China does not deserve normal trade relations status (by Duncan Hunter)

In March of 1941, Rep. Carl Anderson from Minnesota warned America about the danger of arming potential adversaries. He said then that the chances of war with Japan were 50-50, and that if our Navy were to meet the Japanese, we would encounter a fleet which was built with American steel and fueled with American petroleum. A few months later at Pearl Harbor, 21 American ships were sunk, 300 planes were destroyed, and 5,000 Americans were killed and wounded by a Japanese fleet that was indeed built with American steel and fueled with American petroleum.

Why is it that we still have not learned from this valuable lesson? Today, China is using its $80 billion trade surplus with the United States to build a formidable military. Tragically, the weapons China procures are targeted toward the very Americans who supplied them through their trade dollars.

With some of the $350 billion that they have amassed in trade surpluses over the last eight years, China has purchased two Sovrenny class missile destroyers from the Russians. These destroyers are designed for one purpose . . . to kill American aircraft carriers. Ironically, China did not have the finances to purchase these destroyers until money from U.S. trade made it possible.

Our nation's trade surplus with China has allowed its Communist leaders to purchase the SU-27 fighter, a high performance aircraft capable of effective warfare against America's top-line fighters. The Chinese bought kilo class submarines, AWACS aircraft with air-to-air refueling capability and sophisticated communications equipment, all with U.S. trade dollars.

Compounding this danger, China continues to sell components for weapons of mass destruction to nations like Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and North Korea. Last month, China signed a treaty agreement with Russia dedicated to the opposition of America's efforts to defend itself against ballistic missiles.

As Congress debated China's trade status, advocates argued that America was dealing with a new China, a friendlier China, a country that would become an economic partner with the United States. So, despite evidence that China continues to engage in unfair trade practices, violate human rights, and pose a threat to our national security, Congress supported President Bush's decision to provide China with "normal trade relations" status, the same trade status given to our friends across the world including Great Britain, France, Germany and Japan.

This was a mistake. China's initial refusal to release our military personnel and plane earlier this year is indicative of the regard in which the Communist regime holds our government and serves as a strong reminder that China does not consider America an economic partner, but an enemy.

The hard-liners of the Communist regime continue to view America with cynicism. They see the United States as a country anxious to make a profit at any cost, even if it means allowing them to pose a major threat to our national security. The fact is, while we trade with China, they prepare for war.

America has just left the bloodiest century in the history of the world, but it was also a time of triumph for America. It is the story of a great Democrat president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who stood with Winston Churchill against Hitler's German. It is the story of a great Republican President, Ronald Reagan, who faced down and disassembled the Soviet Union.

These successes, however, did not come without cost. America lost 619,000 service personnel in the 20th century. These brave men and women lie in cemeteries across this country and in the oceans and battlefields around the world, many of them fighting in wars for which we were unprepared; that is a tragedy. The greater tragedy will happen if this country, by our own hand after having fought and bled and sacrificed defending freedom, allows another military superpower to fill the cemeteries of this nation with the bodies of Americans killed with weapons purchased by American trade dollars.

China is clearly one of the biggest threats to our nation in the 21st century and has not earned the right to have normal trade relations status. China's past actions reveal its intent. America's leaders cannot send mixed signals and our nation's economic and military interests must be consistent, not in conflict. This is why I believe normalizing trade relations with China was the wrong decision.

Of interest:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21580534-25377,00.html

Greg Sheridan

April 19, 2007

THE proposed four-way strategic dialogue involving the US, Japan, India and Australia, which caused such a furore when it was first revealed in The Australian while John Howard was in Tokyo, is set to go ahead after all.
It is just one of a series of moves the Howard Government might make that, taken together, could provide an inestimably beneficial strategic transformation in the Australia-India relationship.
India is as big a challenge and opportunity for Australia as China has recently been, and as Japan has been for the past 50 years. India’s economy is just about growing as fast as China’s, but its demographic profile is conducive to its growing fast for much longer than China, because its population is so much younger.

Anyone who loves freedom has a stake in the success of the Indian development model: to show that a giant, poor country can achieve economic development and poverty reduction while remaining a liberal, secular democracy. India’s credentials in all this are impeccable. Though an overwhelmingly Hindu country, India has a Sikh Prime Minister and a Muslim President; you can’t do much better than that.

One thing the Indian relationship has lacked in Australian politics is a single-minded champion at the most senior level.

The then foreign minister, Percy Spender, drove the creation of the US-Australia alliance at the start of the 1950s; the then Country Party leader and trade minister, “Black Jack” McEwen, drove the Japan relationship in the later ‘50s; Bob Hawke was the China champion in the mid-’80s and Gareth Evans oversaw a historic new intimacy with Indonesia in the late ‘80s.

Now it’s up to Howard. The decisions needed can only come at prime ministerial level. Win, lose or draw at the election at the end of the year, Howard can cement a prodigiously important new relationship if he acts decisively in three areas.

The first is the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum. The official moratorium on new members of APEC runs out this year, when Australia hosts the meeting in Sydney. There is a list of 13 potential new members: three from Southeast Asia (Laos, Cambodia and Burma), several Latin Americans and a few from South Asia. But the only member of consequence is India. On some measures - admittedly rather ropey measures - India is already the fourth largest economy in the world. APEC desperately needs India. But APEC is already too big, as a result of grievous US dereliction in the past in bringing in Russia and a slew of useless Latin Americans. Thus India should be the final member.

The presence of the Indian Prime Minister would add immense strategic and economic weight to the APEC leaders meeting, by a vast distance the most important part of APEC. And for Australia to have brought India into APEC would become a permanent, in time legendary, part of the Australian story on India, an inestimable benefit for Australia.

The bureaucratic cast of mind would not want this to happen because the presence of India will complicate the ineffable workings of the snail measurement standardisation subcommittee or some such nonsense. But it is at prime ministerial level that the big strategic changes are seen most clearly.

Indeed, Kevin Rudd has already called for India’s admission. The presence of India allows Howard to shoot for history in another way, too. Climate change and energy will, at Australia’s initiative, be key elements of the APEC agenda. How can these two issues possibly be advanced in the absence of India, as India is critical to both?

If we can’t get consensus on India’s membership, then Howard should invite his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, to attend as his guest. No country would dare stand against India’s presence. This was how the G7 became the G8. Someone invited Boris Yeltsin and after that he just always showed up. Eventually the G7 ratified this and became the G8. Forgiveness and acceptance are much easier to get than permission. Howard should bite the bullet here and act decisively.

On the four-part security dialogue, the thinking now is not to expand the existing US-Japan-Australia strategic dialogue to include India, but to create a separate process involving the four nations.

It could well start as senior officials of the four great democracies meeting to discuss disaster relief on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum in Manila in August.

The proposal for the four-part security dialogue originated with the Japanese, specifically with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a highly creative thinker on regional foreign policy. The US system is a little divided. The Pentagon is in favour, having already held joint naval exercises with Japan and India, so are the National Security Council and Vice-President Dick Cheney. The weak sisters (by which I do not mean Condoleezza Rice) at the State Department have been holding things up with the combination of extreme caution and anti-Indian bias that often characterises them.

For Australia to be included in this company of democracies is wholly positive. It is opposed within Australia by the whateverist school of Sinologists and foreign policy mandarins, who always favour whatever the Chinese Government favours, and who in this case are scared the Chinese might be annoyed by our associating with our democratic friends. They are the last people Howard should heed.

Finally, when the US-India nuclear deal is bedded down in both nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency has passed a special exemption for India, Australia, with 40 per cent of the world’s uranium, must support the deal in the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

On all these things it’s up to Howard. He will be busy with many other concerns this year but if he acts decisively on these three issues he can rightly be hailed as the father of a new India-Australia partnership that would be of great long-term benefit to Australia.

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