Tag Archives: North Korea

National Security Assessment: P.N.T.R. for China Will Be Bad for America

(Washington, D.C.): A growing number of national veterans groups and service organizations have announced their opposition to granting the People’s Republic of China Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR), which is expected to be voted on next week, on national security grounds. Disputing Secretary of Defense William Cohen’s recent assertions that rejection of PNTR with China would have serious strategic repercussions on the United States and Asia, these organizations have made clear that increasingly aggressive Chinese behavior should not be rewarded by removing the annual review of China’s trading status.

Included among these eight groups1 is the nation’s largest veterans organization, the American Legion. In a press release issued on 10 May, the Legion’s National Commander, A.L. Lance, said the following:

The American Legion sets forth the prerequisite for peace and stability, without which Communist China will become economically and militarily more formidable even as it embarks on policies pursuant to regional instability. A something-for- nothing trade arrangement with China — one that severs trade from national security and human rights — threatens stability, rewards antagonism, and strengthens a potential foe of American sons and daughters in the armed forces.

The following are highlights of letters written in recent days by several of the Nation’s foremost military organizations. Six were addressed to one of the House of Representative’s preeminent champions of human rights, religious freedom and national security — and one of that chamber’s leading opponents of PNTR — Rep. Frank Wolf (R- VA); the seventh was sent to another of the House’s leaders in these areas, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ):

  • “The Reserve Officers Association believes that it would be a mistake to grant PNTR to China at this time. The annual process of reviewing trade relations with China provides Congress with leverage over Chinese behavior on national security and human rights matters. Granting PNTR would deprive Congress of the opportunity to influence China to improve its human rights record and behave as a more responsible actor on the national security stage. Just within the past few weeks, China has made military threats against Taiwan and threatened military action against the United States if we defend Taiwan….Additionally, Beijing has exported weapons of mass destruction to Iran and North Korea, in violation of treaty commitments.” (Jayson Spiegel, Executive Direct, Reserve Officers Association of the United States, 27 April 2000)
  • “I write to express support and appreciation of…actions [taken by Rep. Wolf] in opposing Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China….China has done little to deserve such consideration….Indeed, China appears to be striving to achieve not only economic dominance of the Pacific Rim but also a significant military advantage over her neighbors, and quite possibly, the United States.” (Raymond A. Bell, Executive Director, Warrant Officers Association, 9 May 2000).
  • “[T]he Fleet Reserve Association, representing 151,000 members…joins you and your colleagues in opposing [PNTR] for China. FRA shares your concerns that weapons of mass destruction exported by that country can be used against U.S. military personnel, and our Nation’s citizens.” (Charles L. Calkins, National Executive Secretary, Fleet Reserve Association, 21 April 2000 to Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ)).
  • “As a resource to the U.S. Military, our membership is concerned with our relationship with China. Decisions made today will be affecting the political-military balance in the Pacific for the next 50 years. The People’s Republic of China may well be a rival. Building its economy on the backs of its people, China is also willing to risk world stability….As a nation, we should continue to expand the marketplace, but not carte blanche. Now is not the time to offer [PNTR] for China.” (Marshall Hanson, Director of Legislation, Naval Reserve Association and Dennis F. Pierman, Executive Director, Naval Enlisted Reserve Association, 9 May 2000).

The Bottom Line

These and other national security arguments against PNTR for China are only reinforced by economic and geopolitical considerations. The latter were lucidly laid out in today’s New York Times in the attached, highly complementary op.ed. article and column, written respectively by Alan Tonelson, Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industrial Council, and syndicated columnist William Safire.




1The groups as of 18 May are the American Legion, the Reserve Officers Association of the United States, the Warrant Officers Association, the Fleet Reserve Association, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, AMVETS, the Naval Reserve Association and the Naval Enlisted Reserve Association.

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.

Chairman Spence Warns of Perils for America’s Strategic Equities in New U.S.-Russian Negotiations, ‘Grand Bargain’

(Washington, D.C.): Tomorrow, a U.S. delegation will begin negotiations in Moscow
aimed at
achieving what outgoing Clinton National Security Council arms control czar Robert Bell has
long called the “Grand Bargain” — a deal in which the United States will be obliged to make
further, deep reductions in its strategic forces while preserving, if not adding to, the restrictions
imposed by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty on the deployment of effective missile
defenses.

The inadvisability of such a “bargain” was lucidly described in a recent paper
distributed by
Rep. Floyd Spence (R-SC), the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee in the August
edition of the Committee’s National Security Report. The Spence analysis constitutes a scathing
critique of President Clinton’s arms control policy, a timely warning about the negotiations now
getting underway and, it is to be hoped, the opening salvo in a sustained fight by the Loyal
Opposition against any agreements that result therefrom. (Emphasis added throughout.)

Communiqus and Treaties are Poor Shields: Implications of
the
U.S. -Russian Joint Statement on the ABM and START III Treaties

by Rep. Floyd Spence

On June 20, 1999, President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin agreed to the “Joint
Statement Between the United States and the Russian Federation Concerning Strategic Offensive
and Defensive Arms and Further Strengthening of Stability” that called for discussions later this
summer on a third Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START III) treaty and on strengthening the
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. According to Administration officials, these discussions
will begin in Moscow on August 17th. However, serious questions remain
over whether the
Administration’s commitment to continued reductions in nuclear arsenals and past treaties
– in particular, the 1972 ABM Treaty – will serve to increase or decrease American security
in a rapidly changing and increasingly dangerous international environment.

The Administration has hailed the Joint Statement as a major achievement. According to
National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, this is “the first time the Russians have agreed to
discuss changes in the ABM Treaty that may be necessitated by a national missile defense
(NMD) system were we to decide to deploy one.” The Joint Statement also moves
the United
States and Russia closer to a third round of nuclear weapons reductions under the Strategic Arms
Reduction Talks (START) despite the fact that the Russian Duma, or parliament, has yet to ratify
the START II treaty.

The fundamental question is whether these two negotiations will leave the United
States more
or less secure in a world marked by the rapid proliferation of missile technology and
weapons of mass destruction? Has the traditional arms control “theology” been
rendered
obsolete by the variety of post-Cold War threats and challenges facing the United States?
Understanding the origins of the ABM and START treaties and their evolution since the demise
of the Soviet Union sheds light on this question.

The ABM Treaty

The ABM Treaty, concluded between the United States and the USSR in 1972, prohibits the
deployment of a ballistic missile defense system to defend the territory of the United States. It
was intended to prevent deployment of missile defenses that could undermine the Cold War
theory of mutual security being best preserved if all parties leave themselves vulnerable to
nuclear attack. This Cold War strategy was referred to as Mutual Assured Destruction, with the
appropriate acronym of MAD.

After the treaty entered into force in 1972, the United States scaled back its missile defense
efforts. The treaty had an even more far-reaching effect, however, as it inhibited the development
by the United States of many of the required building blocks for a national missile defense
system by banning the development, testing, and deployment of sea-based, air-based,
space-based, or mobile land-based ABM systems and ABM system components (including
interceptor
missiles, launchers, and radars or other sensors that can substitute for radars). In stark
contrast
to U.S. inaction, Russia built and today maintains and continues to modernize a
sophisticated strategic missile defense system – the world’s only such anti-ballistic missile
defense system. Some estimates indicate Russia’s missile defense system could protect
nearly
80 percent of Russia’s population from a limited nuclear attack.

Much has changed, both strategically and technologically, since the ABM Treaty was first
conceived. Most strikingly, the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the proliferation of
missiles and weapons of mass destruction has radically altered the strategic
environment.
The threats posed by rogue regimes such as North Korea differ greatly from threats posed by the
Soviet Union, and Russia’s increasing reliance on nuclear weaponry to preserve its declining
status as a great power complicates the relatively simple calculus that underpinned the ABM
Treaty. Moreover, as U.S. investments in missile defense technology mature, the feasibility of
deploying an effective national missile defense system becomes increasingly apparent.

In reaction to these strategic and technological changes, U.S. policy and adherence
to the
ABM Treaty has become increasingly hard to understand and consequential for the future
of U.S. missile defenses. In 1993, the Clinton Administration sought to reach an
agreement with
Russia on a “demarcation line” to distinguish between strategic missile defense systems and less
capable Theater Missile Defense (TMD) systems. The demarcation agreement, concluded on
September 26, 1997, imposed limits on the capabilities of U.S. theater missile defenses –
capabilities that the ABM Treaty never intended to restrict.

The Administration also began negotiations in 1993 on an agreement to determine which
states
of the former USSR would be successors to the Soviet Union with regard to the ABM Treaty.
The resulting and highly controversial September 1997 agreement named Russia, Ukraine,
Belarus, and Kazakhstan as treaty successors to the Soviet Union. Remarkably, this
agreement
is so controversial that, two years later, the President still has not submitted it to the U.S.
Senate for advice and consent. Regardless, the most significant effect of adding parties
to the
ABM Treaty is that it will be significantly more difficult for the United States to negotiate
changes to the treaty to permit deployment of effective national missile defenses.

Even as the Administration continues its efforts to preserve the viability of the ABM Treaty,
two
recent studies have challenged the legal status and validity of the treaty. One of these studies,
The
Collapse of the Soviet Union and the End of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty: A
Memorandum of Law, by specialists in constitutional and public law at the firm Hunton
and
Williams, concludes: “The ABM Treaty no longer binds the United States as a matter of
international or domestic law. This is because the Soviet Union has disappeared, and there is no
state, or group of states, capable of implementing the Soviet Union’s obligations under the ABM
Treaty in accordance with that agreement’s terms.” Despite such assessments, the Administration
continues to view the treaty as the “cornerstone of strategic stability.”

Though Administration officials have portrayed impending negotiations with Russia
as an
opportunity to renegotiate the ABM Treaty to allow U.S. development of national missile
defenses, the Joint Statement seems to indicate that the negotiation’s primary purpose may
be
to preserve the ABM Treaty.

The START Negotiations

The first Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START I) treaty was signed in Moscow on July
31,
1991. The treaty, approved by the U.S. Senate in October 1992 and by the Russian Duma one
month later, required Russia and the United States to reduce their strategic nuclear forces to
6,000 deployed warheads on each side, a limit both parties have nearly achieved today.

The START process produced a second treaty (START II) between the United States and
Russia
on January 3, 1993, that limits each side to 3,000-3,500 deployed warheads and bans all
multiple-warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles (MIRVed ICBMs). The ban on MIRVed
ICBMs is considered one of the most important provisions of START II. MIRVed ICBMs – in
which Russia maintains a substantial advantage – are considered to be the most destabilizing
weapons. The ability to deploy as many as 10 warheads on a single missile makes them lucrative
targets and in the minds of some, a “use it or lose it” weapon.

Although the White House and the Kremlin quickly reached agreement on START II, the
Russian Duma has still not approved the treaty. The majority of the Duma is made up of
Communists and hard-liners who generally consider START II disadvantageous to Russia and
who view nuclear weapons as Russia’s only remaining claim to great power status. Indeed, most
Duma members advocate “skipping” START II and negotiating START III to correct the
“errors” of START II that hard-liners perceive as “unfair” to Russia. Nonetheless,
Presidents
Clinton and Yeltsin agreed at the Helsinki Summit in March 1997 that the United States
and Russia would only begin negotiations on START III after START II enters into
force.

Despite the 1997 agreement not to negotiate START III until START II is approved by the
Russian Duma, Russia and the United States almost immediately began unofficial
negotiations over “what a START III package might look like.” Thus far, this “picture”
of
START III would limit deployed warheads to between 2,000 and 2,500 by December 31, 2007,
and include measures to increase transparency of strategic nuclear warhead inventories and in the
destruction of strategic nuclear warheads. Unfortunately, as the United States further
reduces
its nuclear arsenal in conformity with bilateral START agreements, the impact of other
nations’ growing nuclear arsenals not bounded by START – such as China – take on
greater significance.

Of particular concern, the 1997 Helsinki Summit foreshadowed what may happen to
the
START II treaty during upcoming START III discussions. At Helsinki, the United
States
agreed to extend the elimination period for nuclear weapons from 2003 until the end of 2007.
Although all missiles and warheads originally scheduled to be eliminated in 2003 are to be
“deactivated” while awaiting elimination in 2007, the term “deactivated” is undefined in any
agreement and is yet to be negotiated. Critics charge that extending the elimination
period
allows Russia to retain its destabilizing MIRVed ICBMs for an additional four years,
effectively canceling one of the most important and stabilizing achievements of START
II.
This interpretation appears to be shared by senior Russian military officers who, after Helsinki,
flight-tested the SS-18 and other MIRVed ICBMs for the stated purpose of extending their useful
service life until 2007.

The Implications of the Joint Statement

As the bipartisan Rumsfeld Commission unanimously concluded last July, the threat to the
United States posed by ballistic missiles and the weapons of mass destruction they can carry is,
“broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in estimates and reports
by the intelligence community.” As a consequence, the commission noted that the United States
could have, “little or no warning” of a ballistic missile threat.

Despite assertions to the contrary, the June 20 Joint Statement does not bode well
for the
development of U.S. missile defenses, as there is a fundamental disagreement over the
statement’s intent. Russia did not agree to accommodate changes to allow the United
States to
deploy effective missile defenses, but only to discuss possible amendments to the ABM
Treaty.
More substantively, the Joint Statement reasserts the centrality of the ABM Treaty to
U.S.-Russian relations, and has “the Parties reaffirm their commitment to that Treaty.”
According to the statement, the purpose of talks on the ABM Treaty is, “to strengthen
the
Treaty, to enhance its viability and effectiveness in the future.” Thus, it appears that a
higher
priority is being placed on adhering to the 27-year old treaty than on allowing the development of
effective missile defenses.

Indeed, the Joint Statement itself nowhere explicitly mentions developing effective missile
defenses as a purpose or focus of future talks. Rather, it includes ambiguous language stating that
talks may, “consider possible changes in the strategic situation that have a bearing on
the
ABM Treaty.” The statement does, however, explicitly recognize past agreements to
restrict
missile defense development and deployment: “The Parties emphasize that the package of
agreements signed on September 26, 1997, in New York is importantfor the effectiveness of
the ABM Treaty, and they will facilitate the earliest possible ratification and entry into force of
those agreements.”

In stark contrast to Administration policy, Congress has long recognized the importance of
effective missile defenses to America’s future security. In May 1999, the Congress
passed H.R.
4, declaring it to be the policy of the United States to deploy national missile defenses.
Although the President signed H.R. 4 on July 22, 1999, President Clinton simultaneously
declared, “No decision on deployment has been made.…In making our
determination [on
deployment in the future], we will also review progress in achieving our arms control objectives,
including negotiating any amendments to the ABM Treaty that may be required to accommodate
a possible NMD deployment.”

The Administration’s reluctance to commit to a national missile defense system is difficult to
comprehend considering that, since release of the Rumsfeld Commission’s report,
Administration officials have increasingly acknowledged the seriousness of the ballistic missile
threat. Recently, Secretary of Defense William Cohen stated that ballistic missiles, “will soon
pose a danger not only to our troops overseas but also to Americans here at home.” Despite this
recognition, the Administration continues to link development and deployment of U.S.
missile defense programs to what can be negotiated with the Russians under the ABM
Treaty – a treaty that does not even address the ballistic missile threat from China, North
Korea, Iran, or other nations developing and deploying such weapons.

The implications of the June 20 Joint Statement for the strategic nuclear balance also remain
uncertain. Discussions on START III, as agreed to in the Joint Statement, present
Russia
with the opportunity to undo the most important provisions of START II and impede U.S.
plans for deployment of a national missile defense system. For example, public
statements by
Russian officials and defense experts advocate using START III to reverse the ban on MIRVed
ICBMs, impose a ban on more stabilizing MIRVed SLBMs (where the U.S. has an advantage),
establish prohibitive technical restrictions on U.S. national missile defenses, and preserve the
Russian advantage in tactical nuclear weapons.

In the post-Cold War era, the nuclear balance has become a more complex
calculation, and
much of the equation lies outside the framework of U.S.-Russian relations.
The ABM Treaty
and START negotiations do not take into account the volatile developments in southern Asia,
where both India and Pakistan have recently tested nuclear devices and increased the pace of
their missile development programs.

Furthermore, neither of these bilateral treaties can account for potential increases in China’s
nuclear arsenal, North Korea’s expanding missile and nuclear capabilities, and the clear
ambitions of Iraq, Iran and other rogue nations to develop such systems. Under such
circumstances, it is questionable whether current and future U.S. security needs are well
served by a Cold War strategy that subordinates missile defenses to the preservation of
nuclear parity in strategic offensive forces with a weakened Russia, to the exclusion of these
other growing threats.

Timmerman Offers Fresh Evidence That D.O.E.’s Front Office Needs to be Cleaned-Out, Not Just Rearranged

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday, Secretary of Energy Bill
Richardson finally threw in the
towel on his doomed effort to persuade bipartisan congressional critics and the American people
that nothing more need be done to address his Department’s security melt-down than to add a
few more layers of unaccountable bureaucrats. With his capitulation, it is now all but certain that
there will be — at a minimum — a new “semi-autonomous agency” created within the Department
of Energy charged with exclusive responsibility for nuclear weapons stewardship.

An important essay in this month’s American Spectator by Kenneth R.
Timmerman — one of
the most intrepid and prolific investigative journalists of our time — demonstrates that, unless
this reorganization is accompanied by substantial changes in Clinton Administration policies and
personnel, the Department of Energy is virtually certain to continue to exacerbate
U.S.
security challenges, not redress them. The following excerpts from Mr. Timmerman’s
article
illuminate in particular the harmful role being played by an advocate of radical anti-nuclear
policies, Assistant Secretary of Energy Rose Gottemoeller, whose stealthy
Senate
confirmation was arranged by Mr. Richardson and to whom (if he could get away with it) he may
be inclined to look for a new Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship, if such a position is
ultimately created.

Excerpts from “Russo-American Nuclear Cities”
The American Spectator, July 1999

by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Since 1994, the Clinton administration has been spending taxpayer dollars to employ
Russian
nuclear scientists and weapons designers in civilian projects, with the laudable goal of seeking to
prevent them from selling their talents to rogue states such as Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Libya.
But a recent review by the General Accounting Office (GAO) found that some of the
money
has helped the Russians develop better nuclear weapons, missiles, and biological weapons–and
that many civilian projects financed with U.S. taxpayer money have direct military
applications. Even worse: Some of the U.S-funded scientists and institutes are
developing
weapons for Iran and Libya.

Despite these warnings, the Clinton administration now proposes to spend an additional $600
million to launch a massive public works project in ten Russian “nuclear cities.”
Although these
sites are ostensibly closed to outsiders, Iranian visitors have in the last five years been
spotted at some of Russia’s most sensitive weapons labs, including Vector and
Obolensk,
where scientists have genetically engineered human and animal viruses to produce the most
deadly biological weapons known to mankind.

The GAO concluded in February that the Nuclear Cities Initiative is “likely to be a
subsidy
program for Russia for many years rather than a stimulus for economic development,” and
recommended that it be scaled back. It also said the Department of Energy (DOE),
which will
oversee the program, should more vigilantly check the backgrounds of Russian scientists slated
to benefit from U.S. taxpayer largesse, in order to ensure that weapons designers do not enter
classified U.S. facilities and do not use U.S. funds to subsidize new weapons development.

Heading the Nuclear Cities program at DOE is Assistant Secretary of Energy Rose
Gottemoeller, the same official who fired the department’s head of security programs
because
she suspected him of leaking information to Congress on the disastrous state of security at DOE
nuclear storage plants and at the national labs (“Nuclear Security Meltdown,” TAS, June 1999).
In her academic writings, Ms. Gottemoeller has urged the U.S. to abandon its long-standing
policy of strategic ambiguity by declaring publicly that the U.S. will not be the first to use
nuclear weapons.

But Rose Gottemoeller is not just any anti-nuclear academic: In 1993 she became National
Security Council director for Russia and the other Soviet successor states. Since then,
she has
presided over policies that advanced the career of former KGB Director Yevgeni
Primakov, turned a blind eye to Russia’s nuclear and missile transfers to Iran, and
supported President Boris Yeltsin at the expense of democratic reformers, plying him
with
political favors and cash that went directly into off-shore bank accounts. Although she has no
hands-on managerial experience, Gottemoeller inherits a program crippled by poor management
and lack of oversight, which seems destined to have precisely the opposite effect of its stated
intention of helping wean Russia away from nuclear weapons.

* * *

ENTER BILL RICHARDSON

When he unveiled the $600 million Nuclear Cities Initiative last September in Vienna at a
joint
press conference with Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Yevgeni Adamov, Energy Secretary
Bill Richardson praised the Russians for their willingness to open ten previously closed nuclear
cities. “This is a Russian-led effort to ‘rightsize’ their nuclear complex and use the valuable skills
of their scientists and engineers to promote economic development and new enterprises -to turn
the scientific and technological expertise that resides in their premier weapons facilities toward
peaceful uses,” Richardson said. “I can not emphasize enough how important it is to us all that
economic hardship not drive Russian nuclear weapons scientists into employment in places like
Iran and North Korea.”

But that was not what the Russians promised at all, according to a GAO
audit. The GAO’s
own investigators were denied entry to Sarov (formerly known as Azarmas-16, one of Russia’s
two nuclear weapons design institutes) earlier this year. In a meeting with the auditors outside the
closed city, Sarov officials acknowledged that “it will be difficult to attract commercial partners
to a city located behind a fence.”

* * *

The DOE’s stated aim is to help the Russians to develop viable commercial projects that will
attract Russian and foreign investment capital. “The notion that the national labs can
help the
Russians to commercialize their nuclear weapons technology is absurd,” says former
Pentagon official Henry Sokolski. “The labs have no notions of commerce. The
problem is that
with enough utopianism, you can commit the very crime you’re trying to prevent.”

A DOE official who worked extensively with the Russians on efforts to convert
their
nuclear weapons and missile industries to civilian ends deems the programs a resounding
failure. “The majority of U.S. taxpayer investments in Russia since 1992 have been
misdirected,
because they did nothing to convert military production to viable civilian projects,” he says.
“There has been inadequate oversight, a lack of direct involvement by U. S. industry, and no
effort to create an environment where the Russians have an economic interest in the outcome.”
For offering such criticisms, the official was removed from dealing with Russia and placed into
administrative limbo by his superiors.

* * *

Even Russian lab directors are complaining that in its naive approach to
proliferation, the
Clinton administration is making dangerous mistakes. The American
Spectator has learned
that one Russian lab director warned the director of DOE’s Initiatives for Proliferation
Prevention (IPP) project in Moscow in November 1996 that U.S. taxpayer money was being
funneled into Russia’s most dreaded biological weapons facilities, and that, given the way the
U.S. had structured the programs, there was nothing he could do to stop it.

GERMS, MISSILES, AND IRAN

The State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, known as Vector, was founded in
the
1970’s to carry out topsecret research into deadly viral weapons. Given all new labs and a new
charter by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, Vector “weaponized” new strains of smallpox at a time
when the World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated worldwide. On May 24 of
this year, the World Health Organization voted not to destroy the remaining world stockpiles of
smallpox, which in theory are held only at Vector and in Atlanta, Georgia, for fear the Russians
may have transferred them to rogue states for use as weapons. Worldwide smallpox vaccination
was halted nearly twenty years ago, leaving most of the world’s population with no immunity
-and thus, easy victims of a Third World biological attack.

According to Ken Alibek, a Russian defector who was deputy director of Vector’s parent
organization, Biopreparat, the U.S. has only 7 million doses of smallpox vaccine, putting major
U.S. cities at the mercy of any large-scale terrorist attack. Smallpox has killed 500 million people
this century alone, making it the deadliest disease known to man.

Before Alibek defected from Russia in 1992, Vector also developed a new form of the Ebola
virus known as Marburg-U, a disease which liquefies the victim’s internal organs and causes the
pores of the skin to ooze blood from internal bleeding. Vector’s state-of-the-art
production
facility near the Siberian town of Koltsovo continues to receive funds from IPP and the
U.S. Department of State, under a parallel program known as the International Science
and
Technology Centers (ISTC). Vector’s programs are still “too sensitive to discuss,” say former
officials, who voice concern that the State Department has provided general support
funds
which Vector can use for whatever purpose it chooses. These funds were
awarded Vector
despite U.S. government awareness that the institute is currently developing new biological
weapons for the Russian military, including a new strain of German measles that
creates AIDS-like symptoms in a matter of days.

A Vector researcher went to Iran on a contract approved by the Russian government, the
GAO
discovered, at the same time that Vector was receiving U.S. taxpayer grants, ostensibly to
develop new vaccines. And according to Alibek, who published a chilling insider’s account of
Russia’s secret biological weapons programs earlier this year (Biohazard: The Chilling True
Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World, Random House, $24-95),
Vector scientists have recently succeeded in introducing a gene from Ebola into the smallpox
Virus to create “a smallpox-Ebola weapon.”

* * *

Other institutes whose ISTC-funded projects have been put on hold include NPO Trud,
which
sold liquid fuel booster technology to Iran, the Moscow Aviation Institute, and the Baltic State
Technical University, where Iranian missile designers were being trained. The Scientific
Research and Design Institute of Power Technology (NKIET) was also receiving ISTC funds.
Deputy Atomic Energy Minister Bulat Nigmatulin acknowledged that NKIET had held talks
with Iran, aimed at building heavy-water and light-water reactors. However, he said, “these talks
did not lead to anything and were halted when talks reached more concrete matters.” Nigmatulin
then used a Clintonian defense to explain why NKIET should not be punished: “If a wife dances
with another man the whole night and nothing happens in the end, I don’t understand why the
husband would be upset and jealous,” he said. “And they didn’t even dance all night.” Two
weeks later, on February 1, the Ministry of Atomic Energy announced that a group of 40 Iranians
was arriving in Russia that month for a 13-month training program in nuclear reactor operations.
So much for dancing.

* * *

FUNDING PROLIFERATION TO ENHANCE CAREERS

Critics of the State Department’s ISTC program include Oles Lomacky, an
American who
served as Executive Director of ISTC in Moscow from 1995 to 1997 “The purpose of
these
programs is very noble, but the difference between our intent and our actions is night and day.”

Lomacky and others involved in the programs who asked not to be named cited poor
management and careerism as impediments to meeting the administration’s nonproliferation
goals. “The grand scheme is, if you give Russian scientists enough money, they will
stop
doing what they were doing before, which was designing weapons. That is just a fantasy,”
says Lomacky. “Our objective ought not to be maintaining the nuclear cities, but
creating
opportunities for these people to do other things somewhere else. As it is, the same people who
were designing bombs in the Soviet era are still there.”

* * *

A former U.S. intelligence officer who has tracked both programs tells TAS…”For God’s
sake, if
you’re going to give them money, you need to make sure you know what they’re doing. Most of
the time, the ISTC doesn’t have a clue. They are actually providing U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund
proliferation. We need to get our scientists into those Russian labs, not write the Russians a blank
check so they can do whatever they want.”

* * *

The DOE has accepted the GAO’s criticism and has pledged to correct the
deficiencies the
government auditors found in the IPP program. But while individual programs can be
corrected, the administration’s approach toward the collapse of Russia remains
fragmented, fraught with bureaucratic infighting, and lacking any strategic vision.

In a separate review of the Russian programs, released this May, the Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) pointed out that U.S. taxpayers currently spend $700 million per year on programs
aimed at enhancing nuclear security in Russia that have simply failed to solve the problem.
“Sizable quantities of fissile materials in Russia remain unprotected; no effective export control
system or enforcement mechanism exists to ensure that stolen materials or warheads are not
smuggled out of the country; and thousands of weapons scientists and nuclear workers are facing
economic hardship because of budget cuts and recession,” says the CBO.

* * *

We have been lucky so far, but the Clinton administration’s piecemeal response to the
momentous challenge created by the end of the Cold War will face far greater scrutiny after the
first nuclear terrorist bomb goes off on Main Street, and Americans realize that it could have
been prevented.

Clinton Legacy Watch # 28: ‘Peace In Our Time’ With China

(Washington, D.C.): Sixty years ago in September, the leader of the free world returned from
a
visit to the homeland of a potential adversary. Neville Chamberlain gushed about his ability to
work with Adolph Hitler. He promised his people “peace in our time.” And in a turn of phrase
more important for its metaphorical import than its literal meaning, he urged those who
enthusiastically welcomed him back from his Munich meeting with the Fuhrer to “go home and
get a nice quiet sleep.” History may well treat Bill Clinton’s 1998 trip to Communist
China
with the same contempt as is now reserved for Prime Minister Chamberlain’s catastrophic
diplomatic mission to the Third Reich in 1938.

A Bill of Particulars

While there are, to be sure, differences — most notably, the President’s televised, if tempered,
comments about the benefits of democracy — consider a few of the eerie parallels:

  • Hyping Sitzagreements: The most palpable similarity is the
    placebo agreement reached by
    the President and his hosts to de-target ballistic missiles aimed at each others’ nations. As was
    true of Hitler’s promise at Munich to confine himself to gobbling up Czechoslovakia’s
    Sudetenland, this commitment is of no strategic value. We cannot verify that the Chinese have
    stopped pointing at us the thirteen-or-so ICBMs which U.S. intelligence believes are targeted
    against American cities. Even if they were actually to do so, within a few seconds — or, at
    most, a few minutes — the original coordinates could be re-entered.

    • The effect of this accord, however, will — like the deal with Hitler that Chamberlain
    represented as “peace for our time” — be to encourage Western publics to “get a nice
    quiet sleep,” by discounting an emerging danger.(1) Like
    their British counterparts two
    generations before, Americans today want desperately to believe that conflict can be
    avoided with Communist China. Nothing makes the people of democracies happier
    than the soporific assurances of their leaders that no threats exist. They understandably
    welcome representations to the effect that sacrifice will not be needed to transform a
    potential foe into a reliable “strategic partner.” Unfortunately, this is rarely the case
    and does not seem to be so in this instance.

  • Abandoning a Fellow Democracy: In China, President Clinton effectively
    abandoned
    Taiwan in much the same way that Chamberlain in Germany turned his back on democratic
    Czechoslovakia. While experts debate whether the formulation he used went beyond the
    rhetoric of appeasement of Beijing dating back to the 1972 Shanghai Communique, the
    practical effect was unmistakable: The United States will support the hegemonism of the
    Communists on the mainland over the aspirations for self-determination of the people of
    Taiwan.

    • The Clinton Administration is now in the absurd, not to say strategically inane, position
    of signaling its willingness to see an entity without appreciable territory or resources
    become a Palestinian state, despite the considerable threat such an entity will
    pose to
    a valued democratic ally, Israel. At the same time, the Administration is denying
    Taiwan — a democratic nation in all but name, which enjoys both territory and
    considerable resources     (indeed, it has some of the largest hard currency reserves of
    any country in the world) — the right to be recognized as an independent sovereign
    state, in deference to the largest despotism on the planet.

  • Legitimating a Despot: The President went to considerable lengths to
    legitimate Jiang
    Zemin, in much the same way as the Prime Minister in 1938 felt obliged to invest in Hitler a
    stature that went beyond the requirements of diplomatic politesse. One could almost hear
    echoes of Chamberlain’s enthusiasm for the man who was modernizing Germany while acting
    as his partner in avoiding war as Mr. Clinton gushed that Jiang is “imaginative,” “an
    extraordinary intellect,” a man of “very high energy” and the “right leadership at the right time”
    for China.

  • Undermining Alliance Relationships: In a manner reminiscent of
    Chamberlain’s disregard
    for his French allies in the run-up to Munich, President Clinton has exacerbated the strategic
    problem posed by China’s rising influence in Asia through his stiff-arming of America’s
    regional allies: Japan, South Korea and the Philippines — to say nothing of Taiwan. Madeleine
    Albright’s banal post-facto assurances that U.S.-PRC relations will not be improved at the
    latters’ expense are unconvincing. In any event, they are unlikely to dissuade American friends
    in the Pacific Rim from seeking to reach their own accommodations with the ascendant
    dictatorial power. If history is any guide, and it generally is, such accommodations will only
    serve to make conflict more likely.

  • Buying Time for the Dictators: Finally, with his equivalent of the “Good
    Housekeeping Seal
    of Approval” on Communist China, Mr. Clinton has (like Chamberlain before him) bought time
    for a potentially fatal disease to metastasize. According to the President, there is no need to
    rethink the wisdom of transferring U.S. and other Western dual-use technology to
    China’s military    ; we need not worry about the policy of allowing the People’s
    Liberation
    Army access to America’s capital markets     (where it is raising inexpensive, undisciplined
    funds for its ambitious modernization program); and since he believes the biggest threat we
    face from the PRC is an environmental one, we can safely allow the further “hollowing
    out”
    of our own military    (2) — even as theirs becomes
    better able to conduct devastating, if
    “asymmetric,” attacks against U.S. forces and infrastructure. The contrary is true in each
    case.

The Bottom Line

In short, chances are that President Clinton’s trip will be seen historically for what it was: an
exercise in appeasement. Jiang Zemin may be no Hitler (any more than he is a visionary
democratizer), but the government he leads has the potential to be every bit as dangerous a
problem for the Western democracies as was the Third Reich, if not considerably more so.

Should this potential be actualized, Mr. Clinton’s conduct — both while paying court abroad
as
well as while policy-making at home — is likely to be held substantially responsible for the tragedy
to come, in much the same way as his British counterpart’s behavior continues to be six decades
after the fact.

– 30 –

1. For more on President Clinton’s deliberate effort to mislead the
American people about the
missile threat, see the op.ed. article by J. Michael Waller published in today’s
Washington Times entitled “No nukes pointed this way? Think again.”

2. The splendid “Inside the Ring” column in today’s Washington
Times reports that a powerful
briefing entitled “Averting the Defense Train Wreck” prepared by the Center for Strategic and
International Studies’ Dan Gouré and Jeffrey Ranney is making the rounds of Pentagon
leaders to
generally favorable reviews. This study adds further urgency to the warning issued to President
Clinton in a private letter sent last week by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. According to
news reports, Sen. Lott offered a “flat-out condemnation” of the current state of the U.S. military.
See in this connection Clinton Legacy Watch # 22: More Evidence of a Hollow
Military (No.
98-D 62, 7 April 1998) and Clinton Legacy Watch # 17: Dangers of a ‘Hollow
Military’ (No.
98-D 23, 5 February 1998).

On My Mind; Lessons of the Asian Collapse

By A. M. ROSENTHAL
The New York Times, 23 December 1997

Maybe it is the arrogance that comes from power, maybe some other intellectual disease, but
governments, politicians and particularly capitalists of the West are not getting the real messages
that come from the collapse of Asian economies.

The lessons are that they themselves, these Westerners of economic and political might, helped
speed Asia to its disasters — and that unless that truth is accepted, waves of collapse will come
crashing again and again.

All over the West, government bureaucrats, politicians and journalists are telling us, with almost
unbearable smugness, that Asians finally are understanding that democracy, openness in business
dealings, non-favoritist rule of law, all are essential to the practice of capitalism. But don’t worry,
they say, the computerized global economy will make sure everything turns out jim-dandy.

A few things are wrong with those sermons. First, capitalism has shown itself flexible enough to
have worked for the security of rulers, and the profit of investors, under governments based on
fascism, religious fundamentalism, slavery, internal terrorism, apartheid, absolute monarchy,
militarism — the whole nasty menu of non-democratic regimes. Now, backed by Western billions,
it helps maintain a Communist Government in China.

The real lesson is that openness and freedom are essential not to capitalism in all its incarnations
but to a specific form of capitalism. That is, democratic capitalism — the combination of a free
political society and an open economic system, without control by government-business
conspiracy or partnership.

Democratic capitalism is what Westerners want for themselves but did not think was important
for Asians. They invested hundreds of billions in forms of capitalism that destroyed democratic
capitalism. If ever an economic attitude was racist, there you have it.

As Kim Dae Jung, South Korea’s President-elect, has said, “Asian values” never precluded
democracy. He said that long ago, when he was under house arrest by South Korean dictators and
ignored by Westerners doing business with his captors.

Take a quick look around. American capitalists race European capitalists to sink money into
China’s economy, knowing a great chunk goes to the Chinese armed forces. French, Russian and
German investors line up in Iraq for contracts with Saddam Hussein — effective only if sanctions
are lifted. So at the U.N., that becomes the goal of investors’ nations.

In the Mideast, Western investment goes almost entirely into despotisms that have no intention of
permitting political, religious or business freedom. Russia, supposed to be a developing capitalist
partner, helps Iran build missiles that will be able to reach U.S. troops in the Mideast. For the
story in detail, read the special report by Kenneth Timmerman, an American expert on Iran and
weapons proliferation, in the January Reader’s Digest. Then, if you have a child with U.S. forces
in the Mideast, relax; try.

Now back to Asian countries floored by their own systems of capitalism: capitalism based on
cronyism, familism and corruption, and ruled by economic combines. Their members are
government, bank and business cliques that get together to decide who gets contracts and how
they are split. Also: who gets loans, at what rate, and with what collateral, excuse the thought.
For what they do every day, in America they would all be in jail.

Foreign investors knew what they did. They knew they were not investing in democratic
capitalism but in secretly run systems that perverted the techniques of capitalist marketplaces until
they destroyed them.

But Western businessmen and governments did not think it mattered, bottom line. When they
found out that they were oh so very wrong, they and the Asian governments peering into the
chasm of default got the International Monetary Fund to pull them back.

Even political democracy is no guarantee of creating democratic capitalism if its leadership is
fragmented and foolish enough — see India. Cosmetic changes in places like Indonesia or Malaysia
will not do it either.

Western investors and governments themselves cannot guarantee Asia what it needs — capitalism
prospering in and for democracy. But they can help — by not giving the fruits of democratic
capitalism to governments that destroy the tree.

Chris Cox 1997 Keeper of the Flame remarks

On the Occasion of His Acceptance of
the Center for Security Policy’s "Keeper of the Flame"

28 October 1997

As we meet tonight, America’s security policy toward Asia — and the Center’s own advice on this subject — are much on the minds of people in Washington and across the country because of the visit of Jiang Zemin to Washington. For those of us who have long been working on Asia policy, and China policy in specific, this is a great opportunity….This year, I have traveled twice to the People’s Republic of China and met myself with Jiang Zemin. Since I have been Chairman of the [House Republican] Policy Committee, we have introduced several pieces of legislation relating to East Asia policy, nine of which will come to the floor of the House a week from tomorrow in a full-day session of over 12 hours devoted to China policy-an unprecedented opportunity.

The Lesson of the Recent Taiwan Crisis

In early 1996, at the time of the Taiwan missile crisis, the Policy Committee produced, and I introduced on the floor of the House, a very pointed resolution that stated that if the People’s Republic of China were, without provocation, to attack Taiwan, the United States would defend Taiwan. And that resolution passed the House of Representatives with 369 votes in favor, and only 14 votes against it. Immediately following this, the Clinton Administration abandoned its policy, which they described as "strategic ambiguity," and sent two carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait — immediately following which the People’s Republic of China lifted the blockade of Taiwan, and called off the balance of the missile tests. The scheduled Presidential elections on Taiwan went forward as planned. The months following have been peaceful. That is all to the good.

But it is ironic that the Clinton Administration described its own policy as "strategic ambiguity," because that is exactly what I would say about it in criticism. How was the government in Beijing to know what would be the United States’ response if the PRC did attack? And why would we want to keep that a secret from them? Yet there were even sharper ambiguities than that. The Clinton policy was ambiguous about our security perimeter in the region, recalling Dean Acheson’s tragic misstep concerning South Korea in 1950.

And the policy was morally ambiguous. It equated the kind of provocation for which the People’s Republic of China was responsible in launching missiles into the Taiwan Strait with the supposed provocation of the government of Taiwan’s holding democratic presidential elections — or sending its leader to receive an honorary degree from Cornell University.

The Folly of Inconstancy and ‘Strategic Ambiguity’

Strategic ambiguity is a dangerous policy, because uncertainty risks war. A security policy of strategic ambiguity is the opposite of a policy of peace through strength: it risks war through weakness. But even ambiguity doesn’t quite capture the Clinton policy, which is, even more than ambiguous, uncertain and unpredictable.

* * *

…The President’s China policy remains the clearest example of a lack of constancy. In the face of Communist China’s ongoing export of chemical weapons technology to Iran, even the Clinton State Department cited seven Chinese violations in May of this year. The CIA has designated the People’s Republic of China "the most significant supplier of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) related goods and technology to foreign countries." In August, of this year, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency concluded that it is "highly probable" Communist China is violating the biological weapons convention. Just last month, the United States Navy reported that China is the most active supplier of Iran’s chemical, nuclear and biological weapons program. What will be the Clinton response to all of this at the summit tomorrow?

The answer is that Bill Clinton is expected to activate the 1985 Nuclear Cooperation Agreement with China — an agreement that requires a presidential certification that the People’s Republic of China has become a responsible member of the non-proliferation community. A more self-defeating example of "coddling dictators in Beijing," to use Bill Clinton’s words, would be hard to find.

China is Not Free

The Clinton policy of so-called engagement — unilateral and unconditional engagement, to be sure — is premised on the sound notion that the United States should wish China to be our friend. That is indeed a sound notion. We should, and we do, wish China to be our friend. But we must seek more than that. We must also desire to have friendly relations not with the largest Communist nation on earth, but with a free China.

While the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union gives us hope that China, too, will one day be free, the current government of the People’s Republic of China exercises control over more people than any one-party dictatorship in history. Communist China, with two-thirds of its urban work force employed in state-owned industries, is anything but a free market. The notorious Laogai prison system, on which my colleague Rep. Chris Smith has held hearings today, holds between six and eight million Chinese citizens captive and employed in slave-labor industries — some 140 export industries that ship to 70 countries around the world. There is no rule of law in China. Transparency International recently declared that China is the fifth most corrupt nation in the world. Private rights of ownership in real property are negligible. And the People’s Liberation Army, whose official military budget has more than doubled in the 1990s, supplements that spending with off-budget subsidies through the ownership of an enormous conglomerate of commercial firms that themselves are significant marketplace actors. This is not free enterprise.

Will Economic Determinism Work?

Yes, China is changing. But it’s not changing any more than anyone would expect a modern Communist state to change. Many people in the Clinton administration and in the business community argue that China’s economic progress is miraculous. It means, they say, that China cannot be Communist. If China still has a Communist economy, they say, how could it grow by 10 percent a year?

Well, that’s an old and meaningless argument, considering the base of poverty against which Chinese economic growth is measured. Communist China reported a growth rate in 1958 of 22 percent at the height of the tragic "Great Leap Forward." Twenty-two percent annual economic growth is simply fabulous — provided you are more interested in statistics than food. During this same period, China’s economic policies led to a man-made famine that claimed 20 million lives.

Yet throughout this period, even up to the time of Mao’s death in 1976, foreign business people were saying exactly what they are saying today. Many U.S. investors expressed open admiration for what was going on under Mao. David Rockefeller, for example, praised "the sense of national harmony," and argued that Mao’s revolution "succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose."

But while the enthusiasm for Chinese Communism is remarkably long-enduring (and seems willing to endure anything), such endorsements, just as in the case of Stalin’s Russia, have borne little or no relation to the truth. Just as "miraculous" as these reported economic growth figures is that after so many years of such progress, Communist China is still so poor. The truth is that today, even after all of these years of "miraculous" growth, the per capita gross domestic product of the People’s Republic of China ranks it below such emblems of Third World poverty as Lesotho, the Congo, Senegal, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Even today, the People’s Republic of China needs our help. And they deserve it. All of this history means not that we should refuse to engage China, but rather that America should seek to influence China for the better.

A ‘Policy of Freedom’

But following the Clinton Administration’s policy of passivity has coincided with a trend away from freedom and the rule of law. We should do the opposite. We should actively promote freedom.

* * *

…The American President should say simply to Jiang Zemin what the American President should say to the world: We wish an end to Communism to China. Because we love the peoples of China, we wish them to be free.

Last year, the then-Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Winston Lord, paid a visit to my office. We discussed these matters, and I asked him why it is that the President of the United States cannot say that we wish that China were not Communist. He replied that of course we wish it were so — but we just can’t say it.

And thus, with a silence as eloquent as President Reagan’s international appeals for freedom that helped topple the Soviet Empire, the Clinton Administration has forsworn a policy of anti-Communism.

* * *

When the Ming Dynasty replaced the Mongols in the 14th century, China embarked on its own Age of Exploration-an era that antedated, and rivaled in all respects, anything that was going on in Europe. Chinese fleets scoured the Indian Ocean, visiting Indonesia, Ceylon, even the Red Sea and Africa-where they picked up giraffes and brought them back to the amazement of the people back home.

But this is where Chinese exploration ended. Who knows? With a little more wind, the Chinese might have rounded the Cape of Good Hope. They might have reached Europe. They might even have discovered America.

Today, the irrepressible dreams of human freedom live on in China’s diverse and tolerant peoples. But China’s explorers and discoverers are kept down by worst of the 20th century’s legacies, the last vestiges of totalitarianism, which also live on still in Communist China.

It’s my hope that as we close the 20th century, America — whose unique mission in world history is to promote freedom — can provide the Chinese people with a little more wind to fill their sails, so that this time they will round the corner, so that this time they will actually be free. When that happens, China and the United States of America will truly be friends. And the world will be a much safer place.

“A Policy for Freedom in China”




Full Remarks by
Hon. Chris Cox

On the Occasion of His Acceptance of
the Center for Security Policy’s “Keeper of the Flame”


28 October 1997


Thank you, Fred [Thompson]. I hope you do understand that the reason all these people came here is to hear your introduction – not to hear me. That’s the same reason I had you out in California! We’ll just keep doing this, as many times as it takes. I suppose that, since the rule in politics is you can accomplish anything as long as you don’t care who gets the credit, Fred Thompson showing up here as my introducer makes a lot of sense for a man this humble. Fred Thompson care about who gets the credit? After all, he co-starred with Clint Eastwood!

For my part, I used to co-star with Jon Kyl, and I am delighted, now that you are over in the Senate, to be up here with you again.

It is an honor and a great pleasure to see so many good and old friends here, many of whom worked in the Reagan Administration, where I had my first political job. Not only did we get to participate in the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, but I also got a chance to meet my wife in the Reagan White House. I am forever indebted to Ronald Reagan for introducing me to Rebecca. I may be this year’s “Keeper of the Flame” winner, but Rebecca is my flame, this year and every year. Thank you very much, Rebecca, for all your support. By the way, Rebecca out-ranked me in the White House, as most of you who worked there recall. I have found that was good preparation for marriage.

It was my privilege to introduce Jon Kyl when he won this “Keeper of the Flame” award. It is an honor for me to be here for that reason. And of course, as we all know, Frank Gaffney is the real “Keeper of the Flame,” and these annual dinners are actually our opportunity to show up and thank Frank Gaffney and all of your colleagues at the Center for Security Policy for all of the hard work that you do, day in and day out. The advice that Congress routinely gets from the Center for Security Policy is always timely, insightful, well-researched, and reliable. You never let America down, and you never let us down. We are very, very grateful for all that you do.

As we meet tonight, America’s security policy toward Asia – and the Center’s own advice on this subject – are much on the minds of people in Washington and across the country because of the visit of Jiang Zemin to Washington. For those of us who have long been working on Asia policy, and China policy in specific, this is a great opportunity. Since I have been Chairman of the House Policy Committee, with the help of Mark Lagon (whom we have courtesy of Jeane Kirkpatrick – thank you very much Mark, and especially thank you, Jeane, for giving us Mark), we have put out nine white papers on the People’s Republic of China alone. This year I have traveled twice to the People’s Republic of China and met myself with Jiang Zemin. Since I have been Chairman of the Policy Committee, we have introduced several pieces of legislation relating to East Asia policy, nine of which will come to the floor of the House a week from tomorrow in a full-day session of over 12 hours devoted to China policy – an unprecedented opportunity.

In early 1996, at the time of the Taiwan missile crisis, the Policy Committee produced, and I introduced on the floor of the House, a very pointed resolution that stated that if the People’s Republic of China were, without provocation, to attack Taiwan, the United States would defend Taiwan. And that resolution passed the House of Representatives with – 369 votes in favor, and only 14 votes against it. Immediately following this, the Clinton Administration abandoned its policy, which they described as “strategic ambiguity,” and sent two carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait – immediately following which the People’s Republic of China lifted the blockade of Taiwan, and called off the balance of the missile tests. The scheduled Presidential elections on Taiwan went forward as planned. The months following have been peaceful. That is all to the good.

But it is ironic that the Clinton Administration described its own policy as “strategic ambiguity,” because that is exactly what I would say about it in criticism. How was the government in Beijing to know what would be the United States’ response if the PRC did attack? And why would we want to keep that a secret from them? Yet there were even sharper ambiguities than that. The Clinton policy was ambiguous about our security perimeter in the region, recalling Dean Acheson’s tragic misstep concerning South Korea in 1950. And the policy was morally ambiguous. It equated the kind of provocation for which the People’s Republic of China was responsible in launching missiles into the Taiwan Strait with the supposed provocation of the government of Taiwan’s holding democratic presidential elections or sending its leader to receive an honorary degree from Cornell University.

Strategic ambiguity is a dangerous policy, because uncertainty risks war. A security policy of strategic ambiguity is the opposite of a policy of peace through strength: it risks war through weakness. But even ambiguity doesn’t quite capture the Clinton policy, which is, even more than ambiguous, uncertain and unpredictable.

In 1992, when Vice President Al Gore was still in the United States Senate, Congress passed the Gore-McCain Act. The Gore-McCain Act prescribed sanctions for the sale of advanced conventional weapons by any nation to Iran. That same year, Bill Clinton criticized President Bush for a policy of coddling dictators in Beijing. But over the last three years, Communist China has transferred at least 60 C-802 cruise missiles to Iran, and the Clinton-Gore Administration has entirely waived the Gore-McCain Act and its application to the People’s Republic of China – even though the Clinton State Department has found that “these cruise missiles pose new, direct threats to deployed U.S. forces,” and Admiral Scott Reed, the former Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, reported that these new missiles give Iran a “360-degree threat that can come at you from basically anywhere.”

This vacillating policy apparently applies throughout East Asia. In 1993, when unmistakable evidence of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development was uncovered, President Clinton took what appeared to be a clear stand: “North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb. We have to be firm about it.” That is very clear. But today, North Korea, according to published CIA analyses, has a nuclear bomb. And according to testimony last week in the U.S. Senate, Kim Jong Il is frantically working to complete building the long-range missiles to carry it 3,100 miles away, as far as Alaska.

What then does being “firm about it” mean? For the Clinton Administration, it means that for the first time, North Korea is a major recipient of U.S. foreign aid. President Clinton is using millions in taxpayer dollars to provide the Stalinist regime in North Korea with two nuclear reactors and fuel in return for Kim Jong Il’s empty promise not to make nuclear weapons – a promise that is not only unverifiable, but almost certainly already broken.

But the President’s China policy remains the clearest example of a lack of constancy.

In the face of Communist China’s ongoing export of chemical weapons technology to Iran, even the Clinton State Department cited seven Chinese violations in May of this year. The CIA has designated the People’s Republic of China “the most significant supplier of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) related goods and technology to foreign countries.” In August, of this year, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency concluded that it is “highly probable” Communist China is violating the biological weapons convention. Just last month, the United States Navy reported that China is the most active supplier of Iran’s chemical, nuclear and biological weapons program. What will be the Clinton response to all of this at the summit tomorrow?

The answer is that Bill Clinton is expected to activate the 1985 Nuclear Cooperation Agreement with China – an agreement that requires a presidential certification that the People’s Republic of China has become a responsible member of the non-proliferation community. A more self-defeating example of coddling dictators in Beijing, to use Bill Clinton’s words, would be hard to find.

The Clinton policy of so-called engagement – unilateral and unconditional engagement, to be sure – is premised on the sound notion that the United States should wish China to be our friend. That is indeed a sound notion. We should, and we do, wish China to be our friend. But we must seek more than that. We must also desire to have friendly relations not with the largest Communist nation on earth, but with a free China.

While the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union gives us hope that China, too, will one day be free, the current government of the People’s Republic of China exercises control over more people than any one-party dictatorship in history. Communist China, with two-thirds of its urban work force employed in state-owned industries, is anything but a free market. The notorious Laogai prison system, on which my colleague Rep. Chris Smith has held hearings today, holds between six and eight million Chinese citizens captive and employed in slave-labor industries – some 140 export industries that ship to 70 countries around the world. There is no rule of law in China. Transparency International recently declared that China is the fifth most corrupt nation in the world. Private rights of ownership in real property are negligible. And the People’s Liberation Army, whose official military budget has more than doubled in the 1990s, supplements that spending with off-budget subsidies through the ownership of an enormous conglomerate of commercial firms that themselves are significant marketplace actors. This is not free enterprise.

Yes, China is changing. But it’s not changing any more than anyone would expect a modern Communist state to change. Many people in the Clinton administration and in the business community argue that China’s economic progress is miraculous. It means, they say, that China cannot be Communist. If China still has a Communist economy, they say, how could it grow by 10 percent a year?

Well, that’s an old and meaningless argument, considering the base of poverty against which Chinese economic growth is measured. Communist China reported a growth rate in 1958 of 22 percent at the height of the tragic “Great Leap Forward.” Twenty-two percent annual economic growth is simply fabulous – provided you are more interested in statistics than food. During this same period, China’s economic policies led to a man-made famine that claimed 20 million lives.

Yet throughout this period, even up to the time of Mao’s death in 1976, foreign business people were saying exactly what they are saying today. Many U.S. investors expressed open admiration for what was going on under Mao. David Rockefeller, for example, praised “the sense of national harmony,” and argued that Mao’s revolution “succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose.”

But while the enthusiasm for Chinese Communism is remarkably long-enduring (and seems willing to endure anything), such endorsements, just as in the case of Stalin’s Russia, have borne little or no relation to the truth. Just as “miraculous” as these reported economic growth figures is that after so many years of such progress, Communist China is still so poor. The truth is that today, even after all of these years of “miraculous” growth, the per capita gross domestic product of the People’s Republic of China ranks it below such emblems of Third World poverty as Lesotho, the Congo, Senegal, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Even today, the People’s Republic of China needs our help. And they deserve it. All of this history means not that we should refuse to engage China, but rather that America should seek to influence China for the better.

But following the Clinton Administration’s policy of passivity has coincided with a trend away from freedom and the rule of law. We should do the opposite. We should actively promote freedom.

What more reason could we have to act than the most recent State Department Human Rights Report on China? It offers a brutal assessment: “All public dissent against the Communist Party was effectively silenced by intimidation, exile, the imposition of prison terms, administrative detention or house arrest. No dissidents were known to be active at year’s end.”

The antidote to Communist corruption, slave labor, and the denial of commercial freedoms in China is free enterprise. U.S. policy should be based on promoting it.

Yes, we have seen the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Empire, so that Bill Clinton could say in February 1995, “We won the Cold War.” (Note the “we.”) But the fight against Communism is only half finished. Today, we need a new policy not of ambiguity, but of clarity. And a “Policy of Freedom,” which is what our new initiative in Congress is called, begins with a policy of clarity of language.

Today, Jiang Zemin conversed with an actor portraying Thomas Jefferson at Williamsburg. Thomas Jefferson, our third president, when he served as governor of Virginia in Williamsburg, wrote his Statute of Religious Liberty, which became the basis for the freedoms of conscience in our own Bill of Rights. This is the person to whom Jiang Zemin “spoke” today; yet the irony was not even noticed by our own Administration.

What would Ronald Reagan have said? Ronald Reagan made a career of speaking truth to evil. He did it when he was President of the United States, and it made America an even greater country. It’s well known that President Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire,” but that wasn’t the only occasion when plain speaking served him well. On July 8, 1985, President Reagan spoke to a very distinguished and educated group, the American Bar Association. And whatever else one might say about the American Bar Association, it is a group comprised exclusively of men and women with advanced degrees. (Laughter.) All of whom appreciate refined language.

In his prepared remarks, the President – I call him the President, and you all know whom I mean – said this, in his prepared remarks, about five nations, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Libya: He branded them members of “a convention of terrorist states.” A convention of terrorist states. One has difficulty imagining Bill Clinton being so judgmental. But he didn’t stop there. They were “outlaw states run by the strangest collection of misfits, looney toons and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich.” (Laughter.)

We needn’t be so undiplomatic in our conversations with Jiang Zemin. Just as President Reagan on national television demanded the release of Nelson Mandela, we should demand the release of Wei Jingsheng.

And the American President should say simply to Jiang Zemin what the American President should say to the world: We wish an end to Communism to China. Because we love the peoples of China, we wish them to be free.

Last year, the then-Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Winston Lord, paid a visit to my office. We discussed these matters, and I asked him why it is that the President of the United States cannot say that we wish that China were not Communist. He replied that of course we wish it were so – but we just can’t say it.

And thus, with a silence as eloquent as President Reagan’s international appeals for freedom that helped topple the Soviet Empire, the Clinton Administration has forsworn a policy of anti-Communism.

We have an opportunity to do better. Next Wednesday, November 5, 1997 we will spend 12 hours on the floor of the House o f Representatives debating nine bills covering nearly every major aspect of the United States-PRC bilateral relationship. These bills together embody a clear Policy for Freedom.

The legislative approach in each case is tailored to the particular subject matter: enforcing the ban on slave labor, demonstrating our commitment to religious freedom, expanding Radio Free Asia, denying normal commercial status to the Communist Chinese military, reporting to Congress on Communist Chinese espionage and active measures in the United States, enforcing the Gore-McCain Act against China’s sending cruise missiles to Iran, assisting Taiwan with defense against China’s missile attacks, and so on. Yet despite the breadth of this legislation’s coverage, the well-known and well-worn vehicle of Most Favored Nation status is nowhere to be found in this debate.

It is possible to pursue a Policy for Freedom that works.

Communism is not something that must be tolerated in China. It’s not something that we must accept if only we were to understand Chinese history, because the truth is, Communism is alien to China.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin are hardly the fountainheads of Chinese culture. At the same time, obedience to the state is hardly a uniquely inbred value of Asia. It is something that we have known all to often and for too many years in the West, just as it was known under China’s imperial monarchy. Philip II, Louis XIV, Bismarck, Hitler, Mussolini – they were all fond of this so-called value. The truth is that in 5,000 years of history, and in 22 dynasties covering four millennia, China’s cultural experience has prepared it for almost anything. Certainly the Chinese people are prepared now for freedom.

From the year 618 forward, when the T’ang Dynasty welcomed Christians and Buddhists and Muslims and opened up ties to India, China grew rich in art and literature, and became technologically advanced. By the year 1000 – one thousand years ago – China had reached a population of 65 million (about the same one-fifth of the global population it represents today) and was easily the most technologically and culturally advanced civilization on the planet. This China was tolerant, commercially and scientifically advanced, and open to the world. Only Western Europe at that time had experienced five centuries of Dark Ages. China had not. Our world was then the least important area of civilization on earth, by far. This rich Chinese heritage, and not a bastardized “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” represents China’s birthright.

I’d like to conclude with a further story from Chinese history, and a thought.

When the Ming Dynasty replaced the Mongols in the 14th century, China embarked on its own Age of Exploration-an era that antedated, and rivaled in all respects, anything that was going on in Europe. Chinese fleets scoured the Indian Ocean, visiting Indonesia, Ceylon, even the Red Sea and Africa – where they picked up giraffes and brought them back to the amazement of the people back home.

But this is where Chinese exploration ended. Who knows? With a little more wind, the Chinese might have rounded the Cape of Good Hope. They might have reached Europe. They might even have discovered America.

Today, the irrepressible dreams of human freedom live on in China’s diverse and tolerant peoples. But China’s explorers and discoverers are kept down by worst of the 20th century’s legacies, the last vestiges of totalitarianism, which also live on still in Communist China.

It’s my hope that as we close the 20th century, America – whose unique mission in world history is to promote freedom – can provide the Chinese people with a little more wind to fill their sails, so that this time they will round the corner, so that this time they will actually be free. When that happens, China and the United States of America will truly be friends. And the world will be a much safer place.

End of Full Remarks

Defectors Spare US Further, Ill Advised Appeasement of North Korea- At Least Temporarily

(Washington, D.C.): The
Administration’s decision to grant asylum
to two North Korean diplomats following
their defection last weekend has
prevented the U.S. government — for the
moment, at least — from the latest
exercise of what might be called the
Clinton Doctrine: trading
tangible American political, economic,
technological or other strategic
concessions in exchange for
“assurances” by regimes with
well-documented records of breaching such
commitments.

According to today’s Washington
Post, “During three days of
talks that were due to begin yesterday in
New York, U.S. officials were prepared to
tell officials of the [North Korean]
communist regime that if [Pyongyang’s]
provocative missile [proliferation]
activities were halted, Washington would
seek to lift some long-standing economic
sanctions that are now hampering the
country’s economy and contributing to its
food shortages.” This willingness is
all the more extraordinary insofar as,
according to the Post,
“Some [of these] measures would be
taken by President Clinton, while
others would require congressional
approval” (emphasis added). Such
approval should not be assumed
to be forthcoming, given
profound (and fully warranted) skepticism
about North Korea that abounds on Capitol
Hill — particularly in the aftermath of
the recent visit there by a delegation
led by House Intelligence Committee
Chairman Porter Goss (R-FL).

In other words, but for the North
Koreans’ last-minute plug-pulling on the
New York discussions, the Clinton
team was poised once again to commit the
United States to actions that amount to
life-support — in the case of food aid,
literally — for the world’s most
repressive and arguably most dangerous
regime. While the exact terms of
the quid pro quo it would demand
can only be speculated about at this
point, if past experience is any guide,
Pyongyang would be obliged in return
simply to make promises that cannot be
verified and that it will in any event
not respect.

A Case in Point

For example, lost in the
self-congratulation concerning this
month’s launch of a joint U.S.-South
Korean-Japanese initiative worth roughly
$5 billion to build North Korea two
nuclear power plants — plants capable of
producing vastly larger quantities of
plutonium useable in nuclear weapons than
the Soviet-supplied reactors they are
replacing — is the fact that Pyongyang
continues to obstruct inspections
required by the so-called Agreed
Framework. As the Center for
Security Policy observed on 19 August:

On 13 August, the Clinton
Administration issued a report on
compliance with arms control
agreements that notes that North
Korea “has not allowed
‘special inspections’ pursuant to
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty” and continues to
“obstruct the full
implementation” of
safeguards required by that
accord.(1)

Such behavior puts into a harsh light the
delusional behavior or cognitive
dissonance that generally accompanies
application of the Clinton Doctrine —
persistent denials or excuse-mongering by
official U.S. spokesmen in the face of
evidence that “assurances”
given by the other party are being
violated. Take, for example, State
Department mouthpiece Jamie Rubin’s
statements on 18 August: “We have
stopped the possibility of a major
nuclear program breaking out in the
dangerous Korean Peninsula.”

The prospects that North Korea will actually
stop selling its weapons abroad are no
better than the chances that Rubin will
be proven correct about its nuclear
ambitions. Indeed, the words of U.S.
officials cited today by the Washington
Post are instructive: “North
Korea has ‘stepped up its marketing’
efforts for various missiles and
demonstrated its willingness to sell
‘indiscriminately’ to any nation with
sufficient cash….On 6 August, for
example, the Administration disclosed
that particular U.S. trade sanctions had
been imposed against two North Korean
government-owned firms for
missile-related proliferation but did not
disclose where the equipment was sent.
One official yesterday said it had been
sent to Pakistan and Iran,
but declined to provide details.”

Small Favors

Given its previous experience with the
Clinton Administration, North
Korea doubtless expects that its
intensified efforts to proliferate
missiles — and other weapons of mass
destruction-related technology — and its
balk at the latest round of negotiations
will panic the U.S. government into
offering still further concessions as an
inducement to resume a dialogue.
This will be particularly true if
Pyongyang sticks to the position
disclosed to the Washington Times
yesterday by a spokesman for the North’s
UN mission, namely that its anger over
the defecting Chang brothers is so great
as to prevent it from participating in
the next round of Four Party talks. These
involve China and South Korea, as well as
the North Koreans and Americans, and are
scheduled to resume on 15 September.

According North Korea such
leverage would be a serious mistake.
If the concern is comprehending the
magnitude of the North’s proliferation
practices, the United States is, as a
practical matter, likely to learn more
about North Korea’s proliferation
activities from Ambassador Chang — a top
diplomat in the region that is
Pyongyang’s principal arms market — than
it would from the functionaries
dispatched for the talks in New York.
This is true whether or not, as some
analysts believe, that the paranoid
regime he represented would not have
given even someone in Chang’s position
access to compartmented information
concerning sensitive sales in the Middle
East. Assuming the Ambassador knows very
little, it will still probably amount to
more useful data than is
provided by the highly disciplined and
thoroughly dishonest apparatchiks from
Pyongyang.

As to the idea of using the
discussions actually to persuade North
Korea to stop proliferating weapons of
mass destruction and their delivery
systems, there is little reason to
believe — even if the United States
agreed to what one American official
quoted by the Post called the
“‘barterization of North Korea’s
foreign policy’ in which the country
repeatedly suggests it will curtail its
noxious activities in exchange for
cash” — that the North will pass up
the opportunity to get paid twice,
once by the U.S. and a second time by
those of its fellow international rogue
states interested in buying Pyongyang’s
wares.

The Sky’s the Limit on
‘Peace Processes’

While the Clinton Doctrine
holds that temporizing measures like
“peace processes” are basically
without down-side risks, the truth is
that there are real costs, costs
that go far beyond the immediate outlays
associated with U.S. concessions offered
as diplomatic lubricants. In
this case, the bilateral talks with North
Korea advance one of the North’s most
long-standing objectives: forging an
independent relationship with the United
States, at the expense and/or to the
discomfiture of the South. Given the
volatile nature of Kim Jong-Il and the
rest of the ruling clique in Pyongyang
and the hair-trigger possibilities for
conflict on the Korean peninsula, it is
hard to imagine a more reckless step than
to encourage in any way North Korean
ambitions of driving a wedge between the
U.S. and South Korea.

In addition, the mere fact that a
“dialogue” is underway is
incessantly used by the Clinton team to
justify further concessions. Food aid,
increased energy assistance and other
measures that can be rationalized as
humanitarian gestures are far more
expensive than they appear to the extent
that they have the effect of staving off
the collapse of the world’s last
Stalinist regime.(2)
Such steps offer no guarantee that that
long-sought moment will be marked by an
implosion, rather than an explosion. If
anything, the passage of time allows Kim
Jong-Il and his ilk the opportunity and
resources to increase the cataclysmic
quality of that melt-down when it
ultimately comes.

The Bottom Line

The American people — and their
elected representatives in Congress —
should thank their lucky stars that the
Chang brothers’ defection occurred in
time to impede the scheduled next
application of the Clinton Doctrine.
Hearings should promptly be convened
after Labor Day to examine the
Administration’s strategy towards North
Korea and to impress upon both the
executive branch and Pyongyang that there
is no inclination on Capitol Hill to
reward North Korea for more of its empty
promises of good behavior.

– 30 –

1. See the
Center’s Decision Brief
entitled Damage Limitation in
the Wake of the New Press Mispokesman
(No. 97-D 114).

2. See the Center’s
Decision Brief entitled No
Way To Treat A Ruthless Totalitarian
Regime: Appeasement On Food, Oil
Emboldens North Korea, Postpones Needed
Reform

No Way To Treat A Ruthless Totalitarian Regime: Appeasement on Food, Oil Emboldens North Korea, Postpones Reform

Washington, D.C.): Next month, the
Clinton Administration is scheduled to
hold preliminary talks with envoys from
the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea
(DPRK), the Republic of Korea and the
People’s Republic of China to set a date,
venue and agenda for the beginning of
Four-Party peace talks aimed at reducing
tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
Unfortunately, the Clinton team has paid
dearly for what may prove to be yet
another phyrric diplomatic
“breakthrough” in terms of U.S.
taxpayer resources, nuclear technology
with inherent military applications and
political capital.

Congress must seize the opportunity
presented by pending legislation to order
course corrections in Administration
policies that pose two significant
threats to U.S. security interests:

First, continued aid and
support to the current government in
North Korea serves only to perpetuate
that regime. It certainly has
not proven conducive to bringing about
real change in the North. If anything, by
helping the ruthless totalitarian regime
in Pyongyang stave off needed systemic
economic and political reforms,
such assistance may be setting the stage
for renewed conflict on the Korean
Peninsula.

Second, the North Korean
dictatorship’s ability to translate its
threats into concessions from the United
States and other Western nations can only
encourage aspiring or nascent nuclear
states to follow suit.

Pyongyang Spends Its Money
on Guns, Wants Others to Buy It Butter

Notwithstanding its ideology of juche
(self-reliance), the North Korean
economy depended critically throughout
the Cold War on trade subsidies and
foreign aid from the Soviet Union and
China. With the loss of much of that
assistance in the post-Cold War era,
North Korea’s economic performance has
become even more problematic. Unreformed
Stalinist policies keep industrial
production at a small fraction of
capacity and assure serious shortfalls in
agricultural output.

Severe floodings in 1995 and 1996
brought North Korea’s food production
capabilities to the point of collapse and
pushed its people to the brink of
starvation. In the current edition of Foreign
Affairs, Marcus Noland, a Senior
Fellow at the Institute for International
Economics, writes that: “A variety
of organizations and individuals have
analyzed the North Korean food situation,
and the consensus is that North Korea is
experiencing an annual grain shortfall of
roughly two millions tons.”

It needs to be borne in mind, however,
that, in the words of Noland, “The
shortfall is partly due to bad weather
and flooding, but its roots
are structural, and the provision of
food aid is only a short-run palliative
in the absence of fundamental economic
reforms.” He concluded,
“The North Korean economy is in bad
shape, and a famine of unknown magnitude
is under way in parts of the country, but
it appears that minimum survival
requirements can be maintained with
little or no external support.”
(Emphasis added.)

Unfortunately, such germane
self-reliance is precluded so long as the
Korean People’s Army (KPA) continues to
use valuable resources training its
soldiers, developing its military
infrastructure and producing lethal
weapons for export. In testimony on 8
July 1997 before the East Asian and
Pacific Affairs Subcommittee of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kurt
Campbell, Deputy Assistant
Secretary of Defense for East Asian and
Pacific Affairs, revealed that “This
year, beginning in January, for a
four-month period, [the U.S.] saw
extensive and intensive military training
in North Korea,” and noted
such exercises are “extremely
expensive, both in terms of food and
fuel.”

In fact, the North is diverting some
$5 billion — or 25% percent of its GNP
— to defense-related expenditures each
year. What is more, Pyongyang is also
squandering approximately 4% of the
country’s GNP — enough to
purchase over 2 million tons of rice, the
rough equivalent of the yearly grain
shortfall — for
propaganda and indoctrination programs
and monuments dedicated to the late Great
Leader, Kim Il Sung (of which there are
already some 30,000). In addition,
according to recent North Korean
defectors, in the Spring of 1997, the
government further undercut the country’s
agricultural production capabilities by
instituting a “massive”
military draft of young adults and
extending compulsory military service
from 10 to 13 years. (1)

What is clearly required is a
dramatic cutback in military
expenditures, reallocation of defense
funds to the civilian population, the
institution of economic reforms and
discontinuation of frivolous and
expensive “cultural” projects
to feed North Korea’s children.
According to the DPRK’s former chief
ideologist-turned-defector, Hwang
Jang-Yop, however, Kim Jong Il — Kim Il
Sung’s erratic son and chosen heir — is
frantically trying to consolidate his
claim to power by currying favor with the
military in an as-yet-unrealized bid to
consolidate his power. Consequently, all
other things being equal, significant
cuts in Pyongyang’s prodigious defense
expenditures are not in prospect.

Helping the North Avoid the
Hard Choices

Recent events offer fresh insights
into the North’s determination to
bait-and-switch the West into further,
unwarranted concessions. Despite public
denials. (2)
the Clinton Administration’s announcement
on 15 July of its intent to donate an
additional $27 million in food aid to the
World Food Program for distribution in
North Korea was surely seen by Pyongyang
as a reward for the North’s declaration a
week before that it was willing to enter
four-party talks with the United States,
PRC and South Korea. Then, on 16 July,
DPRK forces entered the demilitarized
zone, provoking a 50-minute fire-fight,
including the use of artillery by both
sides.

This North Korean practice of
negotiating “at the brink” has
paid Pyongyang handsome dividends in the
past — most spectacularly, the 1994
U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework. Under the
terms of this so-called “non-binding
political agreement,” the West is
obligated to provide $4 billion to pay
for the construction of two light water
nuclear reactors (LWRs). It is also
supposed to supply 500,000 tons of heavy
fuel oil per year, at an estimated cost
of $50 million per year, until the
reactors go on-line.

In exchange, North Korea was supposed
to: freeze its existing nuclear energy
program; assure the safe and
internationally monitored storage, and
subsequent disposal, of spent fuel from
the existing North Korean reactors; and
undertake a renewed and constructive
dialogue with South Korea. There are
serious concerns on all scores. Defector
Hwang has reportedly told his debriefers
that North Korea already has a small
number of nuclear weapons. Full access of
the sort needed to confirm North Korea’s
nuclear activities has not yet been
afforded. And the DPRK continues to
behave in a belligerent fashion toward
the Republic of Korea (e.g., last week’s
attack in the DMZ, the April suspension
of talks with the South unless and until
Seoul provided guarantees of food aid,
the failed submarine-borne intelligence
collection operation in September 1996,
etc.). On those occasions where the U.S.
or its partners in this venture complain,
the North threatens to resume its nuclear
weapons program and/or engage in other
hostile actions until the matter is
dropped — or otherwise resolved to
Pyongyang’s satisfaction.

The Bottom Line

Against this backdrop, it should come
as no surprise that, despite the scant
return on its diplomatic and financial
investment in North Korea, the Clinton
team maintains that it is “satisfied
with [the DPRK’s] performance,”
according to Charles Kartman,
Acting Assistant Secretary of State for
East Asian and Pacific Affairs. (3)
Such a statement can only reinforce the
DPRK’s conviction that it can fend off
the need for systemic reform, continue
amassing offensive weaponry and euchre
the West into meeting its food,
humanitarian and energy requirements.

If North Korea is allowed to engage in
similar tactics to secure still further
concessions in the upcoming Four-Party
talks, the Clinton Administration will
bear responsibility for enabling
Pyongyang further to avoid systemic
reforms while building up its threatening
military capabilities. As the
Administration appears incapable of
resisting Pyongyang’s stratagems, it
behooves the Congress step into the
breach.

Congressman Chris Cox, chairman of the
House Republican Policy Committee and a
long time member of the Center’s Board of
Advisors, is expected shortly to offer
two amendments aimed at doing just that.
The first Cox amendment would modify the
FY1998 Agriculture appropriations bill so
as to prevent the use of U.S. funds for
the direct delivery of food aid to the
government of the Democratic Peoples
Republic of Korea (DPRK). It would,
however, allow assistance through the
World Food Program or private
organizations registered with AID. The
second would amend the Foreign Operations
appropriations bill, so as to prohibit a
$25 million appropriation for energy
assistance contemplated in the 1994
U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework. Such an
expenditure cannot be justified as long
as the North Korean military is using
large quantities of fuel oil — some of
which has, in the past, reportedly been
diverted from provided supplies — to
conduct massive, offensively oriented
training exercises or other actions that
threaten to put at risk American or
allied forces in and the civilian
population of South Korea.

The Center for Security Policy
commends Representative Cox,
for amendments he has developed to
minimize the chances that food aid and
fuel oil to North Korea will wind up
strengthening and perpetuating its
despotic regime. While some argue that
the effect of such actions will be to
harm innocent North Korean civilians, as
a practical matter, the only prospect
those civilians have for real relief will
come when the policies and
practices of the present North Korean
government are changed once and for all.

– 30 –

1. “Does
Beijing Know Something,” Defense
& Foreign Affairs’ Strategic Policy
Monthly Report, May/June 1997.

2. See “U.S.
Says It Will Double Food Aid to North
Korea,” Washington Post, 15
July 1997.

3. In testimony
before the East Asian and Pacific Affairs
Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee on 8 July 1997.