Gerson

President Bush’s "Star

Wars" speech reminded me of a conversation I had late in the

Clinton era with Ezra Vogel, who served headed the State Department’s Asia

intelligence during the first Clinton Administration. He had returned to

Harvard, but was deeply engaged in a wide range of trans-Pacific security

negotiations. Responding to a question about his goal for meetings to explore

creation of a U.S.-Chinese-Japanese security framework, he said he sought a

"grand bargain" with China. How? By threatening deployment of Theater Missile

Defenses (TMD) which could theoretically neutralize all China’s missiles. As the

threat became credible, China would be offered a deal: The U.S. would call off

TMD deployments if China would agree not to adopt a more aggressive military

doctrine and not to deploy weapons that increased its aggressive capabilities.

 

That this would leave the

nuclear-capable U.S. 7th Fleet, hundreds of U.S. forward deployed military bases

and installations, and 100,000 G.I.s and their weapons still surrounding China

concerned him not at all.

 

Many "interests" are

served by the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Star Wars program, but with their strategic

focus concentrating increasingly on Asia, the fantasy of restoring power

relations similar to that following the Opium War is high on the list. By

military means and otherwise, Washington aims to integrate China into a

U.S.-Japanese dominated system on Washington’s – not China’s – terms.

 

Shortly after this

conversation took place, I traveled to China where Chinese strategic analysts

were fixated on the dangers of threatened U.S. T.M.D. deployments. As the

Chinese government has done many times since, they repeated that having "stood

up" after a century and a half of Western domination, they would not tolerate

such intimidation. They know that the U.S. is closer to developing TMD

technologies than the more ambitions "National" missile defenses (NMD). And,

they were unmistakably clear that if TMD are deployed, China will produce as

many missiles as needed to overwhelm them. Apparently the Bush Administration

doesn’t care. Secretary Rumsfeld has fused the technologically more feasible

concept of TMD with the NMD pipe dream, and the Administration is pushing full

steam ahead.

 

Major U.S. policies –

including war – are usually driven by a coalition of interests. This is

certainly the case with so-called missile defenses. Bush’s Star Wars speech was

short on details but long in terms of the interests and ambitions represented.

First and foremost, it sought to remove their major diplomatic obstacle: the

1972 A.B.M. Treaty, which precludes missile defenses and is the foundation of

the world’s nuclear arms control agreements.

 

Toward what end? First is

the political agenda – reinforcing the Bush Administration’s right-wing

political base by promising protection against the inflated specter of Saddam

Hussein, and simultaneously seeking to isolate Star Wars opponents as soft on

defense. Of course, Richard Butler, who headed the U.N.’s special commission to

disarm Iraq, is clear that an Iraqi nuclear threat is a "remote" danger. Star

Wars has been a political project since Reaganites invented it to marginalize

the 1980s Nuclear Weapons Freeze movement. The Freeze movement prevailed, but

Republicans and too many Democrats learned that Star Wars is good politics. Even

if the technology doesn’t work, false promises of security through missile

shields win election votes. Thus the Clinton-era debate was not about whether to

fund Star Wars research, but at what level. Democrats, for the most part, feared

making themselves politically vulnerable.

 

Someone, of course,

profits when Washington flushes tax payer dollars down the drain. "Free

enterprise" is good in theory, but there is a long history of Pentagon budgets

being used to subsidize covert national industrial policies. Remember the

supercomputer race? Also recall that throughout the 1990s the high tech industry

was one of Bill Clinton’s most important political bases.

 

The "military" part of the

military-industrial-complex must also be mollified and nourished. Bush’s vision

of land, air, sea and space-based "missile defense" platforms neatly skirts the

Pentagon’s internal turf wars by gorging all its competing empires.

 

Yet, the most intriguing

aspect of Bush’s speech was the olive branch proffered to Russia – not China. If

Russia will modify the ABM treaty, there are hints that some of its industries

and scientists can be integrated into the U.S.-dominated system, and its

military can dream of staying in the game. So what if that isolates China.

That’s the point. Recently Russia and China have established a weak "strategic

partnership" in response to Washington’s increasingly aggressive unilateralism.

But, with both nations dependent on, and anxious for, U.S. and Japanese

technologies and investments, the faux alliance is tenuous at best. Washington

is making Moscow an offer.

 

Which returns us to

extorting the "grand bargain" from China. In 1972, Richard Nixon split the

Sino-Soviet alliance, opening the way to play one against the other. The Bush

Administration appears to be tempted to try it again, this time using Moscow to

reinforce post-Cold War containment of China. This is a dangerous game. The spy

plane confrontation should have taught us the perils of arrogant disregard for

Chinese history, politics, and power.

 

The Cold War ended through

popular demonstrations and Realpolitik understanding that "common security" is

real security. In this regard, there is a true grand bargain to be honored: the

Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which commits the U.S. and other nuclear

powers to eliminate all their nuclear weapons. It. trumps a costly and dangerous

arms race with a nation that is the world’s oldest continuous civilization.

 

Dr. Joseph Gerson is

Director of Programs of the American Friends Service Committee in New England

and the author of With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral

Imagination.