Right Is Wrong on Romania

Every now and then the American political system seems ordained to do something stupid. One preeminent example was the U.S. withdrawal of favorable trading status to Yugoslavia--a move that was fortunately later reversed--that led Ambassador George Kennan to resign his post in 1963. Now history is threatening to repeat itself with regard to Romania.

The Senate Finance Committee is holding hearings on U.S.-Romanian relations, with the focus on whether Romania’s most-favored-nation status should be revoked. The answer assuredly should be no.

Most-favored-nation is really a misleading term. It doesn’t mean that a country gets especially favored access for its exports to the American market, but that it is treated no worse than any other trading nation. In other words, to have most-favored-nation status is the norm; not to have it is the exception.

Romania is one of four communist countries to enjoy most-favored-nation status. The others are Yugoslavia, Hungary and China. (Poland lost its “favored” access to the U.S. market as a result of Warsaw’s crackdown on Solidarity, the democratically inclined trade-union movement.)

The challenge to Romania’s most-favored-nation status has been sparked by David Funderburk, former ambassador to Romania who owed his job solely to the influence of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). Ever since President Reagan’s election five years ago, Helms has been trying to impose his Neanderthal views of foreign policy on the State Department.

Funderburk bases his case for withdrawal of most-favored-nation status on the fact that Romania is a communist dictatorship, that human rights are routinely trampled there, and that the government of the small Balkan country is not as independent of Moscow as it would like us to believe.

So what else is new?

No one who knows anything about Romania is under any illusion that the communist regime is anything but a despotic, Stalinist-style government that represses its own people and cynically sells exit visas for Jews and other emigration-minded citizens.

But Hungary, Yugoslavia and China--especially China--are not models of democracy, either. Like Romania, they are being rewarded not for democratic values but to encourage their tendencies toward national independence and to give the United States a small degree of leverage on policies that we don’t like. Whatever Helms and Funderburk may say, Romania has resisted full integration into the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact as well as the periodic Soviet efforts to reestablish absolute control over the world communist movement.

Most-favored-nation treatment on trade is important to the Romanians--enough so to make American reaction a factor in their calculations. But no knowledgeable person believes that its withdrawal would persuade the Romanians to become nice capitalist democrats. Only the Helmses of the world and the political appointees who do their bidding within the diplomatic community are so naive.

The Senate Finance Committee has better things to do than indulge the illusions of the far right.