Truman
Doctrine, RIP
At the present moment in world history nearly every
nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free
one.
One way of life is based upon the will of the
majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free
elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom
from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a
minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a
controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United
States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities
or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work
out their own destinies in their own way.
I believe that our help should be primarily through
economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political
processes.
-President
Truman, 1947 the “Truman Doctrine”
Wise words indeed; and thanks
to the Truman Doctrine Greece and Turkey (the original focus of the doctrine in 1947) are
democracies today. Thanks to the subsequent
leaders in Washington who subscribed to the same doctrine, while weathering scathing
criticism from the intelligentsia and the media, many of the former Soviet countries are
democracies today.
Those who sell out, for what looks like an advantage at the time, often times end
up not trading something for something else, but end up trading something for nothing. Just over twenty years after the Truman doctrine a
too-clever politician named Kissinger decided to trade in the Truman doctrine for
Machiavellian schemes. Maybe the thought was
that America was not strong enough to support the Truman doctrine anymore, or that our
foes were stronger than we were, but in the end it was a sell out. The thought was that to split up the communist
block, America would trade the security of a mostly free China (the Republic of China, AKA
Taiwan) and a veto-holding seat on the UN Security Council, and trade with Communist
China, in exchange for unsettling the balance of power between Communist China and
Communist Russia.
This was a scant twenty years since the Korean war, where Chinese
“volunteers” had tortured American and other UN sanctioned defenders of the
invaded South. About twenty years later, the
Berlin Wall fell and Soviet Russia reformed. In
retrospect, how useful was it to warm up to Red China, and to sell the Taiwanese down the
river? Apparently it was irrelevant. America traded something for nothing. Actually it was worse than something for nothing:
it sold out on principle and bought trouble.
Communist dictatorships, as Russia and all the rest demonstrated, implode into
their own emptiness when isolated from free markets.
However, by putting hordes of workers on the clock, such ruling elites can take in
a flood of cash from free markets and use those funds to prop up the country and to
enlarge the military. This is precisely what
Red China is doing today.
Now America sells out, not to disturb the Sino-Soviet relationship, but to inflate
the stock prices of companies taking advantage of cheap Chinese peasant labor. China may be more fascist than communist these
days, but if anything, that makes it even more dangerous as a fascist country can actually
produce war material much more efficiently and has a never ending thirst for raw
materials. The wish is that by filling up the
coffers of the government and turning China into a super-power that somehow it will
“rise to the occasion.” That is
imbecilic. The Soviets were brought down by
bankrupting them, not by flooding them with hundreds of billions of dollars of one-way
trade each year.
The plain and simple reality is that if the Red Chinese wanted to reform the
country (e.g., a free press, freedom of religion, freedom of association, free elections,
not driving tanks over demonstrators) they could do so at absolutely any time. Is anyone so fool as to think that another
hundred billion dollars of one-way trade and suddenly a ballot box will magically rise out
of the of the Yangtze River, as Excalibur rose out of the mists of Avalon? Dictators are dictators because they like to be
dictators, and dictators both crave and are corrupted by power. No dictatorship in the history of the world was
ever ended by being propped up by future victims.
In the next twenty years, Red China will demand, after some contrived incident,
that America secede the Pacific between Hawaii and the coast of China. Later on the demand will be that Hawaii be turned
into a neutral zone or returned to a stirred-up indigenous population. Someday, after all loose dollar bills are safely
in China and they no longer have any need of us, the Red Chinese will do their very best
to demonstrate to the world that they are the new superpower. Red China has a fetish for sinking air craft
carriers. But what are the lives of several
thousand American sailors for the current stock price of GE? Is not your grandson’s blood worth a pair of
socks that cost a dollar less, or to have a DVD player in every room of the house? Kissinger was a schemer who was out-schemed; his
place in history will be not with Neville Chamberlain but with Vidkun Quisling. But for the rest of us: a dollar spent on Red
Chinese goods is a dollar spent on bullets and missiles to kill your children and
grandchildren and a dollar spent on plunging the free world into darkness.
Truman was right. In fact, even if the
country is not strong enough to uphold the Truman doctrine it should do it anyway: better
to fight valiantly and have a chance of success than to gracefully walk to the gallows. Evil is never as strong as it appears, and is
powerful only when unopposed. As for
politicians, it is simple: a free press in
one year in China, or all imports have a 20% duty; freedom of assembly in two years, or
all imports have a 40% duty; free elections in three years, or an 80% duty. If that is what the Red Chinese want, then they
should not complain. And the American
consumer, collectively the most powerful force in the world at the moment, can put a stop
to this suicidal stupidity at any time.