year. All this dithering and
incompetence has enabled Saddam to replace his bombast after the Gulf War with a credible
claim to have rolled back allied achievements then. If anyone still thinks Saddam will be content
just with that, they will be deluding themselves.

Castro’s Slavery Dictates the Gonzales Family be Reunited in Freedom — and Clinton’s Normalization Plan Be Stopped

(Washington, D.C.): Rarely has the plight of a single human being — let alone a
six-year old boy
— so powerfully illuminated the moral underpinnings of and critical choices confronting
American security policy. The Clinton Administration’s decision to deport Elian Gonzales is
such a case, however, reflecting not only the odious lengths to which it is prepared to go to
appease Fidel Castro. It also lays bare the larger purpose of such appeasement: A
desperate
bid to normalize relations with Cuba’s totalitarian ruler before President Clinton’s tenure ends
and the opportunity is lost, possibly forever, to throw Fidel the political and economic life-line
his regime so desperately requires.

Three articles that appeared in leading papers yesterday make clear the stakes not only
for
Elian, but for a nation that would abandon him to Castro’s totalitarianism. The third, an op.ed.
article in yesterday’s Washington Times by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, is especially important
for
its insights into the kind of company the Clinton Administration is keeping — and, for that
matter,
utilizing — in its campaign to promote relations with a country the National Council of
Churches fatuously believes is committed to “removing inequities,”and therefore
justified in its
enslavement of not only political prisoners but the Cuban people as a whole.

Wall Street Journal, 10 January 2000

What Clinton Is Sending Elian Back To

By Michael Gonzalez

When I was seven or eight years old, not much older than Elian Gonzalez is today, the
principal
at my school in Cuba forced me to wear a Young Pioneer scarf. He simply announced, in front of
the whole class, that he’d had it with my refusal to join, and that I couldn’t say no any longer.
The Pioneers are the communist version of the Hitler Youth. All those kids you see on television,
wearing blue-and-white scarves around their neck and taking part in government-staged
demonstrations for Elian’s return, are Pioneers.

I had again and again, for two years, told my teachers and the principal that I would not join
the
Pioneers. I was the lone holdout in a classroom that included the children of political prisoners
and others from known anticommunist families. My conscientious objection cost the class a
100% participation rate and therefore perks such as field trips. I wasn’t the most popular kid in
school.

But my new status as a Pioneer also did not make me very popular with my father, as I had
feared. Dad had his ear glued to his (highly illegal) shortwave radio when I arrived home for
lunch. I can still picture him, sitting in his rocking chair. He was home because he was very ill;
he had two to three years left at most and he (and all of us) knew it. Just after the
revolution he
had walked away from a post as a professor of law at the University of Havana, an
institution he loved, because — the words still ring in my ears — “you can’t teach law in a
country not ruled by it.” He died soon after because lack of a proper diet aggravated his
diabetes.

It didn’t take too long for me to explain to my father why I was wearing the Pioneer scarf, or
for
him to renounce me for my weakness. He also decided that if they were going to take his family
away, there was nothing left, so he would have to go to the school and kill the principal. Since
this was the agent of government who had transgressed his family’s freedom, he was the obvious
choice. Killing the principal’s boss would have made no sense, and killing Fidel Castro was
impossible. I don’t fault my father’s logic in the slightest.

Castro had forced Cubans to hand over all their private weapons very early in his rule, but
Dad
had kept his father’s gun, thinking the ability it gave him to take one last stand for his family
against tyranny was a thread of freedom to cling on to. Again, I admire him for thinking this
way.

My grandmother had other ideas. She promptly locked her son up in his room as he was
getting
the gun, and announced to him that he would have to go through her on his way out. Mother soon
was fetched from her office, and she informed my father that he would have to do away with two
women in his family.

While he remained pathetically locked in his room, my mother walked me back to school,
still
empty of schoolchildren at lunchtime, and had a quick word with the principal as she handed
back the Pioneer neckwear. The essence of it was that her husband was very upset and that the
principal had better not try this sort of thing again. Until I left Cuba three or four years later, I
was not bothered on this score again.

My father and I made up that evening, of course, and he explained to me that once I was
living in
freedom, I’d be able to make up my own mind, and that if I then turned into a communist, that
was my business. I didn’t — far from it — and I’m glad my father decided to try to get us out,
though he did not live to see the day.

Even if you think my father may have been right about wanting to shoot the principal, you
might
wonder if he was not a bit too severe with me. I was, after all, just a kid, and the principal had
forced the thing on me. In fact, Dad understood all too well that I had had it with resistance, for
otherwise the principal really couldn’t have forced anything on me. Dad knew that after putting
up a good fight for some time, I too had had enough, and that I was more than happy to join in,
not to stand out, not to have to fight after school or suffer the taunts of others, including teachers.
That’s why he acted the way he did, and why I remain so grateful to him.

In totalitarian systems it takes desperate measures to remain an individual, to have
any
degree of autonomy even within the most narrowly defined private sphere. Our natural
instinct for survival militates against fighting the system; we have to overcome human
nature just to resist.

This is the kind of world that produced Elian Gonzalez’s father, the man who, after
Castro
organized anti-American rallies, said he wanted his son back — even though he knows that
his ex-wife, Elian’s mother, died taking the boy out, and that Elian would have a better life
in America, and not just materially. This is the world that produced the people at the
rallies, very many of whom would escape Cuba if given the chance.

And much, much worse, this is the kind of world President Clinton is sending Elian
Gonzalez back to. If he’s strong, he will survive, but I somehow think his father is very
different
from mine.

I am an American today, and I love America as only someone with my kind of background
can.
It’s going to take a lot more than a wrong decision by a discredited administration for me even to
begin to feel disappointed in this vast, generous country. But, knowing as I do what kind of place
Elian is being sent back to, I can’t help but wince at the thought of what we’re about to do.

Michael Gonzalez is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe’s editorial
page.

Wall Street Journal, 10 January 2000

‘Asides’
Father Knows Best

An analogy for the folks who want to send Elian Gonzalez back, excerpted from a posting on
Licianne.Com:

James, the father of Elian, a six-year old Negro boy, has petitioned the Superior Court for the
return of his son. James, age thirty, is a Negro slave living in Hanover County, Virginia and has
joined in a petition by his master, Robert Wortham, for Elian’s return to Hanover County. In his
court petition Wortham asserts that six-year old Elian had been taken from the Wortham farm in
Hanover County by his mother, Charlotte, a Negro woman also belonging to Wortham.

Charlotte, a runaway slave under the law, then made her way north with the boy until she
arrivedin Maryland where she unfortunately died of exposure and exhaustion.

James asserts that he wants to raise his son as a father should, that he misses his son’s
company
and laughter. James and Wortham both accuse the boy’s Philadelphia relatives of maliciously
and illegally detaining Elian. Wortham asserts that if Elian is returned to his home, Elian will be
well cared for on the Wortham farm. So do you send the boy back?

Washington
Times, 10 January 2000

National Council of Castro’s friends;
NCC should leave Elian Gonzalez alone

By Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley

The National Council of Churches (NCC) wants to send refugee Elian Gonzalez
back to
Cuba. This should come as no surprise since the NCC does not represent American
Protestants and has long served as a lobby for the Marxist dictatorship of Fidel Castro.

The NCC was founded in 1950 as a repackaging of the old Federal Council of Churches, a
body
dedicated to ecumenism and the social gospel. Though the New York based NCC gives the
impression that it represents American Christians, its member bodies amount to only about half
of American Protestants and a fourth of American Christians overall. Major NCC groups such as
the Presbyterians, Methodists and Episcopalians have been losing members in recent decades.
An examination of NCC policy statements and resolutions confirms that the NCC
leadership is far to the left of the rank and file of its own denominations.

The Council took no official notice of Mr. Castro’s rise to power in 1959 and remained silent
while Mr. Castro aligned his regime with the Soviet Union, quashed human rights and brutally
repressed dissent – exiling, imprisoning or executing nearly two-thirds of his original
revolutionary Cabinet. By 1968, when the NCC finally broke silence, nearly a million Cubans
had fled the island. The first NCC statement urged the United States to recognize the Castro
regime.

Church World Service, the NCC’s relief arm, set up the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center in
Miami but when exiles began speaking out in local churches and to the press about Cuban human
rights, NCC officials said the program “abetted our government’s effort to discredit Cuba” and
“encouraged humanitarian sentiment that generated hostile attitudes toward Cuba among U.S.
congregations.”

The NCC fired James McCracken, head of the refugee center, and replaced him with the
Rev.
Paul McCleary, who helped set up an “advocacy” office for Cuban affairs in Washington, and
who later testified in favor of Vietnamese “re-education camps.”

In 1977, a year before his election as NCC president, Methodist bishop James
Armstrong
led a delegation of American church officials to Cuba, where they supported the regime’s
repressions. Said their report: “There is a significant difference between situations
where people
are imprisoned for opposing regimes designed to perpetuate inequities, as in Chile and Brazil, for
example, and situations were people are imprisoned for opposing regimes designed to remove
inequities, as in Cuba.”

On its return from Cuba in 1977, the first official NCC delegation said they were
“challenged and inspired” by Cuba and flatly denied that the Cuban regime persecuted
Christians. The NCC stood in sharp contrast to Amnesty International, which asked to
see those
the group described as “the longest term political prisoners to be found anywhere in the world.”

In other reports, Amnesty International mentioned imprisoned poet Armando
Valladares,
who noted that Cuban officials used pro-Castro statements of American clergy to torment
prisoners. “That was worse for the Christian political prisoners than the beatings or the
hunger,” Mr. Valladares wrote. “Incomprehensibly to us, while we waited for the embrace
of solidarity from our brothers in Christ, those who were embraced were our
tormentors.”

In 1980, the NCC published a book claiming that “Cubans are the only Latin Americans who
have broken with dependent capitalism and its accompanying dehumanization of the common
people.” Further, the efforts of the Cuban government “affirm that the gospel’s command to feed
the hungry and preach good news to the poor is being fulfilled.”

That is the ethos of the current NCC leadership, which also supports lifting the U.S.
embargo.
Family reunification has nothing to do with it. The NCC leadership believes that Elian
Gonzalez will be better-off under socialism in Cuba, better-off without the right to free
speech, free association, and freedom of movement – the bourgeois capitalist vices that the
NCC believes dehumanize people.

Cuba confirms that nations that are barren of liberties are also barren of groceries. But the
NCC
believes Elian will be better-off under a regime of shared scarcity. The Council’s stand
can
only be described as loathsome, the direct opposite of the most Christ-like figure in this
episode, Elian’s mother. She died that her son might be free.

That heroic sacrifice should be respected and Elian Gonzalez should stay here. Meanwhile,
the
National Council of Churches should drop its religious affiliation and register as an agent of the
Cuban government.

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San
Francisco
and the author of “From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Witness of the National Council of
Churches.”

Future of the Panama Canal

7 December 1999
Washington, D.C.

On Pearl Harbor Day, one week before today’s official ceremony marking the United States’ relinquishing of the Panama Canal, the Center for Security Policy convened its latest High-Level Roundtable Discussion to address what comes next. This Roundtable, entitled “After the Hand-over: the Future of the Panama Canal and U.S. Hemispheric Interests,” provided an indispensable guide to the strategic challenges to American interests and security now arising in much of the Western Hemisphere — challenges that will likely be exacerbated by the loss of U.S. bases, training and intelligence capabilities and the capacity to provide physical security for Panama and the Canal, and by extension, the region.

More than 100 experienced national security practitioners, retired senior military officers, former Members of Congress, congressional aides and members of the press participated in this Roundtable. Highlights of the remarks made by the Lead Discussants and other participants in the course of this extraordinary three-and-a-half hour conversation included the following:

Overviews

The stage was set by former House Rules Committee Chairman Gerald Solomon and Admiral Leon ‘Bud’ Edney (USN, Ret.), former Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic. Rep. Solomon provided an excellent summary of how the United States came to be a party to the 1977 treaties relinquishing control over the Panama Canal and how the intervening years have proven the critics of those treaties to be right.

Rep. Solomon also read a letter prepared for the Roundtable by former Senator Paul Laxalt, leader in the Senate of the opponents to the Panama Canal Treaties. Sen. Laxalt expressed the view that, had he and his colleagues known then what is now known about the hemispheric context and Communist Chinese penetration of the Canal Zone (among other places in the region), there would almost certainly have been the votes needed to reject that accord.

Admiral Edney decried the “benign neglect” with which successive U.S. administrations have treated the Western hemisphere, giving rise to a situation in which it is too late to reconsider the wisdom of relinquishing the Canal. He also expressed grave concern at the present Administration’s failure to apply the basic tenets of the Monroe Doctrine with respect to China’s ominous and growing involvement in our backyard.

As Admiral Edney pointed out:


  • “We [have] neglected to apply the basic tenets of the Monroe Doctrine, which goes back to the fundamental history and security interests of the United States in this hemisphere….We’ve ignored that, because if anyone believes that the Hutchison Whampoa Company is like any other Western…operation and does not have a direct security interest and intelligence-gathering interest to the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese government, they are sadly mistaken and naive.”




  • “Dependable access to the Panama Canal is essential to the hemispheric national security and economic needs of the United States.”




  • “We are also being naive if we believe the assurances of the current political announcements coming out of Washington that say that the only non-democratic [government] in the hemisphere is Cuba. If you consider that Haiti is a democracy — and all those other southern and Central American countries that are struggling with improvements — are consolidated democracies which includes a free press, balanced security interests and which includes a financial rectitude, and viable parties — then you look at the world through much more rose-colored glasses than I do.”




  • “As always, we have the right to go back in, but…it’s easier to get out than it is to get back in. And I view this kind of event which has been going on…since 1977 and now is going to be finally accomplished on the 31st of December, as a sad day for the United States of America.”




  • Admiral Edney also warned about the decision effectively to halt the use of the live-fire training range on the island of Vieques near Puerto Rico. He observed that, without access to that unique facility, the Navy will have no need for the near-by Roosevelt Roads naval base, giving rise to a likely withdrawal from the latter.


In addition, the Roundtable benefitted from written inputs by two of the Nation’s most eminent security policy practitioners. Former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger observed:


    “In the context of a general ongoing Chinese shift toward more outward-looking activities and in keeping with their three millennia of statecraft, it is not logical to assume that they would pass up a chance to acquire a major foothold in one of the world’s three major naval choke-points — especially if it can be done with little cost or risk. It suits their diplomatic, economic, military and intelligence interests, just as such a capability in potentially unfriendly hands can be a threat to ours.”

In a letter to the Senate’s President pro tem, Senator Strom Thurmond, publicly released at the Roundtable, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer rebutted the proposition that the 1977 treaties mitigate security concerns arising from the Chinese or others’ ability to interfere with Canal operations:


    “Right of passage in an emergency is too time sensitive for Panamanian court action or administrative rulings by Panamanian bureaucrats when the safety and effectiveness of our forward deployed units are threatened. Further, with the current departure of our forces it may be only a short period of time before that vacuum is filled by hostile foreign troops which could, in turn, make any current plan, law or treaty ineffective. With U.S. forces no longer present, the likelihood of damage by terrorists or similar catastrophes that could put the Canal out of commission is increased.”

The Roundtable next focused on three subjects: 1) The Strategic Environment — Ominous Developments in the Hemisphere; 2) The Abiding Strategic, Military and Economic Importance of the Panama Canal to the United States; and 3) Is China an Emerging Threat to the Canal — and to Hemispheric Security More Generally?

Strategic Environment

This first section featured lead discussants: Dr. J. Michael Waller, Vice President, American Foreign Policy Council; Dr. Norman Bailey, former Senior Director, International Economic Affairs, National Security Council; Tomas Cabal, journalist and professor, University of Panama; and Dr. Constantine Menges, former Senior Director for Latin America, National Security Council.

Among the topics discussed in this section were: the instability in Columbia, which is facing challenges from three armed groups; the growing authoritarianism, leftist radicalism and anti-Americanism of Venezuelan President Chavez; the increasingly warm entente between China and Cuba; escalating economic difficulties and rampant corruption in Mexico and Ecuador; and drug-, arms- and alien-smuggling by the PRC, the Russian mafia, the made-over KGB and other parties in the region. Of particular note were the following:

Dr. J. Michael Waller


  • “General Charles Wilhelm, who is the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Southern Command, is constantly telling anyone who will listen that our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities and assets in the region are terribly eroded — in some places virtually completely eroded. We have extremely limited resources, yet more problems and more duties than ever before.”




  • “The first [problem], obviously, is Panama and the whole question of what are the Chinese companies involved with Panama. When you figure that the Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott, takes a personal interest in the story, has the Senate Armed Services Committee hold a hearing on this exact question, and then won’t invite a single expert witness on China or the Chinese military or Chinese enterprises and treats it as a Latin America event….[and] after four hours of testimony, Senator Bob Smith asked each of the administration witnesses, as well as the head of the Panama Canal Commission, the American deputy head of the Commission, a State Department official, and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for SOLIC and said, ‘what do you know about Chinese companies and their service in the interest of the Chinese military,’ and all of them said they didn’t know, yet all had just been testifying for four hours on the fact that this company, Hutchison Whampoa presented no threat at all.”




  • “The problem is a lot larger than Panama [insofar as] you have a lot of these small island republics in the Caribbean becoming independent little narco-states of their own, where they have banking secrecy laws, where you can buy passports. You have all these Ukrainians and Russians running around with Dominican or St. Lucia passports. You have even some countries where we’re running our new counter-drug operations out of which have huge drug operations of their own, particularly in the Netherlands Antilles.”




  • “And you have Cuba, which has not only been allowing certain types of trafficking to be run through Cuba as a transshipment point, and has not only allowed the Russians to upgrade their electronic intelligence facilities, but is also allowing Russia to begin flying Tupalev 160 strategic nuclear bombers in and out of there again. [Havana] has brought the Chinese in now to set up at least two electronic intelligence facilities of their own, as well, on their territory.”




  • “Now, I’d like to comment a little bit on Colombia….First of all, they seem to be losing…the drug war down there, both the opium poppies and the coca….You have a very high morale, very aggressive, very professional, very honest, and very trusted police force there….Now, the goal, obviously, is to help the army do the same thing. But the Colombians are being hamstrung for a couple of things. First, lack of commitment of the United States to make fighting the drug war a priority. We send down antiquated equipment, completely insufficient equipment with insufficient quantities or with, in the case of the Blackhawks, insufficient or nonexistent spare parts….




    “But also, we have encouraged them to get into this peace process with the guerillas. There are two Marxist guerilla groups, the FARC and the ELN. They’re both Marxist. The FARC is mostly rural-based, but with the peace process, the Colombians, with U.S. cajoling, have given them a demilitarized zone about the size of Switzerland, which they’re using not only to regroup and to resupply and to build themselves up and probably to launch attacks on Bogota….Also, they’re inviting in foreign investments. And who are the foreign investors they’re bringing in? The Iranians.”

Norman Bailey

  • “Just a very few words about Ecuador. To start out with, Ecuador is in the process of disintegration — socially, politically, and economically, having suffered through El Nino and the drop in oil prices, but particularly a series of governments which can only be described as an amalgamation of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers put together.




    “The result of that has been a situation at the present time in Ecuador where the country is…totally bankrupt, where everyone is at everyone else’s throat, where the government has no authority and no control over much of anything. The armed forces have recently been making some not terribly subtle statements about how awful the civilians are running things, and I don’t think it’s out of the question, although I’m certainly not predicting it…that there will be some kind of (probably somewhat disguised) military coup in Ecuador.”



  • “The Venezuelan situation is extremely volatile and extremely dangerous. You have a former coup leader who’s been elected president of Venezuela. This is a man who is following through on the plan that he developed through many years of conspiratorial activities, and during his time in jail….Mr. Chavez is deadly serious about what he intends to do with Venezuela, and anyone who is still under any illusions as to what he has in mind can only be described as a complete and utter fool, not to put a fine point on it. What he does have in mind is to become a civilian dictator with the support, not only the support of the armed forces, but with the military in many of the most important positions in the country.




    “As far as the United States is concerned, there are many dangers to that situation. The most dangerous of all is the fact that as a result of [Chavez’s] total mismanagement and likely future worse management of the economic situation, petroleum production in Venezuela is likely to peak and decline, whereas it should have, if properly managed, continued to increase and Venezuela, depending on which month you’re talking about, is either the first or second petroleum supplier to the United States.”



  • “[Chavez] also is very actively interfering in his neighbors’ business. He has reawakened the boundary dispute with Guyana on one border and he has actively interfered in the so-called peace process in Colombia, interestingly enough, on the side of the guerillas. He was stationed on the border during a substantial period of his military career and he established excellent relations with the Colombian guerillas and he maintains those relations. And he and Fidel Castro have every intention of being involved in the so-called peace process, and in the case of Castro, of course, with the agreement and at the request of the Colombian president, about which more later.”




  • “The Colombian situation is one of extreme danger and instability. You have five different armed forces fighting each other for control of the national territory. Some comments have been already made about the situation. The aspect that I would most like to comment on is the fact that the border with Panama is totally uncontrolled. Panama has absolutely no capacity whatsoever to control their own border with Colombia. The guerillas of the FARC and the ELN and the paramilitary forces go in and out of Panama at will.”




  • “The more serious aspect of it is the fact that there is no security in the Canal area. Once the American forces have evacuated and most of them are gone already and they’ll all be gone by the end of this month, the security situation in the Canal Zone is absolutely nonexistent….There is no security. The possibility of sabotage on the part of Colombian groups, on the part, for that matter, of any other kind of terrorist group and so on, are enormous and would be extremely easy to carry out.”


Tomas Cabal


  • “The increasing presence of Red China and their companies, which in the long run, may provide a threat to the geopolitical interests of Panama and the United States.”




  • “I do think that there still is a window of opportunity which has been presented by the current administration’s opening negotiations of a wide security agreement with the Republic of Panama. As part of that negotiation, the government has already set aside portions of Howard Air Force Base, Rodman Naval Station, the communications center at Curacao, and facilities on the Atlantic side of Fort Davis and at the general training school at Fort Sherman.”




  • “There is also a possibility that Panama can extend either forward operating landing rights for American aircraft or simply to reach a new agreement to utilize Howard Air Force Base for American aircraft. It seems to me ironic that the Clinton administration will be spending $100 million to upgrade an Ecuadorian air base…and they’re also negotiating with the governments of Curacao and Aruba to secure landing rights. When you add those figures to the increased fuel bill [entailed in] operating AWACS aircraft out of Key West, then one fails to understand why the Clinton administration could not agree that some type of economic package could have been signed and secured with the Panamanian government.”


Constantine Menges


  • “The situation that I think is emerging now is a new constellation of threat that involves: the Castro regime, as always, using its covert resources through its intelligence service and its long-established connections in the region; the emerging radical military dictatorship in Venezuela; and then, with its large checkbook and political influence operations, Communist China is moving into the region both in the Panama Canal zone — having through corrupt means won that contract to manage the ports….I think this context of simultaneous threat is something that requires thought and action.”




  • “Colonel Chavez has had a life-long history of activism on the radical left….Reliable reports indicate that he lived for a time with the Colombian communist guerillas in Colombia; in 1996, Chavez was engaged in smuggling weapons of the Venezuelan armed forces to the Colombian guerillas. And in his established political movement and in his campaign for the presidency in 1998, he received extensive support, financial and otherwise, from Saddam Hussein and the regime in Libya.”




  • “And, in fact, having taken office as president in February 1999, Colonel Chavez has, in my judgment, essentially acted time after time contrary to the existing constitution of Venezuela….He has also established his control over the armed forces, bringing back to the military the people who were his fellow coup- plotters, the officers. They’re now in charge of the military, the intelligence services, the national guard. He has established parallel military committees in 16 of the 22 states of Venezuela that have, in fact, taken over the governmental functions of the elected governors of the states.”




  • “Chavez has gone to China. He has gone to Cuba on November 18 and told Castro once again that he is ‘with Castro.’ ‘Castro is not alone.’ He will lead the Venezuelan people to ‘the same sea as Castro has led the Cuban people….’ And we see a situation where this regime, in my view, will, once the dictatorship is consolidated there, it is still not too late.”




  • “We see a situation where, in my view, Colombia is very fragile. It is a country in which the Communists can come to power either through power-sharing, the false kind of political settlement that was attempted in the 1980s, or through a victory leading to a collapse of the armed forces and taking power more or less in the Vietnam scenario or the China 1949 scenario. It is in a very fragile situation. Castro hopes to use Colonel Chavez as his ostensible neutral intermediary to try to persuade the Colombian president to accept conditions politically that would lead to the end of democracy in Colombia and to the victory of the communists.”


Discussion


  • “There are people in this Administration who have told me, very high level, that the canal is going to be closed”




  • “All polls indicate that over 76 percent of the Panamanian people welcome a continued military presence of the United States in Panama.”




  • “The new Foreign Minister of Panama, Aleman, said, under no circumstances would the American military be permitted to return to Panama.”




  • The Clinton Administration made no real effort to pursue negotiations with the Panamanians to permit the U.S. to maintain a military presence in Panama.




  • It is offensive to the people of Panama than neither President Clinton nor Vice President Gore [nor even Secretary of State Albright] will be present for the hand-over ceremony.


The Continuing Importance of the Panama Canal

The Symposium next moved onto its discussion of “The Abiding Strategic, Military and Economic Importance of the Panama Canal to the United States” with Lead Ddiscussants: Vice Admiral James Perkins (USN Ret.), former Deputy Commander-in-Chief , U.S. Southern Command, and former Commander, Military Sealift Command; and Lieutenant General Gordon Sumner (Ret.), former Chairman, Inter-American Defense Board.

These distinguished former military officers and other knowledgeable participants confirmed that U.S. economic and military interests would be seriously and adversely affected should the Nation be denied the use of the Canal for a protracted period of time — or even a relatively short period at a strategically inopportune juncture. The following comments were of particular interest:

Admiral Perkins


  • “[The United States] spends millions of dollars in places [whose names] end in “stan” and we spend so little time, effort and money in our own hemisphere from a military standpoint.”




  • “Day-to-day, pound-for-pound, I think we get more bang for the buck as Americans from the mentoring and the training and the example that these young men and women provide to the Latin American militaries than any other place in the world.”




  • “Civilian control of the military is not a proud tradition in that part of the world, and I think the example that our sailors and soldiers and airmen and Marines and Coast Guardsmen provide on a day-to-day basis is absolutely essential to continuing the process of civilian control of the military in Latin America, which is doing pretty well in some places, not doing so well in others. It’s a tenuous sort of day-to-day thing.”




  • “[The United States relies on] the Military Sealift Command in time of war or national emergency to deploy the force by sea. Ninety-five percent of the stuff that went to the Gulf went on a ship….and I think that’s become more and more important as we pull back from Germany and from Europe and from other places and become, in fact, a continental army.”




  • “From my perspective as a Military Sealift commander, clearly, there are other ways of getting to places besides going through the Panama Canal — but it takes longer and it’s harder. So [as] we look very closely at the Panama Canal, we’re concerned as it evolved toward the 31st of December this year.”




  • “…The counter-drug effort that was mounted out of Panama was significant. Howard Air Force Base, a piece of it in airborne surveillance and interceptors, is absolutely critical. I’m very concerned that the basing arrangements that we’ve ginned up since that time in Ecuador and in the islands are going to be sufficient to pick up the slack.”




  • “Plus, another threat to the canal and to Panama itself is the narco-threat. It was clear to me when I was there that the Darien province down on the border with Colombia is full of narco- guerillas. They used to use it for a ‘rest and relaxation (R&R)’ camp at one stage. Without the deterrent factor of U.S. military troops in Panama, one has to wonder, what’s the next logical step? I don’t think it’s necessarily a good one.”


General Gordnon Sumner


  • “This country has been focused East versus West….We have strategic myopia when it comes to the Western Hemisphere. The tragedy is that as far as the professional life of a military officer is concerned,, the Western Hemisphere is a backwater. It is a backwater. We have about 1,000 general and flag officers in the Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Army….We have about a dozen out of 1,000 assigned to the Western Hemisphere. That gives you exactly what this country thinks strategically of this hemisphere.”




  • “This is a major problem for this country. The last time we went in there, we were on the ground, and I was very much involved with getting Max Thurmond to run that operation. We were on the ground. Wait until we try to go in the next time and the FARC is on the ground, the ELN, the Chinese.”




  • “[Former Panamanian Dictator] Omar Torrijos told me…the winds of communism were coming [from the East]. Right now, the winds are blowing from the West, the Chinese winds.




    “But we have a strategic problem here that I don’t see anyone in the executive branch of the government dealing with, and very few people in the legislative branch of the government dealing with. History has a way of coming up, and a major power that…does not understand its national interest [is] destined to the ash heap of history.”

Discussion

  • Concern was expressed that Russia’s SVR, the successor to the KGB, and Russian organized crime is also exploiting the perceived vacuum of power and growing instability in Latin America. Evidence was cited that Iraq and Iran are doing so, as well.




  • “But to offer some thoughts on what can be done on Panama, there’s a newly-elected president….I think the United States Government, members of Congress, could write a letter to the President and perhaps try and get the President to focus on this in a competent way, in spite of his extraordinary comment on November 30, as reported by Reuters, that he thought the Chinese would do a very efficient job in managing the canal (subsequently corrected by the State Department spokesman to indicate that he meant the Panamanians would do an efficient job. But he actually meant the Chinese, because the question was specifically asked him about the Chinese.”




  • “If you look at OPEC production, it’s 30 million barrels a day, 15 million of which Chavez and the radicals will control. The price has gone up a large amount, from 12 to 24, since he’s become president. The oil weapon against the industrial democracies, I think, is part of this. Global production is 72 million barrels a day, so there’s enough supply to overcome it in time, if it’s dealt with in time.




    “Russia produces seven million barrels a day. So if it adds to the 15 million that the Chavez group will have in OPEC, you’ve got 22 million a day. You actually have a situation in which, at a number of different levels, political [steps], covert action, the oil weapon, the radical entente can start and reinforce and act against the interest of the United States and its major allies, and I think that’s happening.”



  • “I think that if leaders in Congress will focus on the Hutchison Whampoa issue in the next week and will make public statements — whether they go to Panama or make them here — it can be an issue in Panama and we can get some traction among those people in Panama who might agree with us….After all, the bribes were not paid to the current administration. And, after all, Ambassador Hughes, Clinton’s own ambassador, called it a corruptly concluded agreement.




    “This is the starting point. If we break the dam on this, it paves the way for making progress in other areas. I think we should focus on canceling the Hutchison Whampoa contract. But that will be achieved only if there is some indication from elected officials of the United States Government that there is a concern about it.”

A particularly noteworthy intervention was made by Major General John Thompson (USA), the current Chairman of the Inter-American Defense Board. Speaking in a personal capacity, Gen. Thompson spoke passionately about the need for a greatly increased focus by U.S. executive and legislative branch policy-makers on hemispheric security matters in the wake of the Canal’s handover. Special and urgent attention needs to be paid to the fact that “Important U.S. strategic interests in Colombia are dying the death of 1,000 cuts every day.” According to General Thompson:

  • “One of the things that’s very important that this group can do a lot to help is that we can require our political leaders to have a deeper understanding of the tremendous interest that America has in this hemisphere. Indeed, there have been significant changes in the security paradigm. With the end of the Cold War, there are new forces that are unleashed. There are new expectations that people have all over the world, but especially in this hemisphere, and as we have heard ample evidence of today, there are an awful lot of very serious problems, we could almost say conundrums, facing some of the democracies of this hemisphere.”




  • “I don’t know how many of you read an article about four weeks ago in the Washington Times written by Bobby Charles….But Bobby’s article expressed his deeply-felt disappointment and frustration over Congress’ inability to come to grips with important American strategic interests in Colombia and to take bipartisan action to help a country, a longstanding, albeit imperfect, democracy that Colombia is who is dying the death of 1,000 cuts almost every day while her great friend, the United States, sits by shaking our head, spending more energy discussing the imperfections that exist in Colombia than doing anything of the many things that are within our power to do something about.




    “Colombians are not asking Americans to die for them. They were terribly embarrassed that five Americans died several weeks ago in a tragic aviation accident. They don’t want our soldiers to come to die for Colombia. But they do need help.”



  • “In the past, not only have we not helped the Colombians help themselves, we have refused them access to materials that they wanted to buy from us when they were in much better economic condition. And they’re still desperately trying to get materials from us. Many of us here should be doing a better job of advocating their interest.”




  • “We [‘Cold Warriors’] still believe that there are people out there who mean us ill. I find many of my friends in this town amused when I suggest that there are people who are waging psychological warfare against our society and against the other democracies of this hemisphere. I absolutely know that that is true, but I don’t think it’s politically correct to talk like that today.”


Is China an Emerging Threat?

The final segment of the CSP Roundtable dealt with the topic “Is China an Emerging Threat to the Canal — and to Hemispheric Security More Generally?” It featured as Lead Discussants: Al Santoli, the editor of the American Foreign Policy Council’s China Reform Monitor and congressional investigator; Roger Robinson, former Senior Director of International Economic Affairs, National Security Council; and Dr. Richard Fisher, Office of Rep. Chris Cox. Among the important interventions offered in this section was a contribution by Edward Timberlake, co-author with William Triplett of the best-selling books Year of the Rat and the newly released Red Dragon Rising.

During this section the Roundtable heard additional, compelling evidence of: China’s cooperation with Cuba in areas of intelligence; the PRC’s willingness to use “engineer battalions” to introduce military personnel into the Western Hemisphere under the guise of infrastructure construction; Beijing’s use of military-to-military ties with Ecuador to acquire “aggressor” training for the People’s Liberation Army to defeat the tactics and weapon systems the United States has employed and has shared with its allies; the PLA and other Chinese entities’ increasing exploitation of American debt and equities markets to raise large sums of money for activities — whether in Venezuela, Sudan, Iraq or elsewhere — that are highly inimical to U.S. interests; and Chinese attempts to penetrate, corrupt or otherwise undermine democratic processes in the hemisphere. Among the most noteworthy points were the following:

Al Santoli


  • “[There] is a Chinese-language publication produced by the People’s Liberation Army early this year called Unconventional Warfare, written by two strategists who are colonels in the PLA. Since this book has come out, it’s gotten some attention in terms of their concepts of asymmetrical warfare, non-conventional warfare, which is the way that they’re studying the Gulf War and studying what we have done in Kosovo and other places. [Their focus is on] how to defeat the United States. Myself being a part-time martial artist and understanding some of the general concepts of how you take down a bigger opponent, you a) look for their weaknesses and b) you try to defeat them with their own strength.




  • “And so what I see the Chinese doing now in Panama is a microcosm of this, is a triangulation of the United States — a triangulation involving: ports (Bahamas and Panama’s Colon grigiop, which are the two major ports in the Southern hemisphere, very closely tied to our economy; Vancouver, above us on the coast, as well as setting up shop throughout Canada. And this is one of the things that has shocked Canadian security officials, is the extent that Li Ka-shing, Henry Fox, Stanley Ho, and some of the others who are tied into the Riadys and the CPP group in Thailand, all of whom are Chuchao Chinese.“




  • “[In the] November 2, 1999 [editions of] the Hong Kong Ming Pao Chinese language newspaper was a story where they were citing Chinese military sources about how the PLA navy is now refitting COSCO ships for, specifically, they went into in the outset of the story, warfare against Taiwan. (We know that COSCO is the merchant marine, besides the chief merchant fleet, it’s also the merchant marine for the PLA.) In this particular article, they went into detail of how these COSCO ships are being refitted for the event of an invasion of Taiwan.




    “However, deeper into the story that goes into how Haifeng container ships are being reequipped to stay within the merchant fleet, but at the same time to be able to conduct military operations, such as sealing off the sea, fighting submarines, controlling air space, mine-laying and mine-sweeping, and monitoring missions, for example, blockade warfare and information warfare, using counter-electronics and other means.”



  • “Li Ka-shing and Hutchison are directly involved with COSCO, not only in our own hemisphere. COSCO is a big user of the Panama Canal with or without Hutchison, but they are partners with Hutchison, but also North Korea. Li Ka-shing and Hutchison have the only outside foreign port holdings in North Korea, and tell me if anybody in this room would think the North Koreans would have somebody hold the ports if they were not part of the Chinese communist government and closely connected to the Chinese military.”




  • “If we go to war with China over Taiwan, in our hemisphere, if they want to block our shipping, our supplies, or just to create financial [and] economic warfare, they are in position to do so. And the maintenance of the canal and their port facilities on that canal, in tandem with their control of Freeport, Bahamas, as well as Vancouver ports, as well as COSCO activities up and down our coast, is a strategic advantage for the Chinese.”


Roger Robinson


  • “China, as many of you know, is in a kind of energy crisis itself….they are net importers today of about 1.5 million to 2 million barrels per day. By 2009, that number is expected, very conservatively, to grow to 11 million barrels a day. So they really are scouring the earth for oil, and not surprisingly, they have decided to forego what’s called the Japan model in the oil business, particularly for large importers.”




    “In doing so, it really means that they’re not going to rely on world market mechanisms. They’re not going to buy their oil on the spot market, for example. They don’t trust it. They want what MIT Professor Dan Fine…calls “flagship assets” to secure physical product. It’s the old fashioned way. The dirt and the oil in the ground is what they have in mind.”



  • “Now, prior to coming to this subject, we’ve been sort of following China National Petroleum Corporation, particularly in other areas of concern from a national security perspective, the most immediate being the Sudan….Well, it turns out that China National Petroleum, just to give you an example, because I think it’s relevant to the Venezuela case, has put about $1.5 billion to $2 billion in Sudan, so far. They’re planning to ramp up to $5 billion.”




  • “The Chinese government with its flagship China National Petroleum [has] a flag asset putting down concrete stakes. Now, just to give you a sense of where else they’re hanging their hat: They have about $1.4 billion in Iraq, all primed and ready to go the first day that the sanctions are lifted, which, of course, they’re working daily to do against Saddam Hussein. And they’re also involved in a trans-Iranian pipeline. In other words, they find out where we can’t be and they march in there, sometimes with conventional weapons, not to mention a fat wallet, in places like Sudan, and with more exotic weaponry, components for weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile delivery systems and the like [on offer] for their Iranian and Iraqi partners.”




  • “Not surprisingly, they warmed up to the Chavez idea in a very profound and quick way. Thus far, China Petroleum has put in some $750 million…into Venezuela. They’ve already been awarded some of the highest quality blocks (as they’re referred to) of offshore oil deposits. And just two months ago, when the first Venezuelan oil arrived in Beijing, it wasn’t some quiet, discrete event that you’d [expect from] a commercial venture. [Rather], it was greeted with almost a state visit, I mean, major fanfare. And that was, of course, about the time that Chavez showed up in Beijing to identify himself with the Maoist revolution — just as he did so in the case of Havana more recently.”




  • “Now, the tragic part about this is that the U.S. investor community may be providing multi-billion-dollar support for China Petroleum’s consolidation of its activity in Venezuela, not to mention the new signals intelligence listening post in Cuba and their other hemispheric penetrations with an announced listing on the New York Stock Exchange in January or February of this year with an initial public offering estimated between $5 and $10 billion. The best number I have is $8 billion, which would make it by far the largest IPO in New York Stock Exchange history, led by one of the premier U.S. investment banks in this country and involving almost all of the others because of the size of the offering.”


Richard Fisher


  • “My conclusion, based on my own review of developments and the facts as they stand, is that there is nothing phony about China’s interests south of our border and we have every reason to be wary, if not scared. This is a serious undertaking on the part of the People’s Republic of China. I am very thankful for Al Santoli’s expansive and round explanation of how the unofficial and the underworlds of the Chinas collude and combine with the open and the business world to advance the interests of the PRC, and Roger’s eloquent explanation of the paramount economic interests that we must never forget.”




  • “China is pursuing their own interests, and they are preparing, not just south of our border but around the world, for the day — sooner, they hope, rather than later — [when] China will be exercising power, political power, military, economic power, on a par with our own, if not beyond. I am almost certain that this is not an immediate goal, it’s a medium-term goal, possibly by the year 2030, 2050, to be as influential in our hemisphere potentially as we are today. I point to activities that are already underway as signs to me, as demonstrations to me that this process is continuing apace and accelerating.”




  • “I also look to the accelerating level of People’s Liberation Army diplomacy in our hemisphere. I think it’s instructive, it may be obvious or simplistic, but the PLA’s power position within the People’s Republic automatically creates an affinity with militaries in our hemisphere that also have a tradition of political involvement and political activity.




    “My cursory review of the FBIS files of the last year lead me to conclude that, roughly, PLA delegations [and] South American and Central American delegations have had contacts that would roughly cover 80 percent of the countries south of our border. There’s a lot there for the PLA to work for and many reasons for the PLA to want to expand these relationships.”



  • “[For example,] ten years ago, Brazil and China entered into a codevelopment enterprise to build an earth resources satellite, the CBERS, China-Brazil Earth Resource Satellite. It had a long gestation period. It had some financial difficulties. But on this past October 14, the satellite was launched successfully. [True,] it supplies low-resolution imagery best mainly for following vegetation in agriculture matters, but this is just the beginning. China has benefitted from some technology that only Brazil could acquire, and where could this go?




    “Well, if you look at the globe, Brazil is almost on a polar opposite position from the PRC. In order to be supporting a robust civil and military space presence, China needs to establish a global ground- tracking network. There have been reports that Brazil is considering cooperation with China in this area. China already has a ground tracking station in Tarawa….But Brazil, Tarawa, Pakistan, a few places in Africa, and voila, China has a global space tracking network, and in a few years, when China has its own one meter or better imaging and radar satellites, it can then begin to [employ] in the same kind of strategic information that we’ve been trafficking in for years to our own benefit. China will play that same game to its benefit south of our border.”

Discussion

  • “Many people in the government, in the Panamanian government, believe that, somehow, you need to play the game of pitting the Taiwanese against Communist China in an effort to get much more resources. However, as one of the government’s advisors told me one time, the problem with Red China is that they don’t seem willing or able to come up with anything in exchange for this diplomatic recognition.”




  • “However, what we’re noticing now is that, apparently, in conversations with the Chinese, they have told the government of Panama that, if there is a switch in allegiance (i.e., in effect, if they abandon Taipei)…then hundreds of millions of dollars needed by the current Panamanian administration will be forthcoming (not necessarily through the Chinese government directly, but through their international corporations).”


While no effort was made to reach a formal consensus among the Roundtable’s participants, the President of the Center for Security Policy, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., who chaired the session summarized the points that seemed to enjoy broad support. These included the following:


  • “I’ve been impressed by the description of how serious the problem is in our hemisphere. Even as of this morning, when I was writing about it, I think I hadn’t fully appreciated just how much the peril to American interests, certainly over the medium, if not the nearer, term are, not only in Panama, but in Venezuela and Colombia, and obviously in Cuba”




  • “We’ve had several good suggestions made as to things that can be done now, first and foremost, I gather, being challenging Hutchison Whampoa’s corrupt transactions; assuring that American companies can get access to some of the bases that are up for grabs now, as well, hopefully, as Balboa and Christobo; developing Congressional interest in and support for finding ways to effect these kind of turnarounds; and also for helping Colombia and for dissuading the countries of the region from accepting what seems to be the open invitation of the Chinese corps of engineers to come in and build infrastructure for them.”




  • “And not least, of course, I think the point that was made several times in the course of the day, that there’s an awful lot riding on what happens in Venezuela over the next few weeks. It does seem to me it bears considerable attention and creative thought to think about how, without becoming involved unhelpfully in the internal political affairs of a country, the common interest in having democracy survive the present crisis in Venezuela does seem to me to be generally viewed here as something we ought to be giving serious attention and thought to.”

Hard Questions About the Coming War in Colombia

(Washington, D.C.): Over the past two nights, Dan Rather, reporting from Colombia, has
capped
off the CBS Evening News with a stark wake-up call: The United States is becoming
increasingly embroiled in the narcotics-underwritten mayhem that is engulfing that
Central American nation, putting vast quantities of drugs on this country’s streets and
threatening to destabilize Colombia’s region from Brazil to Mexico.

The Shape of Things to Come

As the CBS broadcast of 11 August put it:

    “Very rapidly in recent weeks, the following things have happened — it appears
    suddenly — to put Colombia very much on Washington’s radar screen: First, the crash
    of a US military reconnaissance plane that killed five Americans on an anti-drug
    mission last month. Two of the bodies were returned today. Then, the sudden arrival
    of the Clinton administration’s drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, who, in a reversal of
    policy, called for up to $1 billion to be spent fighting what he now calls narco-guerrillas….The
    highest level talks in Bogota in a decade were held this week between
    U.S. and Colombian officials. That reflects general confidence in the new Colombian
    government, but also alarm over the fact that an estimated 40 percent of the country is
    already in rebel hands    .

    “There is also a growing fear, even among government officials, that the crisis in
    Colombia could spread to the surrounding countries. These nations, many of
    which are newly established democracies, including Ecuador, Peru, Brazil and
    possibly even Venezuela and Panama, can not afford to have their fragile
    democracies wrecked by insurgents as is happening in Colombia.”

This “fear” was most recently publically described by Assistant Secretary of
State for
International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Rand Beers in testimony on 6
August
before the Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources Subcommittee of the House
Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. Despite a determined effort to find grounds
for optimism, Secretary Beers opened his remarks to Congress by declaring:

    “It is difficult to describe the current situation in Colombia without sounding
    alarmist.     Colombia’s national sovereignty is increasingly threatened by a resurgent
    guerilla movement, a violent illegal paramilitary movement, and wealthy narco-trafficker
    interests. Although the central government in Bogota is not directly
    threatened at this time, control over large swaths of the countryside is limited to non-existent. It
    is in these very areas where the guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and
    narcotics traffickers flourish.”

A Need to Know

Now that the American people and their elected representatives are being encouraged to
focus on
the unraveling state of affairs in Colombia, they are entitled to answers to, among others, the
following pertinent questions that have bearing on Clinton Administration policies beyond
Colombia:

  • What role, if any, is Fidel Castro’s government currently playing in aiding and
    abetting
    “narco-guerrillas”     with which his regime has had long-standing ties? At a minimum,
    according to a 29 January article in the London Financial Times, the Colombian
    drug
    traffickers are using Cuba as a drug market and as a favored “cleansing route” employed to
    reduce the opportunities for detection, contributing to what is said to be a more-than-doubling
    during 1998 over previous years in the frequency of drug cargoes dropped by air traffickers
    into Cuba waters for pickup by smugglers. The principal destination for such narcotics is the
    U.S. market.

    Were Castro to be exploiting this opportunity to achieve two of his well-established
    objectives — subverting democracies in Latin America and inflicting harm on the United States —
    the case for rejecting the Clinton Administration’s efforts to normalize relations with his
    brutal totalitarian regime (the most recent manifestation of which is the sanctioning of
    charter flights to Cuba from New York and Los Angeles) is all the stronger.     1

  • What part is Communist China playing in fomenting narco-activities that are
    destabilizing a key country in the hemisphere?     China is no stranger to the drug trade.
    Its
    People’s Liberation Army has, for example, been actively exploiting the PRC’s de
    facto
    colony, Burma, for drug-running operations. In addition, given China’s warming relationship
    with Cuba — China is now using and improving the Cuban signals intelligence facility in
    Lourdes — and its desire to further entrench itself in the United States’ “backyard,” 2 it may
    become more closely involved in the Colombian situation, if it has not already done
    so    .
  • To what extent is the Clinton Administration putting at risk sensitive “sources and
    methods” of intelligence as part of its reported program of providing Colombia with
    real-time intelligence?     The Administration has repeatedly seen intelligence-sharing as
    a
    technique for endearing itself to those like Russia, the UN, Cuba and the PLO that are
    more likely to use such information against the United States and its vital interests than
    be constructively influenced by this practice. 3 Under its
    current president, Andres
    Pastrana, the Colombian government may be less prone to such behavior than other
    beneficiaries of what the Clinton team seems to regard as noblesse oblige.

    Given that government’s history of corruption, the suborning influence of drug operatives
    and
    the incompetence of the Colombian military, however, it is not unreasonable to question whether
    American intelligence will be compromised by the narco-guerrillas, or even foreign governments
    with whom they have ties that are hostile the United States.

  • Why is the Clinton Administration encouraging the Colombian government to
    pursue a
    doomed “peace process” with the insurgents?     Although Secretary Beers told the
    Congress,
    “We have made it very clear to the Pastrana government….that we cannot accept ‘peace at any
    price,'” the Clinton team’s support for negotiations between the Colombian government and
    the leftist guerillas known as the FARC is likely to have the same result as its encouragement
    of peace processes elsewhere: Generally, they have the effect of making it more difficult,
    if
    not impossible    , to protect democratic societies and law-abiding populations against the
    predations of those who employ violence to achieve their ends. It seems likely that, in
    Colombia, such a false “peace process” will only serve to make the country more susceptible
    to total dominance by the narco-guerrillas and their drug-lord backers.

The Bottom Line

Whatever the answer to these questions — and whatever the ultimate decisions about the
nature
and extent of U.S. involvement in Colombia — one conclusion seems inescapable:
Neither the
cause of a secure democracy in Colombia nor the United States’ interest in promoting
stability in the hemisphere more generally and curbing the drug trade will be served by
completing America’s withdrawal from the Panama Canal Zone at the end of this year.

Fortunately, incoming Panamanian President Mireya Moscosco has
signaled a welcome
willingness to see an American presence in her country, but only after the treaty is full
implemented and all American troops leave. Present circumstances in neighboring
Colombia —
to say nothing of the penetration of Panama by enterprises with ominous ties to the Chinese
military — argue for suspending the final stages of the withdrawal and retaining U.S. bases in the
Canal Zone from which to run counter-drug operations, protect the Canal and, if necessary,
project American power.

1 See the Casey Perspective entitled
Administration Move To Normalize Relations with
Castro’s Cuba Bucks Tide of History, Business (No. 99-C 77, 8 July 1999).

2 See the Center’s Security Forum entitled
Carter-Clinton Legacy: Chinese Penetration of
Panama (J. Michael Waller, No. 99-F 11, 10 August 1999).

3 See the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled
Mission Impossible: Wye Deal Poses Threat to U.S.
Intelligence — As Well As Israeli Security, American Interests (No. 98-D 178,
30 October
1998) and Before U.S. Intelligence Can Be Reformed, The Clinton
Administration Must Stop
Deforming it (No. 96-D 44, 6 May 1996).