By Tony Snow / The Detroit News

Chinese leaders determined to make Clinton look like a fool

hite House mavens have given Republicans a campaign issue for 1998 and 2000. The issue is national weakness, and President Bill Clinton’s trip to China will put it on display.

    Let us set the stage. The commander in chief has winged his way to Beijing, where Chinese officials have arranged nine days of sightseeing and humiliation.

    Clinton’s hosts graciously placed him on a podium near Tiananmen Square, knowing the scene would make any and all grandiloquence about human rights sound tinny and hypocritical.

    They denied credentials to three broadcasters working for Radio Free Asia — a twofer snub, since it enables the communist government to thumb its nose not only at Clinton’s administration but also at the idea of a free press.

    They made it clear they have no remorse about trying to influence our 1996 elections or pilfering high-tech secrets that enabled them to build weapons which can threaten us more directly and credibly.

    They asked the president to relax U.S. export restrictions even further — which is rather like Willie Sutton asking banks to leave their safes open at night.

    They pushed for the complete abandonment of the trade sanctions enacted by Congress in the wake of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square.

    Finally comes the icing: As crews were fueling Air Force One in preparation for the big trip, China urged the United States not to sell advanced weapons to Taiwan — and to make a formal statement to that effect in order to inflict gratuitous humiliation upon Taiwan.

    In short, the world’s last major communist power approached the president’s visit as an exercise in brinksmanship. It didn’t kowtow, it provoked. It tested the administration’s patience — and, much to its gratification, found the Clinton team almost Job-like in its forbearance.

    The final nail almost surely will be a public statement by Premier Jiang Zemin or some other eminence that China ought to receive a free pass on trade. This would entail a presidential promise to end annual votes on Most Favored Nation trade status for China coupled with an immediate grant of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO).

    Presently, China qualifies for neither. It hasn’t protected civil liberties, as Congress wants. And it hasn’t repealed trade laws that restrict the import of American consumer goods, as the WTO charter demands.

    This weird “greeting” is a direct product of the administration’s genius for compromising fundamental national principles. The United States has managed to observe one key foreign-policy tenet for 50 years. We believe in free trade and in engagement through trade.

    Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Bush all adopted this approach. But the Clinton cadres added a new wrinkle by treating national security and dignity as fungible commodities. They swapped them for the moral equivalent of trinkets and beads — as if our safety and pride were cheap and glittery gewgaws.

    We can blame the mess on two basic errors in strategy. First, the president figured that defense no longer mattered in the post-Cold War world and thus slashed defense spending to pre-Pearl Harbor levels.

    Not content with that, he decided to reshape military culture. His reforms sapped morale and transformed the Army, Navy and Air Force into bogs of social experimentation. By feminizing the combat forces, the Pentagon has managed to repeat errors committed and rebuffed by many of our allies, including Israel. It also persuaded hundreds of our best pilots and fighters to quit the military and choose something more rewarding and challenging.

    Nobody doubts the United States could whip China in a confrontation, but almost nobody believes Americans would engage in such a tiff without cataclysmic provocation. We don’t have the naval force to intimidate anybody for an extended period of time — not even Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. China and others interpret that as weakness on our part, and they’re right.

    The second great error: The administration confused appeasement for engagement. We always have had enough clout to pry open intransigent markets — and the president was fabulously successful in pursuing this strategy during his first term.

    Unfortunately, he now owes parts of his soul to organized labor and thus has approached free trade with caution. The result: He lost a crucial vote last year on fast-track trade authority and now feels he can only succeed by giving China what it wants, no matter how badly its leaders act.

    Clinton is right to promote engagement. Unfortunately, he has all but doomed his venture by failing to realize that engagement only works when one operates from a position of real and perceived strength. The Chinese think they can make Bill Clinton cry “uncle.” Until he proves them wrong, they seem determined to make him — and his nation — look like the fool.

Tony Snow is The News editorial page’s Washington columnist. His column is published on Monday and Thursday. Write letters to The Detroit News, Editorial Page, 615 W. Lafayette Blvd., Detroit, Mich. 48226.