Instead of more bad news of toadying to the butchers of Beijing, let us suspend for a week the Dianne Feinstein Moral Equivalence Awards and return, as the radio announcer used to say, to those thrilling days of yesteryear. To 1983 to be precise, when Feinstein was still the mayor of a left-coast city and not yet THE SCRAPBOOK's eponymous appeaser of China, when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and when "moral equivalence" was still fightin' words. In Senate testimony last week, Paul Wolfowitz, dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, made many cogent points about the U. S.-China relationship and also recalled this striking moment in George Shultz's tenure as secretary of state:
"I think the basis of a good relationship [with China] comes when they recognize that they have to respect our interests, especially on something as fundamental as American security. I might say as an aside, I was with Secretary Shultz when he visited China in 1983, his first visit as secretary of state, and a particularly difficult period in U.S.-China relations. In fact, if you read the American press and believe it, and maybe they were right, we were on the verge of a complete rupture and loss of all the gains that had been made in two previous administrations with China. And there was all kinds of pressure on Shultz to go to China and be nice to the Chinese, and give them whatever they asked for to try to improve the atmosphere. And, to his great credit, he resisted that.
"I remember, in fact, one incident that took place in Beijing when he was meeting with the, as it turned out, erroneously named American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing -- I say 'erroneously named' because he had one question after another that could have come from the Chinese ministry of trade or the Chinese foreign ministry. And finally a question came on a subject that is still around, which was, Why can't we sell nuclear reactors to China when our French and German competitors can do so? And Shultz was not a man to lose his temper by accident, but he blew up at that point. And he said, Well, we have regulations to regulate this trade because it is an unusual and dangerous trade. And if you don't like it, if you'd rather be a Frenchman or a German, go to France or Germany."
Or you can lie low and wait 10 years for the Clinton administration.