This week the Chinese Communists celebrate
their 60th year in power, an event that the make-war-not-peace crowd,
now bloviating over Iran and Afghanistan, might benefit from
contemplating. They might also recall a time when the mere suggestion
of peaceful coexistence with the Red Menace of China was a career-ender
for high school teachers and State Department officials alike. Now the
danger from the Chinese Reds is that, being more prudent capitalists
than Americans, they might be unwilling to continue carrying our
rapidly growing debt.
According to the demonology that has long
driven U.S. foreign policy, no country has ever cast a larger shadow as
evil incarnate than Communist China. All communists in the Cold War
era, like all Islamic radicals today, were assumed to be part of a
unified internationalist movement bent on world conquest. And the
Chinese, as the Iranians now, were thought to be the worst of the pack.
Incapable of change and therefore the fit object of unrelenting
hostility, they needed to be confronted militarily, up to the point of
nuclear annihilation if that's what it took, as the taped musings of
various U.S. presidents attest. This was also a prospect for Iran that
Hillary Clinton contemplated as a presidential candidate.
Communism once was, as the Islamic
terrorist threat is today, presented as an undifferentiated
revolutionary impulse that could never be diplomatically accommodated
without sacrificing our own security or, indeed, our freedom. The
various communist nations and movements, like those currently led by a
polyglot collection of Islamist radicals, were stripped of any
complexity, be it in their national identity or ideology.
That mentality prevailed until the day
that President Richard Nixon suddenly decided that we could do business
with Mao Zedong, the most fervently revolutionary communist of them
all. What Nixon recognized was that the Chinese Communists were, like
their Soviet counterparts, nationalists first and foremost. Any notion
of an international communist conspiracy with a timetable for the
takeover of the world (the correct answer on more than one social
studies test I took as a kid) was rendered absurd by the fervent, even
xenophobic, nationalism of a Tito, Castro or Ho Chi Minh. All of them
made their revolutions, as did the Chinese, without significant outside
help and were hostile to any foreign interference, no matter the
source. Ho, who had successfully battled French colonialists, hardly
wanted to exchange them for the Chinese overlords who had governed his
country for a thousand years.
Yet that obvious fact did not stop Nixon
from continuing to kill millions more in Vietnam and Cambodia in the
name of combating international communism-even after he went to Beijing
to toast Mao. Fast-forward to last weekend, when John McCain, as his
way of justifying an escalation in Afghanistan, was on talk shows
bemoaning our failure to win the Vietnam War. Nobody asked him what
national security purpose a U.S. victory in Afghanistan would serve.
Our defeat in Vietnam led not to dominos falling all the way to San
Diego, as was predicted, but rather to Communist Vietnam and Communist
China going to war against each other. Today those still-communist
powers are battling for shelf space in Wal-Mart and Costco. This would
have happened without sacrificing almost 59,000 American soldiers and
the 3.4 million locals who died in a war that Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara said he could never honestly justify.
The limits of demonology as a substitute
for thoughtful foreign policy are amply on display in the approach to
Iran as the purported leading agent of Islamic terrorism. Once again we
are the self-defined white hats blithely ignoring our long history of
affronting Iranian national integrity. That assault began with the
CIA-engineered overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddeq, the last secular elected
leader of his country, and continued with our support of Iraq's Saddam
Hussein in his war against Iran. By ultimately overthrowing Saddam, the
U.S. vastly increased the power of Iran's religious hard-liners by
installing their disciples in power in Iraq. By supporting the Islamic
radicals in Afghanistan, whom Ronald Reagan called "freedom fighters,"
the U.S. introduced al-Qaida to that country. Blowback is the
inevitable outcome of a dangerous game that must be stopped.
What we need is for Barack Obama to pull a Nixon and attempt to cut a
deal with Tehran as well as with competing forces in Afghanistan that
meets their nationalist aspirations and our security interests. That
won't be easy, since he is a Democrat and the Republican hard-liners
will not allow him the slack given to Nixon. It is also true that the
Iranian leadership can veer into outrageous behavior, making the
international pursuit of peace extremely difficult. But does anyone
believe that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can hold a candle to Mao when it comes
to provocative rhetoric?