Washington Less than a week after the United States invited
the Red Chinese to buy weapons at the great American arms bazaar, the vicepresident, George Bush, complained in Paris that the French had placed Communists in the Cabinet. Why, they might steal American military secrets rather than pay money for them — as the Chinese are apparently expected to do.
Our anomalous behaviour has gone largely unremarked upon in Washington, where the grumbling over selling guns to the Chinese Reds has to do with the tactics of the deal, not its principles. It is being said that the Reagan Administration should not have played 'the China card' now, but held it over the Russians' heads to keep them out of Poland, the concern being that we've almost nothing left to threaten Moscow with, short of all-out war.
If anyone in high places has given any thought to the Japanese reaction to Washington's selling the Chinese weapons— presumably financed at subsidised interest rates—they're not talking about it. The United States isn't of a mind to be careful of Nipponese sensibilities just now. We remain annoyed at their refusal to increase their military budget and Tokyo will be lucky if that refusal is only used as a rationalisation for selling guns to China. The day may come when it will become the basis for a much more stringent protectionism than the one presently being practiced against Japanese exports. For the minority of Americans who follow these matters there must be puzzlement that the Reaganite political faction, whose stock in trade has been dumping obloquy on the Chinese Reds, should be the ones to sell them guns. As late as the campaign last autumn they were fiercely criticising the Carter administration for `disrecognising Taiwan so that we might regularise our relations with Peking. For years and years, of all the Reds the Chinese Reds were traditionally regarded as the vilest shade of carmine.
That is why President Nixon's volte-face in the direction of Communist China caused such an uproar here, although it was nothing more than abandoning the idiocy of ignoring a nation of one billion people. You can pia a barbarous fatty like Mr Idi Amin into diplomatic Coventry with at least minimal effect but, as Americans from time to time are forced to concede, it is not a position that gets you much with nations that have advanced far enough along the evolutionary trail to print their own currency. Nevertheless, exchanging ambassadors and formal civilities isn't the same as selling them guns. Why not sell guns to the Red Russians if we're going to sell them to the Red Chinese?Are Chinese concentration camps superior to Russian concentration camps? Do they serve their inmates egg rolls while the Russians abuse their victims with beet soup? Is it President Reagan's position that we will sell the implements of war and domestic suppression to a Communist government that has murdered 15 million of its inhabitants but, if the figure climbs up over 20 million, it's no sale?
A quick inspection of the Reagan foreign policy, as its outlines develop in the heat of events, leads one to suspect that the United States is more interested in human dignity when it is wrapped in a white skin. The regimentation of a billion yellow skinned Oriental ants is not to be felt so keenly as the oppression of the Bulgarian peasantry. That somewhat parallels the situation of the large, and largely ignored, Chinese population in the United States itself. The Chinatowns of cities like New York and San Francisco, clearly do not enjoy the same legal protection as the settlements of nonAsian citizenry.
It's not that the Chinese are disliked, as the Vietnamese refugees are. As an abstraction the Chinese are rather admired, but as living persons they are mostly invisible. For some Republicans of the Reaganite stripe, yelling about the Red Chinese was mainly a way of beating the Democrats over the head for 'losing' China, and generally acting like Democrats. There probably never was much sympathy for Chinese victims of Red dictatorship.
Since assuming office this Administration has been at great pains to explain that it only slips into bed to have armed copulation with 'authoritarian' governments, never with 'totalitarian' ones. The distinction has become rather famous with those who nurture misgivings about shipping armaments to Pakistan, South Korea, Argentina and the Phillipines.
The rubrics of Reaganism tell us that 'authoritarian' governments are susceptible to quiet moral persuasion and are to be distinguished from obdurate totalitarian ones who are not to be supplied with so much as a B-B air rifle. So where does that leave us with Red China? The answer to this problem, which is apparently not overly vexing the Administration, may be the invention of yet finer and more shameful distinctions. Perhaps the Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, will maintain there is such as thing as 'soft' totalitarian governments. China, being soft, is to be given an American Express card and an invitation to go shopping in the arsenal of democracy, to resurrect a phrase coined by Franklin Roosevelt under decidedly different circumstances.
Outside of Russia and Cuba, we will apparently arm any nation for money, for any reason or for none. All prudence and compunction have vanished.
The only arms sale to run into anything like serious political resistance is the deal that would send the most advanced radar planes to Saudi Arabia. Congress is balking at this, not, however, on the ground that you shoudn't make your living by selling tools of death when you can grow corn and soy beans. No, Congress is merely worried that the sale may jeopardise Israel's security.
So we will sell guns to any country in the world, communist or capitalist, free or slave, save the Russians. No wonder the poor, dear bears are nursing bruised feel ings. They are the victims of discrimination, or perhaps Reaganian eccentricity, or it may be that the case for selling arms to the Russians has not been properly argued in Washington.
The Russians have more money than the Chinese. They also have more oil. If we can become their exclusive suppliers of armaments, it will save us a lot of trouble and uncertainty as to their military preparedness and naturally they would be less likely to go to war against us if they were dependent on us for their ammunition.
Fanaticism may be too strong a word to describe the mentalities guiding Reagan's foreign policy, but it is fanaticism which so often winds up supporting what it abhors because fanatics are able to dispense with moral obligations. You may have to bed down with Stalin to fight Hitler in the course of war, but you don't effect the alliance first and then provoke war. The next time President Reagan goes off to his ranch in the mountains of Santa Barbara, he might spend less time chopping wood and galloping around on his horse, and a little more time reconstituting his understanding of right and wrong.
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