kowtow?

This might seem familiar:

• Presidential candidate A, running against incumbent administration B, criticizes B's China policy as too meek.

• A becomes president, and within months has a China policy indistinguishable from B's.

I have only two solid data points to support this hypothesis [(A,B) = {(Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush); (George W. Bush, Bill Clinton)}]. And the pattern may not hold in 2004. No antiwar Democratic candidate will criticize this administration as too accommodationist: runs counter the convenient stereotypes and all that.

So it falls to the President's ideological allies to make the charge instead.

IT WAS A SAD SPECTACLE: Sitting next to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, visiting emissary from the world's largest dictatorship, President Bush last week performed a kowtow that would have made Bill Clinton blush. Following a script dictated by Beijing, and translated into English by senior national security council official James Moriarty, the president condemned Taiwan's popularly elected president for certain unspecified “comments and actions” indicating a desire for Taiwan's independence. Moriarty then proceeded to tell reporters “on background” that what the president really meant was that he opposed Taiwan's plans to hold a referendum this coming March. The Chinese premier professed himself delighted by the administration's condemnation of Taiwan and opposition to a referendum, reminded everyone that China still reserves the right to use military force against Taiwan in the event of any “provocations,” and traveled back to China gloating about the American president's gift to Beijing.

The referendum in question is scheduled for March, and is not about independence for Taiwan. Instead, it addresses the increasingly sophisticated missile batteries arrayed against the island nation (and nation it is, in spite of the semantic games played by all parties involved).

[Taiwanese President Chen] is hoping, and with good reason, that the Taiwanese people will vote overwhelmingly to demand that China remove these missiles and commit to a peaceful resolution of the cross-straits issue. Chen's critics in the Bush National Security Council claim that Chen is playing politics with the issue in his reelection campaign. And indeed, Chen does hope that his public position regarding China's missile threat will serve him well in the March elections—a bit the way President Bush hopes his position regarding the war on terrorism will help him next November. In both cases, the point is that the two presidents expect to be rewarded politically for faithfully expressing the majority view in their countries. And in neither case does the fact that the policy is politically popular make it illegitimate.

Ouch.

My initial reaction on hearing the news last week was that the Administration had cut a deal: in exchange for voicing opposition to a referendum of only symbolic significance, President Bush is expecting real help in dealing with North Korea. The appearance of obsequiousness, although regrettable, is perhaps necessary.

NRO's resident premature curmudgeon, John Derbyshire, agrees with this assessment:

Taiwan is a free and independent nation. That her leaders cannot proclaim this fact out loud in the forums of the world for fear of provoking the Chinese Communist party, an organization of thieves and murderers, is deplorable. There are, however, rather a lot of deplorable things going on in the world right now. I hope the administration is treating with proper skepticism any assurances we got from Wen Jiabao last week. In the context of our present peril, though, I don't think we had any option but to seek those assurances, or to trade them off for some mild criticisms of Taiwan's up-for-reelection president.

Score one for me! (Well, maybe.) Also on NRO, guest writer Ross H. Munro goes further by putting blame for the flap squarely on Chen.

Starting last year, Bush-administration envoys and Douglas Paal, the de facto U.S. ambassador to Taiwan, repeatedly pleaded with President Chen not to make waves and provoke China, underlining how vital it was to global U.S. strategic interests that stability prevails as much as possible in China-Taiwan relations.

In effect, Chen ignored Bush-administration pleas despite the steps Bush had taken earlier to strengthen Taiwan security. Chen took several steps in recent months to strengthen Taiwan's independent identity that, most significantly, were guaranteed to anger China. Most recently, he proposed various versions of referendums that were seen, at minimum, as laying the groundwork for a referendum in which Taiwanese voters would one day endorse what would effectively be a declaration of independence.

I do hope that China eventually outgrows its insistence that an independent Taiwan is an affront. But for the moment at least, Taiwan is in no immediate danger, and North Korea is the more urgent issue. Unpleasant as siding with a dictatorship might be, sometimes it is the lesser of two evils. (More here.)