Arthur Waldron Visits China Matters...And Is Not Amused

A while back I posted a lament that the New York Times quoted Arthur Waldron on the matter of Chinese policy activities vis a vis Uzbekistan, without identifying Prof. Waldron as someone whose views on China and the Chinese threat were well to the right and who, in fact, is worshipped as a tutelary deity by the “Blue Team” of distinctly non-Asian-expert conservatives that have found post Cold-War careers in hyping the Chinese threat.

Although I took deliberate pains to ascribe Prof. Waldron’s comments to his rather unique views of China’s role in modern Asia history and in contemporary international relations—and not to any right-wing habit of cherry-picking worst-case assessments at the expense of more plausible and less alarmist explanations—he took umbrage.

For the convenience of the reader, I reproduce my post and Prof. Waldron’s comments below.

Professor Waldron’s dismissive statement that “The Blue Team exists mostly in the mind of those who fear them” will provide food for thought and amusement for us, and possibly dismay for that group of panda-affronted Washington warriors.

After all, the Blue Team seeks to cultivate an aura of mystery and menace concerning its hidden web of connections and virtuous conspiracies inside the Washington national security establishment, possibly to compensate for the limitations of intellect, experience, credibility, and achievement that characterize its non-covert activities:

The impact of the Blue Team still "isn't nearly what this community [of
hard-liners] desires," lamented Richard Fisher…. But he noted with
satisfaction that the Blue Team "strikes terror into the heart" of
Washington's policy establishment

The interesting issue of whether Professor Waldron is choosing to distance himself from the Blue Team as a matter of tactics or of principle could be addressed more easily if he started his own blog and deconstructed the inside-the-Beltway gyrations of the Blue Team from his privileged perspective--something that I encourage him to do, so his views can be better examined and understood in full context as he desires.

Professor Waldron concludes with the canard that my anonymity is a mark against my character and presumably discredits my views.

To clarify: I do not know Prof. Waldron professionally or personally. I have a career far removed from academics or public policy, a career which I choose not to endanger by linking my identity to this blog.

In the unlikely event I decide to make a job of retailing my views on China and decide to use my professional standing to enhance the credibility and visibility of my opinions—as Professor Waldron has--I will paint the bull’s eye on my back, abandon the China Hand nom de plume, and provide readers with the dubious pleasure of directing their comments to a name instead of a persona.

Until then, Professor Waldron will have to satisfy himself with addressing the matters of fact and opinion posted on this blog, instead of the individual behind them.

I remain, respectfully—and anonymously:

China Hand

Arthur Waldron and the Rightward Drift of U.S. Discourse on China

In Joseph Kahn and Chris Buckley’s article in the New York Times, China Gives a Strategic 21-Gun Salute to Visiting Uzbek President, a China expert parses the Chinese desire to cozy up to Uzbekistan as follows:

"Energy is clearly one driver for China in the region," said Arthur Waldron, a China expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "My sense is that they also tend to think that anything that throws sand into the face of the U.S. is a good thing."


Hmmm. Not exactly the way I read it.

In the interests of full disclosure, I think Kahn and Buckley should have identified Waldron as affiliated with the self-identified “Blue Team” of confront-China enthusiasts seeking to permeate the Pentagon and State Department.

Waldron is the former Director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute; signatory to Project for the New American Century statements on Taiwan and Hong Kong; served on the boards of various right-leaning foundations, and testifies to Congress on the China threat.

In the feisty days when Clinton was president and the Blue Team boasted of its virtuous conspiracy to tilt policy and perceptions toward a harder anti-China stance in the face of panda-hugger persecution, Waldron openly called for regime change in China.

He provides academic credibility and cover for the Blue Team, which is composed largely of anti-PRC enthusiasts with limited backgrounds in Asian affairs, in role similar to the one Bernard Lewis played for the neo-cons over Iraq.

It may be unfair, but I see Waldron, like Lewis, as an academic at best prescribing tough love for his area of study and at worst sounding positively Sinophobic.

In considering 20th century Asia, Waldron has a strong pro-Japan tilt. A flavor of his views, and how he applies them to the current situation, can be gleaned from his piece Japan Emerges, published earlier this year:


So perhaps we should listen to other historians, less well known than those who concentrate on Japanese domestic history {for the origins of the China invasion}, stressing instead a series of completely unexpected developments in the region that even the most liberal Japanese leaders saw as threatening to their country’s security.

Most important of these was a strong but erratically guided rise of Chinese power that saw that country’s government, goading and reacting to the resentments of her people, flout many of the undertakings she had made at Washington {at the Washington Conference of 1921-22--CH}.

Almost simultaneously came political splits and then civil wars in a China that at the time of the Conference had seemed politically stable and set on a course of peaceful economic development. These wars threatened continental interests that Tokyo considered vital, and when the allies who had promised at Washington to consult on such threats and act to protect legitimate interests failed to do so, Japan attempted to do so herself—in a catastrophic way that saw both democracy and millions of Japanese people perish.

One element of a parallel to these developments is already in place. North Korea’s nuclear capability has deeply unsettled Japan…

Translation: The Chinese were asking for it in the 1930s and now they’re asking for it again today.

Most students of the period tend to blame Japanese belligerence and imperial ambition for the catastrophe of the Pacific War, not Chinese provocation.

As Waldron himself admits, he’s in the minority in his reading of modern Asian history.

So it seems to me a sign of the rightward drift in the popular discourse about China that he nevertheless appears to be a go-to guy for the New York Times when some academic insight about the PRC is called for.

When Waldron depicts China’s outreach to the Uzbekistan regime primarily as a move touching on the mother of all American strategic interests—oil—and a provocative nose thumbing at the United States…

…instead of a clumsy embrace driven by China’s fear that weakening of authoritarian regimes in Central Asia will give the Muslims of Xinjiang a thirst for the same kind of populist, anti-government activism and promise of democratic self-determination that has roiled Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan…

…it makes me wonder if he’s trying to create a pressing issue for America in China’s relationship with Uzbekistan that really isn’t there.

If anything, China may be using its ostentatious show of support for Karimov to signal to the United States that China is fully vested in the survival of this pro-American tyrant and the U.S. government should not feel there is any need—or compelling alternative—to abandoning him.

Arthur Waldron’s Comment

Dear Colleagues--

I am still squinting from the limelight your blog has directed on me. A few
comments:

First, no one who spends thirty plus years of his life on classical and modern
Chinese can have anything but a very high opinion of Chinese civilization. No
one who knows me would question that.

Second, no one who is named for a young American who died fighting in the
Philippines in May 1945 could be pro-Japanese.

Third, the only point of being an intellectual--and I am, in the sense that I am
paid, for life, to think about things and comment, is to CALL THINGS AS YOU SEE
THEM.

Fourth, while I am pleased to see the great changes in China since 1976 I don't
see much eagerness to attack the fundamentals: freeing the press, freeing the
prisoners, allowing elections and opposition parties, making the currency
convertible, etc. The longer this is put off, the more difficult change
becomes, the more opportunities are wasted amd the more difficult the problems
are when the inevitable crash comes.

Fifth, I note a distinct unwillingness on the part of many colleagues to face
directly the worrying aspects of China such as internet censorship,
surveillance, and wasteful military buildup.

Having these views does not make you anti-China. And I would hate to think that
supporting democracy, freedom, and dignity now places me on the "right." Note
that the real hard line communists in China are conservatives. Those like me
who are against them are also called conservatives. This makes no sense.

The Blue Team is not a team and is very loose, it exists mostly in the mind of
those who fear it.

As for your comments on the one phrase extracted from a long interview, they do
not adequately convey my full views on a subject I have studied for many years.
Read my books and articles, not just the stuff that turns up on the net. I am
difficult to pigeonhole.

Rather than follow personalities, follow the facts. As Zoellick's fine speech
made clear, these are not ideal.

I have never sought to be an intellectual leader. I just try to say what I
believe and stick by it, damn the torpedoes. I have taken some hits. What do
you do?

Lets get back to the facts. They provide plenty to discuss.

And here is my name: Arthur Waldron. You know where to find me. The person
behind this blog does not even have the guts to admit who he is. That is NOT
how I operate. Even if it is a negative tenure letter, I write it so that I
could present it in person to the subject. It might be difficult, but the words
would be straight.

Best to All Arthur Waldron

The Willkie/Soong May-ling Affair

Taiwan intellectual, legislator, firebrand, and free spirit Li Ao acquired a further distinction--dingbat--during the 2000 presidential election by alleging an affair between Mdme. Chiang Kai-shek (Soong May-ling) and U.S. political figure Wendell Willkie during the Chungking years.

Turns out, he was right.

In The Soong Dynasty, author Sterling Seagrave had already cited John Service's on-the-scene but anodyne reports on the apparent mutual interest between Willkie and Soong May-ling, which led to Willkie paving the way for Mdme. Chiang's triumphal visit to the United States in 1943.

The story was taken a step further in Jonathan Fenby's recent biography of Chiang Kai-shek.

Fenby quotes virtually verbatim (and fully cites) Mike Looks Back, a privately published memoir (1985) by Gardner Cowles, scion of a publishing empire that included Look magazine. Cowles was Willkie's supporter and confidant during Willkie's political career, which culminated with a presidential run against FDR in 1940.

In 1942, FDR dispatched Willkie on an around-the-world fact-finding trip accompanied by Cowles. During a brief stay in Chungking, Willkie and Mdme. Soong became powerfully enamoured of each other.

On one occasion they slipped away from a government reception, leaving Cowles to divert the attention and wrath of Chiang Kai-shek. Later that evening, the Generalissimo appeared at Cowles and Willkie's quarters and searched it from top to bottom in a vain effort to find his wife.

At 4:00 am Willkie returned, in Cowles' words "cocky as a young college student after a successful night with a girl...giving me a play by play account of what had happened"--though Cowles is too much the gentleman to reveal the details himself.

Then Wilkie announced to an astounded Cowles that he wanted to bring Soong May-ling back to Washington with him.

Cowles convinced Willkie such an escapade would doom his political aspirations. As repayment Cowles was delegated to deliver the bad news to Mdme. Soong. Her reaction created an indelible impression on him:

Before I knew what was happening she reached up and scratched her long fingernails down both my cheeks so deeply that I had marks for about a week.

When Mdme. Soong eventually made her historic trip to the United States the next year, she summoned Cowles to her suite in the Waldorf and proposed that he devote himself exclusively to obtaining the Republican presidential nomination for Willkie, spending whatever was necessary--with his expenses to be reimbursed by Mdme. Soong:

...she wound up her sales talk with a remark I shall never forget: "You know, Mike, if Wendell could be elected, then he and I would rule the world. I would rule the Orient and Wendell would rule the Western world." And she stressed the word rule.

After the war, Cowles repeated the story to his wife, sophisticate/socialite/inveterate name dropper Fleur Cowles. While deriding Mike Looks Back as ghost-written and inaccurate, at least as it pertains to the launch of her legendary style magazine Flair, she retells the Mdme. Chiang/Willkie story herself in her own 1996 memoir She Made Friends and Kept Them, confirming more explicitly that the encounter was a secret tryst between the two and not simply a tete a tete about absolute world domination:

On this historic trip, Mme Chiang had her dangerous, short-lived affair with Wendell Willkie ...This brief love affair...had taken place in Mme Chiang's secret apartment on the top floor of the Women's and Children's Hospital. Mme Chiang was so besotted by Willkie she asked to see Mike Cowles privately before they left China, pleading with him to make sure that Willkie would beat Roosevelt in the next election for the Presidency. She offered to pay any costs! [Emphasis in original]

The conversation concluded with her agitated promise: 'If Wendell could be elected, he and I would rule the world, I the Orient, Wendell the rest.'

Gardner and Fleur Cowles divorced, apparently not on the best of terms, in 1955. By conflating the two conversations between Mdme. Chiang and Gardner Cowles, she seems to be relying on her own recollections of 40-year old events--indeed she recollects that her husband told her the story "shortly after we were married"--and not regurgitating Gardner Cowles' disparaged memoir.

Amusingly, Fleur Cowles seems unaware of what must have been Mdme. Chiang's resentment at Gardner Cowles for interfering with her plans for the ultimate, world-conquering power couple romance, and for failing to catapault Willkie into the White House in 1944.

When Fleur Cowles unexpectedly passed through Taiwan in 1953, Mdme. Chiang dropped her off at her accommodations--a fog shrouded, cliffside concrete aerie with "hideously primitive" sanitation, originally used as a final residence for Japanese kamikaze pilots--and told the snake-phobic Cowles sharply:

Don't worry about rats, Fleur. My housekeeper keeps a boa constrictor.

A bemused Cowles concludes:

...I used to reason that, in all likelihood, neither snake nor housekeeper really existed, that the snake had been conjured up as a mischievous form of revenge by Mme Chiang for 'dropping in' on her but...I just couldn't sleep. By the time I left, I had decided that insects, whether flying or crawling, and the hole in the floor for sanitation, were horrible enough to make the snake merely another ingredient in a nightmare.

Gardner Cowles' recollections, complete with claw marks, can't be dismissed as hearsay or third-hand tittle-tattle. And it was a story he regaled his wife with shortly after the event, before age, imagination, and fading memory had taken their toll.

The question that interests me is What did Li Ao know--and when did he know it? Did he glean allegations from the otherwise obscure memoirs of Gardner and Fleur Cowles? Or are there other voices?

High-Profile Brutality in Taishi: No Accident?

Thanks to Laura Rozen for linking to accounts of a vicious, probably fatal, beating meted out by local toughs in Taishi on a democracy activist--in front of a horrified Guardian correspondent.

For me, the key to the story is possibly this graf:

The tactics in Taishi, however, were more sophisticated than those used by other protesters. Outside legal experts were asked for advice and the protesters used the internet and mobile phones to spread their campaign on bulletin boards and among domestic and foreign journalists.

Furthermore, the activist, Lu Banglie, was not a local. He had come to Taishi to encourage locals to vote in upcoming elections to challenge the corrupt local government.

I believe the central Chinese government considers democratic and quality-of-life agitation useful--when it is exercised by locals against local regimes.

While allowing the locals to let off steam, it enables the central government to present itself as a counterweight to corrupt local power and burnish its "protector of the people" credentials.

What the central government does not want is for non-local human rights and democracy activists to attempt to supplant it in its self-chosen role, and create a situation in which locals look to non-government intermediaries--a democracy movement with national pretensions, or international media--for aid.

Then the central government would find itself in the undesirable and disadvantageous position of a complicit, inefficient, and distrusted force competing against these alternate sources of support--and itself losing the political and moral initiative that comes from being a sole mediator and instead becoming the focus of legitimized pressure groups demanding that it "do something".

Just as the segregated South frowned on "outside agitators" as a challenge to the traditional power structure, the Chinese central government must be deeply concerned at the rise of an alternate national political network.

And just as non-local civil rights activists were brutalized and murdered in the South, the central government--and not just the under-siege local politicians--may have decided that a salutory dose of terror and intimidation at an early stage might be needed to nip this democracy movement in the bud.

Apologies and investigations can come later, but will not dim the memory--or message--of the vicious, high-profile assault on a non-local democracy activist and his impotent witnesses from the international media.

A human rights observor described Lu's beating as going "far beyond anything that has happened before". The fact that it was committed in full view of a foreign correspondent was also unprecedented.

And, perhaps, no accident.

China's Goal for the Internet: Xinhua Select

On a subject dear to all our hearts, the Chinese government has unveiled a new regulation on internet news providers.

There has been a certain amount of squealing in the media and blogosphere, taking the new reg as a jumping off point to grumble about Chinese attempts to clamp down on non-government sources of information and opinion.

All very true, but the intention of the new reg is primarily to create a protected class of licensed Internet news companies, incorporated, registered with the government, with certain levels of capitalization and employees (with minimum 3 years' previous experience in the news business), in other words corporatized news businesses unlikely to offend--a media style we're more than a little familiar with here in the US.

Penalties on unlicensed news purveyors--those brave bloggers, posters, and Falun Gong enthusiasts--are mentioned once Section 5 Chapter 26, for those of you who like to keep track), almost in passing, when the penalties for people who get into the news business without a license are addressed.

So the point of this new policy is not to try to resuscitate the AOL model and create the world's largest moderated chatroom, with Sohu and Yahoo dutifully pulling at the oars--though that's going on too.

What we have here is the capitalism-with-Chinese-characteristics side of the manufacturing consent equation.

The Chinese government wants to create nice, meek, risk averse Internet news businesses that will be protected from competition from lively, popular blogs and websites.

Armed with this protection--and secure in the knowledge that the Chinese government will sanction unlicensed news providers--the official news providers will grow, attract investment, and crowd out and delegitimize other information sources on the Internet.

In other words, it's a MSM Internet model, this time backed up by the clout of the host government.

Is it going to be up to the Chinese teach us the workable, profitable Internet news business model--call it Xinhua Select--based on government monopoly and corporate collusion?


Bill Keller must be envious. Imagine a world in which posting an embargoed David Brooks column is a crime against the state, and not just an offense against decency and respectable prose.

The kvetching of the print media is therefore rather ironic.

The Chinese regs--with their ostentatious paeans to professionalism, responsibility, accuracy, and accountability--sound like they are ripped from the transcript of those tedious blogger ethics panels that professional journalists are always convening to harrass the raggedy-assed purveyors of innuendo, speculation, and recycled news stories on the Internet.

In both cases, the net result is to suppress the indispensable alternate version of reality that the Internet can provide in this age of elite message management and information control.

Seymour Hersh Looks at North Korea

Now that the "bad faith" rumpus over North Korea's follow-up statements on the Six-Party Agreement have died down, and the talks are chugging along toward Vietnam peace-talk style prolonged futility, it's interesting to gain another perspective on U.S. motivations. Why did the White House allow itself to sign onto a process that promises to provide neither disarmament, peace, inspections, or civilian nuclear reactors, but to date has only yielded the Bush administration an unwanted image of Clintonesque feckless accommodation?

Speaking at Steve Clemons' conference Beyond Bullets: Economic Strategies in the Fight Against Terrorism on September 21, renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh stated that he had been told in August by his sources that an agreement with North Korea at any cost was in the works so the Bush administration "could clear the decks" to deal with Teheran's nuclear ambitions.

The urgency, Hersh reported, came from the need for the United States to "keep [Arial] Sharon in the game" i.e. delivering a worthy quid pro quo to Israel--dealing with the existential threat of Iranian nuclear weapons--in return for Israel's sticking with the Gaza withdrawal (and presumably providing support for a neo-con "democracy on the march" version of events in the Middle East that justifies continued adventurism vis a vis Iraq, Syria, and Iran).

It's unclear what "dealing with Iran" would mean, since the Security Council referral by a divided IAEA is expected to result in a veto from Iran's nuclear patron, Russia, despite any multilateralist, "grownups back in charge" diplomatic cred the Condi Rice team may claim on behalf of U.S. foreign policy as a result of the hastily-concluded North Korea boondoggle. One would think the world is unlikely to go along with White House efforts to gin up an anti-Iran coalition after the Iraq fiasco just because we caved on North Korea.

This is unlikely to be an outcome satisfactory to Arial Sharon. With the Bush administration's international clout at low ebb and the American public showing little appetite for escalated Middle East adventures, perhaps the best Israel can do is attempt to reprise its "consequences be damned" pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein's Osiraq facility, this time against Iran's Bushehr reactor and its well-protected constellation of nuclear facilities, under a U.S. diplomatic--instead of military--umbrella.

This interpretation implies that U.S. commitment to the negotiation process on the Korean peninsula is merely temporary and tactical. When Iran is dealt with--effectively, incompetently, disastrously, or indifferently--the Bush administration will turn its attention to North Korea once again with its original pre-September regime change aims and malice undiluted.

Neo-con sympathizers may draw unexpected encouragement from Hersh's remarks. After all, by this scenario, the Chinese did not extort humiliating concessions on behalf of Kim Jung Il from a politically and diplomatically neutered Bush presidency.

Instead, the North Korea agreement can be comfortably construed as a Machiavellian master-stroke: a merely tactical retreat disguising the Bush administration's resolve to deal righteously with the Mini-Me oriental leg of the Axis of Evil at a later date--after America has resolutely grasped the Iranian nettle in a reaffirmation of its implacable determination to transform the Middle East with its gun-barrel vision of democracy.

Time will tell if the advocates of confrontation with North Korea will settle on this more flattering explanation for recent events that otherwise appears to be setback for their cherished goals.

On the other hand, those of us who believe that the neo-con's "democracy by apocalypse" agenda has delivered so much disaster and so little triumph that using the word "hubris" undeservedly implies that the neo-cons actually achieved something positive before overreach revealed their incompetence, the neocons remain what they have always been: useful, complicit tools providing an ideological veneer for conservative elites working to create their "Have It My Way" super-sized self-perpetuating imperial state devoid of accountability and transparency.

North Korea--and the suffering of its people--is merely a distraction, sometimes useful and sometimes irritating, in the evolving American effort to contain and confront China. When--if ever--the United States gets the Middle East under its control and can deny its resources to China, the time may come for America to join with Japan to use the North Korean situation as a lever to destabilize and alarm the PRC. Then the neo-cons will be let slip to confound and distract opinion with their lunatic baying about Pyongyang.

But the other dangers--to American interests and American democracy--are closer to home and more immediate.

In this context, Hersh's revelation (to me) that a 1700 square foot, multi-billion dollar stack of Saddam's US currency stash has disappeared into the insatiable maw of the burgeoning "off-the-books" covert operations empire of Bush's executive branch is a sign that Kim Jung Il and his regime should not number among the greatest of the our worries.

Note: Tip of the hat to Billmon comment site Moon of Alabama for unearthing and publicizing Hersh's remarks.

NK Talks: Fiasco, Business as Usual...or Both?

Re the fracas over Pyongyang demanding that they get their light water reactors first, there will be an understandable tendency to blame the North Koreans for screwing up the nuclear accord with another piece of last-minute brinksmanship intended to wring a final concession out of the talks.

Or, as the LA Times print edition of Sept. 20 puts it, "New Terms May Blow Up Nuclear Deal".

But consider this, from the New York Times, which did the best job of reporting the whole affair:

To break the impasse, Ms. Rice came up with a compromise during meetings on Saturday afternoon with her South Korean and Japanese counterparts. Each country, she suggested, would issue separate statements describing their understanding of the deal, with a specificity that is not in the agreement itself. The South Koreans and Japanese went along with the idea, though South Korea, one official said, complained that it would "sour the atmosphere." Russia and China issued vaguer statements that left unclear the sequence of events.

So the North Koreans, at Condi's suggestion, clarify their position on what they consider the "appropriate" time for them to get light water nuclear reactors, and get jumped on for being obstructionist jerks.

The NYT reported, in a phrase that may come back to haunt the Secretary of State, that Rice's involvement in the negotiations was characterized jokingly as "adult supervision".

The LA Times and Sonni Efron, usually reliable conduits for Condi Rice's version of events, somehow omitted this interesting nugget, which makes Condi look pretty clueless.

The actual negotiations were apparently a full-time fudge factory, according to the Washington Post:

China sought to bridge the gap, playing its leadership role as sponsor of the talks. Chinese diplomats proposed language according North Korea the right to a reactor for electricity production but implying that it could invoke that right only after dismantling its weapons program and rejoining the international nuclear inspection regime.

"Implying". As in "not stating". As in "I wonder what they actually said to the North Koreans?"

What is clear from the reporting is that the Chinese drove a hard bargain and insisted that the Bush administration, rocked on its heels by Katrina, Iraq, and Iran, had to accept that North Korea had the right to a civilian nuclear program or else face public blame for the collapse of the talks.

The Chinese, perhaps, overplayed their hand in an attempt to humiliate the U.S. into returning to the decade-old civilian nuclear reactor scheme and thereby admit that five years of fulmination, threats, and chest thumping rhetoric under Bush had done little more than return the Korean peninsula dialogue to the hated days of engagement, peace, economic carrots, and Bill Clinton-style diplomacy.

For its part, the United States might have been perfectly happy to see the agreement fall apart and not have to follow through on a concession that the upper levels of the Bush administration consider coerced and detestable.

Certainly there seems to be a disconnect between the wailing and gnashing of teeth reported today with the attitude that the Washington Post reported earlier, when the negotiating team was still trying to move things forward:

In an immediate demonstration of the difficulty ahead, the official North Korean news agency early today quoted an unnamed Foreign Ministry spokesman as asserting that Pyongyang would not give up its weapons program until it received nuclear reactors from the United States. A State Department official shrugged off the statement, saying the focus would remain on the Beijing declaration.

For the U.S., focus quickly shifted to asserting that the appropriate time for light water reactors is after complete disarmament and verification.

Re verification, the Post reported:

The administration envisions what one senior official described yesterday as a "very intrusive verification regime that will go well beyond what is required" by the IAEA.

For those of us with short memories, it is perhaps instructive to recall the experience of another member of the Axis of Evil, Iraq.

In that case, the U.S.and the U.K. pushed through an onerous inspection regime whose apparent intent was to confront and destabilize Saddam Hussein's regime to the point that it would expel the inspectors and provide a casus belli.

Whatever the reason--appeasing Bush's conservative domestic base, an inability to accept any unpleasant lessons from Iraq, or simply a failure of perspective or imagination--the U.S. is unwilling to surrender the propaganda advantages and strategic posture that come from assailing North Korea as a pariah state and subjecting its sovereignty to coercive U.S. and/or international supervision.

No doubt Kim Jung-Il remembers that Saddam Hussein acceded to full-cavity search treatment, and in return was rewarded with a duplicitous U.N. dog-and-pony show courtesy of Colin Powell, and got invaded anyway for his pains.

With that kind of history, civilian nuclear reactors will probably be operating on Mars before the Bush administration concludes its inspection regime in North Korea to its satisfaction.

So one can understand, if not appreciate, North Korea's explicit insistence that the light-water reactor program begin now, as a sign of good faith.

Failing that, what North Korea is probably hoping for is to drag the discussions out for another four years until there is a change of U.S. administration and a repudiation of the Bush "failed state" intervention doctrine that creates existential peril for the Kim Jung-Il regime whenever it comes into contact with the United States.

For a U.S. administration under siege and bereft of the credibility and will to resolve the Korean situation through negotiation and concession, the opportunity to deflect blame for the continued impasse away from itself and onto Pyongyang may be the only positive outcome it can hope for.

At Long Last Lefkowitz

At Long Last Lefkowitz

After four months of fits, starts, and leaks, Jay Lefkowitz was finally named the U.S. human rights envoy for North Korea on August 19.

Why Jay Lefkowitz?

While in the White House, Lefkowitz primarily handled domestic policy outreach to conservative Jewish and Christian groups, most famously in President Bush’s stem cell initiative. With Lefkowitz at the helm, a supposedly rigorous, even-handed review yielded a ban on new stem cell lines that pleased the religious groups, while providing political cover for President Bush (and effectively gutting the federal program) by grossly overstating the number of current lines available for research.

Lefkowitz’s qualifications as a North Korea expert or even a human rights activist beyond the blastocyst level might not be readily apparent.

However, he is close to Michael Horowitz, godfather of the conservative effort to recast the human rights foreign policy discourse as a struggle against religious persecution of Christians by communist and Muslim regimes, and midwife of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, which authorized the human rights envoy.

In fact, according to one source, Lefkowitz is Michael Horowitz’s cousin, something that I welcome people more informed about the inner workings of the conservative movement than I am to comment on.

I addressed the Lefkowitz/Horowitz/North Korea/Evangelical angle in a previous post here .

On the surface, Lefkowitz’s long-delayed appointment might be interpreted as a sign that the Bush administration is lurching toward a policy of ideologically-tinged confrontation with Pyongyang.

The exact opposite may be true.

With President Bush’s approval levels scraping along in the mid-30s and even lockstep Republicans beginning to express concern over the difficulties in Iraq, the White House can ill afford another foreign policy debacle triggered by righteous Bush brinksmanship.

It may be better to allow Condi Rice and her team to pursue the full gamut of feasible foreign policy options vis a vis Pyongyang from Acquiescence to Accommodation to Appeasement that may yield the Bush administration some desperately needed domestic and international credit.

At the same time, with President Bush’s support shrinking to the hard core of true believers, he may need to make ostentatious but superficial gestures like the Lefkowitz appointment to reassure the famous “base” that he is still the true, parfit, and infallible knight of their regime change fantasies.

The true measure of the situation will be if Lefkowitz is encouraged to say or do something that seriously endangers the State Department negotiations currently under way.