Don't Be Pragmatic---Be Moral

Hillary Clinton has never been one of the Geek's favorite people. Ever since her behind-locked-doors health care reform debacle, the Geek has had nothing good to say about her. During the Clinton Administration the Geek had any number of crowd pleasing lines to offer about her (presumed) effects on that administration's pretense of a foreign policy.

The Geek greeted the announcement of her impending appointment as SecState with a mix of anticipatory guffaws and gleeful hand rubbing. He could hardly wait to start posting on her blunders in that office.

Intellectual honesty and a sense of the historical dynamics of foreign relations demands that the Geek put aside his prized antipathy for Ms Clinton. He has to say that her stance on the essentials of the Sino-American relationship is correct. It is bang on. It is thumbs--up.

SecState Clinton has taken a lot of heat from the High Minded. She has been trashed by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Beyond that the customary suspects from the red meat Republican Right have crispy-crittered her.

The sin?

As anyone who has not been living in a cave in the FATA this past week knows, SecState Clinton downplayed the abundant American objections to China's dismal record in the human rights department. She emphasised instead the necessity of both nations working on common problems. (The most important of these "common problems" is the necessity for China to keep on buying US Treasury instruments.)

To put it bluntly, the massive expenditures being undertaken by Congress and Administration demand equally prodigious foreign investment. China is a critical portion of that reality. Not only does China already hold a lot of our collective IOUs, we must persuade the lads in the Forbidden City to hold more.

Compared to that defining (and in the Geek's view, highly regrettable) reality, the degree to which China's government represses dissent, violates American concepts of privacy or fails to free Tibet is quite unimportant. Pragmatism in the national interest demands we all get a grip on that.

Unfortunately SecState Clinton's pragmatic stance has been further undercut by her own department. Specifically the release of the annual review of human rights performance by the governments of the world.

China was excoriated by the report, as is to be expected. China has never been noted as a towering monument to Western ideals regarding the rights, liberties and protections due the individual citizen. The nature and character of the government in Beijing is irrelevant. From the beginnings of China as a polity right on down from dynasty to dynasty to Nationalist China to the Peoples Republic of China, the individual has been unimportant compared to the interests of the state and the good of the collective.

The angry Chinese protests regarding the conclusions of the annual review are both justified and not inapposite. The Chinese government does not view human rights in the way that the US or other Western countries do. To Beijing the fundamental human rights are an absence of famine or hunger and the presence of employment. All else is either gravy or a null referent.

Unfortunately the Chinese are addicted to overblown rhetoric and insulting terminology, which serves to obscure the underlying realities. It has been a long time since millions of Chinese have starved to death as a result of government policy. It has been a relatively long time since tens of thousands of Chinese have died in government sponsored internal fighting.

From the perspective of Beijing these are laudable accomplishments. The Geek agrees. Under Mao, China plumbed the most abysmal depths of governmental depravity signified by the Great Famines of the Great Leap Forward and the Yangtze of blood which was the Cultural Revolution.

It has been two decades since the tanks rolled over the pro-democracy demonstrators. Even back then at the launch of today's China, the government moved with historically remarkable restraint, unleashing the peasant soldiers only after numerous warnings and indications of government resolve to end the occupation went unheeded.

This does not mean that China is or will become a paragon of human rights. It means simply that the Chinese government is correct when it avers its human rights performance has improved.

The High Minded, those who are perpetually Indignant and Concerned, will never be satisfied with China. The nature of Chinese culture, society and defining worldview will not mesh comfortably even in the long-term with the most sensitive of American feelings.

That does not matter.

What matters is that the national interests of the United States requires a reasonably positive relationship with China. The economic prong of that fact has already been mentioned. But our need goes far beyond fiscal underwriting.

The US needs Chinese collaboration on a wide array of vexing and critical interests.

For those who worry about such things, there is the question of anthropogenic climate change and what might be done to address it.

On a more pressing (and reality laden) nature are the problems of nuclear proliferation in both North Korea and Iran. China is a central player. Without the full cooperation of China the sanctions against Iran whether those in place or those being discussed by the European Three will not prove effective. Without the full cooperation of China there is no possibility that North Korea will prove more willing to end its ambitions than it has been to date. (Remember, North Korea owes its existence today to the hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops who died there over a half century ago.)

As George Cluny and others who worry about Darfur ought to know as they press the Obama Administration to "seize the moment," China has massive potential leverage on Sudan but so far has been unwilling to use it. Elsewhere in Africa, a continent which may see extreme governmental fragility and social unrest as the global depression deepens and lengthens, China also has both interests and the influence which goes with it.

Then there is the UN. The UN Security Council to be specific. China can make or break an American supported resolution. The same may be said of other UN fora including the General Assembly and the assorted Councils and Commissions.

The pragmatic pursuit of national interest demands we dirty the hem of our moral skirts with the mud of Chinese indifference to the finer points of US defined human rights. Yes, this means that dissidents will be stifled--a prospect which the Geek regards with revulsion--Tibet will not go "free," the police and security forces will engage in extra-judicial punishment, torture will be practiced, privacy invaded and the organs of convicts harvested to the benefit of some wealthy person from some country far from China.

None of these prospects and others unmentioned are pleasant to contemplate. But, even less pleasant to consider is what might happen absent a pragmatically sanctioned working relationship between ourselves and the Chinese.