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Reaganite moralists and Hong Kong
security
By Henry C K Liu
The
Project for the New American Century (PNAC), co-founded
in 1997 by Weekly Standard editors William Kristol and
Robert Kagan, is a non-profit educational organization
that describes itself as "dedicated to a few fundamental
propositions: that American leadership is good both for
America and for the world; that such leadership requires
military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to
moral principle; and that too few political leaders
today are making the case for global leadership".
To many around the world and perhaps even many
within the United States, the above sounds like a
declaration of superpower moral imperialism. Moral
principle is a concept of ethics. For example, love is a
moral principle in Christian ethics, while mercy is a
moral principle in Buddhism. Thus the hippie slogan of
the '60s, "Make love, not war," is a commitment to moral
principle.
The term as used by Kristol and his
neo-conservative fellow travelers is of course a coded
message to mean "Reaganite morality", which has been
tarnished by such things as the insistence of the US
administration of president Ronald Reagan that ketchup
qualifies as a vegetable in school lunch menus to
achieve drastic cuts in federal aid to education. The
most serious moral defect was Reagan's irresponsible
attitude toward the AIDS epidemic; precious time to
contain the spread of the disease might not have been
squandered by a more moral leadership. Still, the PNAC
is concerned with moral principle in foreign policy. The
PNAC declares a fundamental challenge in its Statement
of Principles: "Does the United States have the resolve
to shape a new century favorable to American principles
and interests?"
The signers of the statement -
Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J Bennett, Jeb Bush,
Dick Cheney, Eliot A Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula
Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg, Francis
Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C Ikle, Donald Kagan,
Zalmay Khalilzad, I Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan
Quayle, Peter W Rodman, Stephen P Rosen, Henry S Rowen,
Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel and Paul
Wolfowitz, all luminaries of the US political right -
seek "to accept responsibility for America's unique role
in preserving and extending an international order
friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our
principles ... a Reaganite policy of military strength
and moral clarity".
It sound more like
aggrandizement of self-interest than high universal
principle. There was a time in history when a United
States led by Franklin D Roosevelt, committed to
American liberal ideals, backed by selfless action, did
appeal to the poor, the weak and the oppressed both
domestically and around the world. Up until the death of
FDR, the hope existed that the US would emerge after
World War II not as another world hegemon, but as a
liberating force against Old World European imperialism
and colonialism. Unfortunately for the world, events
turned out to be disappointingly different.
It
serves no useful purpose to focus on the obvious faulty
structure of Reaganite morality. Let us for the sake of
discussion accept the premise set by the PNAC that
"American leadership is good both for America and for
the world; that such leadership requires military
strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral
principle; and that too few political leaders today are
making the case for global leadership". The question
then falls on whether the strategies and tactics
advocated by the PNAC would lead the nation toward those
objectives.
To begin with, current US global
economic policies obstruct the construction of a world
in which what is good for the United States can also be
good for the world. The decade since the end of the Cold
War has seen an increasing polarization of wealth and
disparity of income in favor of the United States
resulting from US-led globalization. Thus a review of US
economic policies toward a more fair and just economic
world order should be high on PNAC's moral agenda. The
US is unquestionably the strongest military power in the
world, yet its military supremacy has failed to deter
terrorist attacks on its home soil. Thus the PNAC should
rethink the logic of making the world's strongest
military still stronger and whether that could improve
US domestic security. The threat to US security comes
less from formal armies of hostile states than from
massive discontent around the world with US hegemony.
As Yale historian Paul Kennedy outlined in his
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the cost
of projecting military power to protect a power's broad
economic interests is more than even the largest
economies can afford indefinitely, especially when new
technologies and production patterns shift economic
dynamism from established centers, causing the rise and
fall of great powers in history. The US now runs the
risk of what Kennedy calls strategic overreach. The PNAC
seeks to promote democracy and political and economic
freedom aboard. Notwithstanding that every government in
this world order of sovereign states also claims to seek
the same things, although not many seek to promote them
abroad, the question remains whether military and
economic threats promote freedom anywhere. Such threats
tend to create a garrison state mentality in the
targeted government and enable it to use national
security as a pretext to suspend civil liberty. Freedom
cannot be imposed from the outside.
On November
25, the PNAC released an open letter to US President
George W Bush stating: "Proposed national-security laws
soon to be introduced in the Hong Kong Legislative
Council represent a new and heightened threat to Hong
Kong's freedoms and autonomy. These laws - which include
laws on treason, subversion and sedition - will curb
freedom of speech, assembly and association. If enacted,
they would endanger Hong Kong's democratic, civil
rights, labor, academic and religious communities by
exposing them to prosecution and imprisonment ... Only
when Hong Kong's government is democratic and its courts
truly independent will national-security laws reflect
the proper balance between freedom and legitimate
law-enforcement interests. Until then, the US should
forthrightly oppose the introduction of new
national-security laws and make clear that the adoption
of restrictive laws would trigger a review of Hong
Kong's special status under the US Hong Kong Policy
Act."
The real target of this open letter is of
course not the endangerment of freedom in Hong Kong. The
real target is China. China has never recognized the
Hong Kong Policy Act (HKPA), a US domestic law directly
interfering in the internal affairs of China. The act
holds China to its promises made under the "one country,
two systems" (OCTS) policy of not changing Hong Kong's
social and economic system for 50 years under Chinese
sovereignty. The HKPA gives the US president the legal
authority to treat Hong Kong with separate economic
status from China under the OCTS principle. With China's
accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), these
issues are increasingly only of peripheral interest.
The national-security laws in question involve
Article 23 of the Basic Law, Hong Kong's
mini-constitution, which states: "The Hong Kong Special
Administration Region shall enact laws on its own to
prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition,
subversion against the Central People's Government, or
theft of state secrets, to prohibit political
organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing
ties with foreign political organization or bodies."
Article 23 should be read in conjunction with Article 4,
which states: "The HKSAR shall safeguard the rights and
freedoms of the residents of the HKSAR and of other
persons in the Region in accordance with the law." And
Article 27, which states: "Hong Kong residents shall
have freedom of speech, of the press and of publication;
freedom of association, of assembly, of procession and
of demonstration and the right and freedom to form and
join trade unions, and to strike." And Article 14, which
states: "The Central People's Government shall be
responsible for the defense of the HKSAR." National
security is indisputably a defense concern.
The
United States has officially accepted the Basic Law as
the constitutional basis for the OCTS principle. Thus
the implementation of Article 23 five years after Hong
Kong's return to China should be a non-issue.
The PNAC open letter will not fundamentally
affect existing US policy on China, any more than the
209-page "Annual Report to Congress of the US-China
Security Review Commission" and the Pentagon's 56-page
"Annual Report on the Military Power of the People's
Republic of China" did (click here to read Asia Times Online's
July analyses of these reports). These reports were
played down by the Bush administration, as the PNAC open
letter will be. "A dime a dozen," one US official
sniffed to Reuters of the congressional report. Another
official told John J Tkacik of Asian Wall Street Journal
that "not a single person in the administration has the
time to read it, and therefore not a single
recommendation will be implemented".
US policy
on China is multidimensional, developed over two decades
under six presidents. And Hong Kong is a side issue
added on after the Tainanmen incidents in 1989, prior to
which the official US position was that the return of
Hong Kong to China was the final chapter on British
colonialism in Asia, to which the US would remain
neutral. PNAC is glaringly out of sync with corporate
America and Wall Street, which see China more as a
fertile market than a focus for missionary moral
principle. As long as the war on terrorism continues,
China's assigned role as the new post-Cold-War enemy No
1 of the US will be defused.
Still, PNAC is not
irrelevant. Its coherent conservative evangelism, while
bordering on the political lunatic fringe, serves a
useful purpose in making China appreciate mainstream US
policy as a welcome compromise, despite persistent
quasi-official provocative pushes beyond established
bilateral understandings. US foreign policy operates on
a level of sophistication far beyond the bureaucratic
range of the Chinese foreign-policy establishment.
Because of China's tradition of intolerance toward
dissent from established policy initiatives, Chinese
foreign policy is helplessly deprived of the good cop,
bad cop approach to diplomacy.
Take the
situation in Hong Kong for example. The
anti-imperialistic, patriotic left in Hong Kong, with
its heroic century-long struggle against British
colonialism under conditions of extreme adversity, has
been brushed aside and largely silenced after the return
of Hong Kong to China, thus exposing the moderate
posture of appeasement on the part of the new SAR
government to constant attack from insatiable
neo-imperialist lackeys. Beijing has deprived itself of
a fallback candidate to warn that the demise of Hong
Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa might bring about
another chief executive much less to US liking, whatever
America's reservation may be with Tung. Even the
British-trained and -installed last chief secretary,
Anson Chan, took note that local leftists were more of a
threat to Hong Kong's colonial tradition than policy
makers in Beijing. By silencing the local radical left,
Beijing has deprived Tung of a much-needed
counter-political shield, not to mention its own
revolutionary and nationalist integrity.
The
HKPA is a clone of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA),
another US domestic law that directly interferes with
the internal affairs of China. The TRA, a diplomatic
pound of flesh for full normalization of US-China
relations and recognition, is now cited as the legal
basis for US military intervention on the side of Taiwan
in the event of forceful reunification, not as merely an
authorization to sell arms to Taiwan for its own
defense. China has never recognized the TRA, which it
considers an intrusion on Chinese sovereignty.
Gary Schmitt, executive director of PNAC, wrote:
"The United States should be taking advantage of China's
current preoccupation with its internal affairs to
strengthen our hand in the region. Washington should so
conduct relations as to leave no room for the Chinese to
doubt that the United States is able and willing to turn
aside any challenge they pose. This means, among other
things, working more aggressively with Taiwan to improve
its defenses." Thus the US-Taiwan military relationship
is not merely to prevent reunification by force, but
part of an overall offensive military strategy to
contain China.
In a speech to the US Chamber of
Commerce in Taiwan on September 18, Douglas Paal,
director of the American Institute in Taiwan and former
National Security Council member under Reagan, said:
"And perhaps the most important step Washington and
Taipei could take in the near term is to begin
discussions on a free-trade agreement between the United
States and Taiwan. An agreement would not only be
economically advantageous to both countries but it would
also have the salutary effect of reaffirming that
Taiwan's future lies with the democratic nations of the
Pacific and not the autocrats in Beijing."
Referring to the United States and Taiwan as two
"countries" and to Taiwan's future as a democratic
"nation" directly contradicts the official US policy of
"one China" and official US opposition to Taiwan
independence. Part of the reason the US keeps pushing
the envelope on Taiwan de facto independence is that
Chinese hawkish elements on the Taiwan issue have been
effectively silenced internally, leaving the Chinese
Foreign Ministry without a bad cop.
It is
possible that US superiority in military technology will
prevent a successful invasion of Taiwan by China. But
that is not the issue. The issue is what cost would US
intervention incur and is Taiwan worth that cost to the
United States? Such consideration would rein in US
adventurism on Taiwan and put a stop to incessant and
escalating provocation. But the US feels immune to such
consideration because China permits no loyal opposition
to provide the exercise of foreign-policy leverage.
The undisguised appeasement by Beijing on both
Hong Kong and Taiwan, sometimes referred to as a Chinese
Munich, will not serve the cause of peace, nor the
long-term relations between China and the United States.
It could elevate the likes of PNAC from that of a
delineator of an undesirable, worst-case scenario to be
avoided by both sides to a policy reality that leads to
inevitable conflict.
Henry C K Liu is
chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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