An Analysis from Instapundit
Senator Dianne Feinstein - AP Photo
In 1978, as the newly elected
mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein befriended Jiang Zemin, then the mayor of
Shanghai and eventually president of China. As mayor of America’s tech
epicenter, her ties to China helped the growing sector attract Chinese
investment and made the state the world’s third-largest economy. Her
alliance with Jiang also helped make her investor husband, Richard Blum, a
wealthy man. As senator, she pushed for permanent MFN trade status for China by
rationalizing China’s human rights violations, while her friend Jiang
consolidated his power and became the Communist Party’s general secretary by
sending tanks into Tiananmen Square. Feinstein defended him. “China had no
local police,” Feinstein said that Jiang had told her. “Hence the tanks,”
the senator from California reassuringly explained. “But that’s the past. One
learns from the past. You don’t repeat it. I think China has learned a lesson.”
Yet the past actually should have told Feinstein’s
audience in Washington a different story. The United States didn’t trade
with Moscow or allow Russians to make large campaign donations or enter into
business partnerships with their spouses. Cold War American leadership
understood that such practices would have opened the door to Moscow and
allowed it to directly influence American politics and society in dangerous
ways. Manufacturing our goods in their factories or allowing them to buy ours
and ship them overseas would’ve made technology and intellectual property
vulnerable.
But it wasn’t just about jeopardizing national security;
it was also about exposing America to a system contradictory to American
values. Throughout the period, America defined itself in opposition to how we
conceived of the Soviets. Ronald Reagan was thought crass for referring to the
Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire,” but trade and foreign policy from the end of
WWII to 1990 reflected that this was a consensus position—Cold War American
leadership didn’t want the country coupled to a one-party authoritarian state.
The industrialist Armand Hammer was famous because he
was the American doing business with Moscow. His perspective
was useful not because of his unique insights into Soviet society, politics,
and business culture that he often shared with the American media, but
because it was understood that he was presenting the views that the politburo
wanted disseminated to an American audience. Today, America has thousands of
Armand Hammers, all making the case for the source of their wealth, prestige,
and power.
It started with Bill Clinton’s 1994 decision
to decouple human rights from trade status. He’d entered the
White House promising to focus on human rights, in contrast to the George H.W.
Bush administration, and after two years in office made an about face.
“We need to place our relationship into a larger and more productive
framework,” Clinton said. American human rights groups and labor unions were
appalled. Clinton’s decision sent a clear message, said then AFL-CIO President
Lane Kirkland, “no matter what America says about democracy and human rights,
in the final analysis profits, not people, matter most.” Some Democrats,
like then Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, were opposed, while
Republicans like John McCain supported Clinton’s move. The head of Clinton’s
National Economic Council, Robert E. Rubin, predicted that China “will become
an ever larger and more important trading partner.”
More than two decades later, the number of American
industries and companies that lobbied against Trump
administration measures attempting to decouple Chinese technology from its
American counterparts is a staggering measure of how closely two rival systems
that claim to stand for opposing sets of values and practices have been
integrated. Companies like Ford, FedEx, and Honeywell, as well
as Qualcomm and other semiconductor manufacturers that fought
to continue selling chips to Huawei, all exist with one leg in America and the
other leg planted firmly in America’s chief geopolitical rival. To protect
both halves of their business, they soft-sell the issue by calling China
a competitor in order to obscure their role in boosting a
dangerous rival.
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Below is an excerpt from the article “The Thirty Tyrants” by Lee Smith.
_________________
The Thirty Tyrants
The
deal that the American elite chose to make with China has a precedent in the
history of Athens and Sparta
BY LEE SMITH
ORIGINAL
PHOTO: WIKIPEDIA
The example Machiavelli gives of the last is the friendly
government Sparta established in Athens upon defeating it after 27 years of war
in 404 BCE. For the upper caste of an Athenian elite already contemptuous of
democracy, the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War confirmed that Sparta’s
system was preferable. It was a high-spirited military aristocracy ruling over
a permanent servant class, the helots, who were periodically slaughtered to
condition them to accept their subhuman status. Athenian democracy by contrast
gave too much power to the low-born. The pro-Sparta oligarchy used their
patrons’ victory to undo the rights of citizens, and settle scores with their
domestic rivals, exiling and executing them and confiscating their wealth.
The Athenian government disloyal to Athens’ laws and
contemptuous of its traditions was known as the Thirty Tyrants, and
understanding its role and function helps explain what is happening in America
today.
For my last column I spoke with The New
York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a
decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. His important
piece documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy
wasn’t working for them. Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from
running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic
Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them
rich.
A trade consultant told Friedman: “The need to compete in
a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate
manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider
what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party,
leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”
In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was
published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist
identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching
themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that
is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises
without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they
happened to make their livings and raise their children.
…
