Posted on: Friday, March 25, 2005

EDITORIAL
Rice's smiles hide U.S.-China realities

If Condoleezza Rice begins to believe her own press notices, we'll be in big trouble.

In a rousing appraisal of Rice's brief performance as secretary of state, Time magazine details admiring headlines and huge photos in the foreign press, and adds that she's finally won the struggle between "realists" and "neo-cons" in the Bush administration.

But this administration isn't finished with making new foreign policy mistakes, or paying for its old ones.

Naming John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz, respectively, to the United Nations and the World Bank is an example.

And in Beijing, at the end of Rice's Asia tour, it became clear no amount of media popularity can overcome the neglect and paralysis in East Asia policy from this administration's first four years.

No diplomat could be expected at once to scold the Chinese for rocking the boat with Taiwan, failing to allow religious freedom and to halt intellectual piracy — and then press them to convince North Korea to relinquish its nuclear weapons programs.

It was the neo-con plan to cut off North Korea from civilization; to choke it until it collapsed. It's still not clear that the White House has abandoned this course.

But the South Koreans and Chinese hate this policy, with its potential for a North Korean military death spasm, or millions of refugees swarming across their borders, and rebuilding costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

It doesn't help Rice's case that the administration has once again played fast and loose with intelligence in claiming North Korea was supplying Libya with uranium hexafluoride, when it knew that it was our friends the Pakistanis who shipped it there.

It wouldn't surprise us to see China and South Korea soon bailing out of the six-party process and seeking their own peace with Pyongyang.

That may be a good thing in the short term. Someone has to convince the "dear leader," Kim Jong Il (Bush famously has said he loathes Kim too much to consider it) that the best use for his nuclear programs is to redeem them for membership in the community of modernizing nations.

Rice, meanwhile, presented the Bush administration's long list of demands of the Beijing leadership against a background of astonishing weakness. Bush's excessive tax cuts for the rich, a total lack of spending discipline and a policy of ever-increasing oil dependency have helped China to become a trade and energy competitor and the second-largest holder of U.S. debt.

No one expects Beijing to start dumping its T-bills — unless it perceives there's a better place to park its foreign exchange surplus. But this growing dependency on China leaves Bush extremely short of wiggle room as the situations in Taiwan and North Korea appear increasingly dangerous and perplexing.