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WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! A communiqué too far: ex-US ambassador loses plot on Beijing by Vincent Wei-cheng Wang* TNA News with Commentary Weekend 9-10 February 2002 Recently in the Washington Post, Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs during the Carter administration, urged the Bush administration to sign a fourth communiqué with Beijing. The previous three were the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, the 1978 communiqué normalizing relations and the 1982 communiqué regarding arms sales to Taiwan. Holbrooke saw the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States as an opportunity to restore strategic rationale — lost since the collapse of the Soviet Union — in the US-mainland China relationship. A new accord, he argued, could update the relationship by addressing changes in their interactions since 1982. Most likely, any such agreement would consist of “agreeing to disagree.” Last week, the White House announced that U.S. President George W. Bush would visit Beijing Feb. 21, following trips to Japan and South Korea. The administration explained that Bush’s visit, originally scheduled after the APEC meeting last October, was postponed due to the war against terrorism. But the timing of Holbrooke's trial balloon and the date — Feb. 21 marks the 30th anniversary of the Shanghai Communiqué — sparked speculation that the need to court Beijing to combat terrorism may have caused an about face in the administration’s mainland policy. Any new communiqué — as was the case with the previous three — was seen as coming at Taiwan’s expense. But is this likely? The possibility of any new communiqué during the Beijing trip is virtually nil, and highly unlikely during the remainder of Bush’s first term for the following three reasons: The first derives from the Bush administration’s foreign policy style, which eschews bilateral or multilateral agreements. As Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage put it, “We should have fewer, not more communiqués lest they tie the hands of future US presidents.” This impulse led to U.S. rejection of the Kyoto accord on global climate change and the Chemical Weapons Convention, for example. The three communiqué with Beijing “repeatedly invoked with near religious significance by Chinese officials,” as Holbrooke points out, have over the years constrained U.S. policy. In the Shanghai Communiqué, the United States acknowledges that Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China, while not defining “China.” The third was Clinton’s “Three Noes,” which committed the United States to no support for Taiwan independence, two Chinas or one China one Taiwan, or Taiwan membership in intergovernmental organizations. Beijing will likely attempt to use negotiations over a new accord to extract new concessions regarding Taiwan. Considered more pro-Taiwan than his predecessor, Bush is fully aware of this. Second, while proponents of the fourth communiqué are partly correct in attributing instability in the US-mainland relationship to the dissipation of the common strategic glue of combating Soviet expansionism, their case of basing US-mainland relations on antiterrorism as a strategic rationale is more hype than substance. Beijing’s significance to the anti-terror campaign is far less central than it was in containing Soviet power, as James Mann, a veteran journalist and China watcher, points out. If nations are arranged in a series of concentric circles in terms of their importance to U.S. antiterrorism goals, the mainland is not in the innermost circle of staunch allies like NATO and Japan. Nor is it in the second ring, which includes Pakistan because of its useful links to Afghanistan, the Taliban and al Qaeda. Rather, it belongs in the third or fourth loop, whose support is desirable but not essential. In fact, Beijing is unsettled by U.S. diplomatic and military gains in West and East Asia as a result of the antiterror campaign. Antiterrorism may exacerbate strategic rivalry, not advance cooperation between the two. Third, a fourth communiqué will not fly because the three communiqué symbolize a bygone era. They represent the approach Kissinger pursued in 1972 — now a bankrupt model. The framework established by the three communiqués was negotiated in secret to avoid congressional scrutiny and public disapproval. As a marriage of convenience, this framework overlooked political oppression and human rights violations in the mainland. U.S. political support for this framework was shattered by the Tiananmen massacre, the end of the Cold War, Taiwan's democratization and muscle flexing by Beijing. Bush knows that he cannot sell an indefensible policy to Congress and the public. His trip to Beijing will be rich in symbolism — something on which Beijing sets great store — but not much in terms of substance. Today, the United States is too smart to care. *Vincent Wei-cheng Wang is associate professor of political science at the University of Richmond, Virginia. *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. 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