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Mr. Bush's
Kowtow
FOR THE PAST several weeks, Taiwan and China have been exchanging
rhetorical
broadsides about how the island's political future might be decided.
Taiwan's
democratically elected president, Chen Shui-bian, has been hinting
that maybe
his people should make a democratic choice about whether to unite
with China or
become independent. Beijing's Communist dictators have replied with
bellicose
threats to settle the matter by force, no matter the price.
Yesterday President
Bush essentially placed the United States on the side of the
dictators who
promise war, rather than the democrats whose threat is a ballot box.
His gift to
visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was to condemn "the
comments and actions
made by the leader of Taiwan" while ignoring the sanguinary
rhetoric of the man
standing next to him. Mr. Bush had his reasons for doing so -- above
all to
avoid one more foreign policy crisis during an election year. But in
avoiding a
headache for himself, he demonstrated again how malleable is his
commitment to
the defense of freedom as a guiding principle of U.S. policy.
Democracy is not always pretty or pure, of course, and Taiwan
provides no
exception. Mr. Chen has started talking about independence and
promoting
referendums because he is locked in a reelection battle. Trailing in
the polls,
he seems to think he can win by producing the same dynamic that
helped him four
years ago, when China's threats and missile firings in the Taiwan
Strait touched
off a backlash among voters. Though Mr. Chen favors independence,
most Taiwanese
do not: Polls show they prefer to maintain the status quo
indefinitely. So Mr.
Chen cleverly proposes to hold a referendum on his own election day
next March
asking his citizens not to decide on Taiwan's status but simply to
call on China
to remove the 500 missiles it has positioned in range of Taiwan and
to renounce
the use of force. It is, perhaps, a cynical electoral ploy --
something known to
occur in other democratic countries -- but it poses no threat to
China.
Beijing's new Communist leaders, including Mr. Wen, would be wise to
embrace
Mr. Chen's demands. Without such steps, they will have no chance of
persuading
Taiwan's 23 million people to accept unification with the mainland.
Instead they
have fallen back on the sort of primitive threats that ought to
cause other
democracies to rally to Taiwan's defense. Last week one general
predicted an
"abyss of war" if Mr. Chen pressed his independence
agenda, and in case that was
considered a bluff, spelled out the price that he said China was
ready to pay,
from cancellation of the 2008 Olympics to mass casualties. "We
will not sit by
and do nothing when faced with provocative activities," Mr. Wen
blustered in an
interview with The Post last month.
It's bad enough that the world's largest dictatorship might consider
a
nonbinding referendum opposing the use of force to be a provocation
justifying
war. But for the United States to accept such totalitarian logic is
inexcusable.
Mr. Bush says his policy is to oppose any unilateral change in the
status quo by
either side and to observe the "one China" policy of
previous administrations.
Aides say Beijing has been told that the use of force is
unacceptable. But Mr.
Bush didn't say that. Instead he swallowed Beijing's argument that
Mr. Chen's
referendum is somehow intolerable, and he dispatched a senior aide
to Taipei to
insist that no vote be held. A president who believed his own
promise to "favor
freedom" would have said yesterday that China's "comments
and actions" -- from
invasion threats to missile deployments -- were of considerably
greater concern
than a proposed exercise in voting booths.
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