Is it any wonder the world has difficulty making sense of Washington’s loudly proclaimed support for democracy and freedom? Consider the following: the headline, in the Financial Times of September 8-9, reads “Bush’s fury at [a certain Asian] regime.” Now try to guess which country is the object of his indignation.
According to the report, “President George W. Bush, who is in Sydney, called for the regime to ‘stop arresting, harassing, and assaulting pro-democracy activists for organizing or participating in peaceful demonstrations.’”
The regime in question, meanwhile, has alleged that “external, anti-government groups” were trying to foment uprising and warned that: “The people will not accept any acts to destabilize the nation and harm their interests and are willing to prevent such destructive acts.”
The article could easily be about China. The authorities in Beijing constantly “arrest, harass, and assault” pro-democracy activists and many others, and back up their intent to prevent “acts to destabilize the nation” with massive censorship, internet and cell-phone monitoring, and the deployment of tens of thousands of secret police and paramilitary People’s Armed Police. And they regularly blame “foreign forces” for what are actually indigenous Chinese demands for freedom.
But of course the country in question is not China. It is Burma, which has an ugly military regime that China supports. Yet in spite of the fact that the behaviors of the regimes in Burma and China are nearly identical, the United States regularly scolds and sanctions the Burmese regime, while embracing and engaging the government in China.
So angry is Bush with Burma that he has “excluded its military leader from a planned summit between the U.S. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Texas.” Yet a day before announcing this, the same President Bush had a cordial talk with (unelected) Chinese President Hu Jintao. Unlike Burmese pariah Than Shwe, Hu was welcomed warmly in Washington last April. In Sydney two days ago, Mr. Bush accepted Hu’s invitation to attend the Olympics next year—in drum-tight Beijing, from which city many dissidents and activists have already been expelled, a year ahead of the games.
To confuse things even further, on August 27, evidently facing not-so-veiled military threats from China, top Bush administration officials administered unprecedented public scoldings to the elected government of Taiwan for planning a referendum about applying to the United Nations. But then last Thursday Bush seemed to reverse that position in a speech that called Taiwan’s evolution to democracy “one of the great stories of our time.”
Where is our true policy in this muddle? If we genuinely value democracy, why are we so ambivalent and self-contradictory about its practice in Taiwan? If dictatorships are best treated by engagement and dialogue, as with China, then why doesn’t the administration reach out to Burma to break its diplomatic isolation? But if pressure and quarantine are the right approach to autocracies, as our Burma policy suggests, then why doesn’t Mr. Bush rethink his plan to visit Beijing? The administration should strive for more consistency in its policies.
