Whatever one's reservations about Pat Buchanan for President, you've got to acknowledge the true grit of his rhetoric.
One of these days, because that's the way world leaders are treated, the Clinton Library will publish in three volumes (four volumes?) the foreign policy pronouncements of William Jefferson Clinton. Backward reels the mind in contemplation of this mass of contradiction and ambiguities; pity the poor political science grad student who will have to go through it.
Here is the way Pat Buchanan handles foreign policy. The setting: San Francisco's Commonwealth Club. The subject? "A Time for Truth About China." Here we go and with only an occasional interruption, the objective here being stylistic rather than polemical:
- Buchanan says he doesn't want war with China or even confrontation, and reminds the audience he was with President Nixon when the China curtains parted in 1972.
- Although it's correct to engage China, it's not correct to embrace its government as friend and partner given that it is and expansionist power hostile to our ideals, (Question: Expansionist? Taiwan and Tibet don't count because China considers them as we would Hawaii and Alaska.)
- In the last decade we have sought to mollify China. Since 1990, Peking has been allowed to run up a trade surplus of $274 billion with the United States. Meanwhile, we have cut our defense spending as a percentage of our GNP in half.
- China has meanwhile sold missiles to Iran and nuclear technology to Pakistan and occupied Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands "astride" Japan's oil lifeline. It has fired missiles toward Taiwan intending intimidation. It has developed 18 ICBM's, 13 of them aimed at the United States.
- China has expanded to 200 the missiles targeted on Taiwan. Forty five missiles (quoting Atlantic Monthly writer Paul Bracken) are all that is needed to paralyze Taiwan and threaten U.S. bases in Asia.
- We have been making policy on the basis of that trade with China will dulcify Peking policy. That doesn't work; there was plenty of trade between North and South Korea when civil war came on.
- The national greed for business in China is deluded. We sell more to "tiny Singapore." What do we sell to China, other than aircraft? Cotton, live animals, starches, fibers, meat, cereals, wood pulp, raw hides, skins oilseeds animal and vegetable fat and fertilizer.
And then, "Now, I understand what China is doing, what I don't understand is what America is doing. U.S. trade policy today is impossible to defend in terms of U.S strategic interests."
So what should we do? "Until China closes its concentration camps, stops coercive abortions, and ceases its persecution of Christians, Tibetans, anti dissents, Congress should suspend most-favored-nation treatment and impose on all Chinese imports the same taxes China imposes on goods form the U.S.A."
We should block the transfer of any new high-tech military technology, veto new loans to China from the World Bank, reject the admission of China to the World Trade Organization and work for the admission of Taiwan. If China doesn't halt its own missile build up, we should initiate an embargo, which "would bring an instant currency and economic collapse in China."
The peroration was full-throated.
There are, of course, reservations. If imports from China were forbidden, we'd have the equivalent of a $57 billion levy on American consumers. ...A central problem with our Taiwan policy is that Taiwan also insists it is a part of mainland China. ... A policy of no trade with countries in which human rights are violated means, e.g., no further trade with Singapore.
But it is 100-proof pleasure to hear a presidential candidate speak out so plainly on foreign-policy questions.
