The China Lineup

Among politicians, support for the Bush administration came in different shades. Democrats like Mario Cuomo, Chris Dodd, and Barbara Boxer were rhapsodic, and so were many Republicans. Other conservatives, such as Henry Hyde and Jon Kyl, sounded worried that the United States had been too soft.

These unpredictable alliances underline a phenomenon we’ve been seeing now for several years. On domestic policy, the battle lines are fixed, while on foreign policy, alliances are shifting. On taxes, the budget, and Medicare, it’s like World War I — easy to tell who’s on which side, with no one moving. But foreign policy is like the board game Risk: There are lots of players, each one’s strength rises and falls with each turn, and you never know who’s your friend or your foe. One possible conclusion is that if there is to be a fundamental shake-up in American politics, it will come when a foreign policy crisis swamps domestic concerns.

It’s very hard to predict how new alliances will form. But the Hainan situation offered a clue. People weighed in from all perspectives, and one issue that divided them seems large enough to someday be the axis around which new disputes will form — namely, the redemptive power of capitalism. Let’s take a look at the four main schools of thought that supported the Bush approach, in ascending order of intellectual seriousness:

* Clintonism. Some people supported the Bush strategy on the grounds that it doesn’t really matter what’s in some stupid letter. The important thing is to get our young people back to safety. As Sen. Boxer put it on CNN’s Late Edition, “Words will never really be the issue here. If it took a few words to get those wonderful people home, good, there was no damage done by that.” This is the foreign policy version of Clintonism. Words are just tools you can spin and twist to get what you want. It depends on what the definition of “very sorry” is.

There is not much intellectual substance here, but there is an impulse, and a very strong one: Let’s not make trouble for ourselves. People who share this impulse see the world as filled with thorny and unpleasant trouble spots, and believe the United States should have as little contact with them as possible. It doesn’t matter what we say, or what abstract principles we end up betraying, let’s just get out of nasty places. Each foreign policy problem is a discrete crisis, and if we can extricate ourselves from it, we will have survived another day to enjoy our happiness at home.

This impulse, a kind of ad hoc timidity, is shared by some on the left and right, on issues ranging from Bosnia to Africa to the Middle East.

* Team Spirit. The second argument that was used in favor of the Bush approach was also based more on impulse than on intellect. The impulse was loyalty. Over the past few years, American politics has become less ideological but more partisan. Millions of people will automatically and furiously support their party leader, almost no matter what he does. Democrats, who loathe small invasions and bombing raids on places like Sudan when Republicans order them, were suddenly supportive when Bill Clinton launched them. Meanwhile, Republicans, who froth at the slightest hint of softening toward communism when it comes from Democrats, took it in stride when George W. Bush led the way.

The ideological movements on both left and right have now become divisions within the party organizations. During the Cold War, members of the conservative movement had an arms-length relationship with the GOP and with the business community. Republicans and corporate types could be allies, but conservatives mistrusted them. Among other things, the business types were perpetually trying to sell the Soviets the rope to hang us.

But now there no longer have to be regular fights over how to deal with the Soviets, so conservatives and business people are not reminded of any fundamental differences between them. What’s more, the Republican party has become more conservative, so there is much less ideological distance between the movement and the party. And conservatives have become part of the national establishment, so that some activists who would have been considered beyond the fringe by corporate types a decade ago are now on $ 10,000 a month retainers.

These days, conservatives and Republicans more often think of one another as members of the same team. There is no longer a bright line separating the pool of conservative intellectuals and journalists from the pool of Republican officeholders. Now there is something of an expectation that activists, commentators, and rank and file conservatives should behave like Republican organization workers. They should help articulate the Republican position. They should say helpful things on television. They should write helpful articles. It’s okay to register disagreements in calm moments, but at times of conflict, everybody is expected to rally for our side.

A similar transformation has occurred on the left — as the Lewinsky scandal made clear, when liberal groups universally betrayed their feminist principles to stand by their party leader. This means that both liberalism and conservatism are less intellectually dynamic. Pressure to conform to the party line leads to groupthink, and narrows the parameters of acceptable debate.

But the phenomenon also means that any foreign policy position an administration takes will have an army of rabid supporters — an army belonging to the party of the president who initiates the policy.

* Realism. During the China standoff, the Bush administration received strong support from Henry Kissinger and the vast bulk of the East Coast foreign policy apparatus. These are the realists. They are the latest iteration of a tradition that grew up in European palaces and looks back to events like the Congress of Vienna as paradigms of foreign policymaking. On these shores, it was cultivated within the gracious quadrangles of Ivy League universities.

Devotees of this school see foreign policy as an intricate game played by worldly grown-ups. They are impatient with moral huffing and puffing, and barely tolerant of “political pressures” that rise up from voters. They see foreign policy as a series of power rivalries that must be managed and mastered.

Fareed Zakaria expressed the realist position with admirable clarity in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post called “Bush’s Grown-Up Approach to China.” He argued that throughout the 1990s, the Republican party behaved like spoiled children: “irresponsible, . . . railing against the world instead of setting about to mend things.” But Bush is finally forcing Republicans to act like adults. By getting his hands dirty, by compromising with Chinese thugs, he is dealing with the world as it is, and facing the hard realities that mature people grapple with.

The Washington Post’s Jim Hoagland (who is not of this school) noted that the Bush letter “could have come, proudly, from the Quai d’Orsay or any other European foreign ministry” — which is essentially why it so thrilled the realists. In the European mode, realists distrust grand visions of a world made safe for democracy. They prize order, and don’t entertain idealistic notions of democratic revolutions. (Thus, Colin Powell, during the Reagan administration, was one of those who furiously lobbied to remove the sentence “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” from Reagan’s Berlin speech, believing it important to engage the Soviets diplomatically and not ruffle their feathers.)

You wouldn’t think that George W. Bush, the guy from Midland, Texas, who detests Ivy League elitists, would be a favorite with the realists. But the realist hand is especially strong now. That’s because commercial considerations have come to dominate foreign policy. The patricians who used to go into foreign policy did so because they wanted a life above commerce. But now diplomacy and commerce have merged, and you have outfits like Kissinger Associates that are part foreign-policy think tank, part consulting firm. They can pursue their double mission because these days business and foreign policy share methods and goals: engagement, compromise, deal-making. Neither business people nor diplomats have an interest in raising issues of human rights or democratic rights that might disturb business with dictators.

* Tough-minded Free Trade. There is a final school that, unlike the realists, has both a short-term strategy and a long-term vision. These are the Tough-minded Free Traders, who believe in simultaneous political (and if necessary military) confrontation and economic engagement. They want to deter China’s political expansionism with power, but strengthen China’s business class with trade.

Unlike the realists, they are willing to stand up to Beijing. But they also believe that the best way to destroy Chinese communism is through trade. As Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal put it, “Let China join the World Trade Organization, but also sell a robust arms package to Taiwan.”

The argument is quite compelling: Build up a merchant middle class within China. Let the Chinese leaders see that they can get rich only if they play by international rules. Wait for the indigenous bourgeoisie to demand political freedom to go along with its economic freedom. Then watch China slowly evolve, as Chile and the Asian Tigers have, from authoritarianism to democracy.

There are only a couple of problems with the tough-minded-free-trade analysis. First, is it politically realistic? It’s easy to say we should be both tough and soft on China. But in practice won’t all those business lobbyists insist that we be always soft? When it actually comes to defending Taiwan or getting tough with China on a myriad of issues, won’t they insist that the United States do nothing that could destabilize their business deals? In other words, U.S. administrations may posture as Tough-minded Free Traders, only to end up as Realists, willing to ignore or minimize every outrage, tolerate every instance of misbehavior, and excuse every abuse of human rights, every breach of the laws of civilized behavior.

Second, the theory puts a lot of faith in the power of capitalism to transform tyrannies into democracies. History offers some examples in which the market has sweetened manners, but there are also plenty of instances where the economically minded have overestimated the civilizing power of trade. In 1912, conventional wisdom held that the European nations could never go to war because they were bound so tightly by trade links. Of course they did go to war. When the Soviet Union fell, Western free marketeers rushed to Moscow, believing that if we could only put in place the right economic reform plan everything would turn out all right. Free marketeers also argued that economic bonds would soften conflicts in places like the Middle East. But in the Middle East as elsewhere, there are those who think that some things are more important than money.

The timid will always look for ways to avoid foreign policy crises. The party loyalists will always follow their leaders. The realists will always look for negotiating tables to crowd around. But if you want a real substantive debate, look to the Tough-minded Free Traders — and, confronting them, the people who condemned the Bush response to Hainan. Because if you survey the backgrounds of the Bush administration’s critics, you find in all cases people who have doubts about the healing power of commerce. You see people who believe that ideas shape history more than economic forces. You see people who believe that a foreign policy largely shaped by commercial interests is likely to be a craven and amoral foreign policy.

The argument between socialism and capitalism is over. Now, the argument is about whether capitalism deserves two cheers or three. The two-cheers crowd, on left and right, want sometimes to rise above commercial considerations. The three-cheers crowd are skeptical about this. Maybe this will be the next big debate, not only in the foreign policy sphere (How do we deal with China?), but also in social policy (How do we regulate biotechnology?) and even fiscal policy (Do we give tax breaks to stay-at-home moms or entrepreneurs?).

If it is — if the next big debate is about the limits of our allegiance to commerce — that Chinese pilot will have clarified the future. Maybe the guy actually deserves the medal he’s getting posthumously as a martyr to the revolution.

David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and the author of Bobos in Paradise.