Bully a Mouse, Kiss a Dragon : Bush: Who will care what President liberated Panama if he keeps pandering to the butchers of Tian An Men Square?

By sending troops to Panama and computers to China, President Bush risks giving America the appearance of a cowardly bully--tough on the weak and weak-kneed toward the strong. It is the same unbecoming appearance that his mentor, Ronald Reagan, gave when he liberated Grenada the same week that he decided to sit on his hands in the face of the terrorist attack that killed 241 American Marines in Lebanon.

For Reagan, the Grenada invasion stood as a positive, if minor, accomplishment. But his failure to match action to his tough words on terrorism came back to haunt him. He ended up a pathetic supplicant trying to buy the freedom of American hostages with bribes of weapons for the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Likewise, the move against Manuel Noriega may prove an enduring success for Bush, but his insistent pandering to the butchers of Tian An Men Square constitutes a failure to meet the most important challenge he faces.

For Panama, the overthrow of Noriega in favor of the duly elected President Guillermo Endara is surely a blessing. For America, the results will be mixed. Our action is bound to reinforce the perenniel Latin American resentment of the big neighbor from the north who has so many times thrown his weight around--sometimes for good causes, sometimes for selfish reasons. Yet many Latins will be glad to see Noriega fall and a certain respect, albeit grudging, will accrue from America’s demonstration of willingness to use force when pressed.

The stakes in Panama, however, are nothing compared to those in China. No amount of success in the one will compensate for failure in the other. Indeed, what is at stake in China is even bigger than China itself. It is the opportunity to rid our planet of communism, one of the great scourges of our century and the threat against which U.S. foreign policy has been aimed for more than 40 years.

Communism is in a state of disintegration. It has collapsed in most of Eastern Europe. Its grip is weakening in the Soviet Union as democratic forces gain strength and as Mikhail Gorbachev himself gropes for some kind of radical reform. The outcome is hard to foresee, but there is a reasonable chance that it will be a system deeply different from the one we have known. That would leave China as the sole bulwark of communism. (The fact that unreconstructed Stalinists persevere in Romania, Cuba and North Korea is of no account except to their long-suffering subjects. Those dictators will eventually be toppled or posthumously repudiated, but however long they endure, neither Nicolae Ceausescu nor even the charismatic Fidel Castro has the weight to sustain the Communist idea.)

The events in China this spring revealed that popular sentiment for fundamental change is vast. The democracy movement lost the first battle but showed enormous strength, including support within the government and the military. Its triumph would be a great good in itself and would give further impetus toward transformation in the Soviet Union. It would be a blow from which communism probably would not recover.

Instead of lending firm support to the democracy movement, President Bush has been succoring its oppressors--by vetoing a bill to automatically extend the visas of Chinese students here, by sending high-ranking emissaries to Beijing, by revoking trade sanctions. The original rationale for America’s rapprochement with Beijing was to counter Soviet power. At its best, that strategy reflected a failure of American nerve. Given our preponderance of wealth, we always had the capacity to match the Soviets ourselves. Today, that rationale rings especially hollow, both because the Soviets are behaving in a far-less menacing way and because the correlation of forces has become more favorable to us.

We are warned that if we stand firm toward China’s current rulers, then they will cease sending their students to us and spurn our investors. This is surely a threat to cut off Beijing’s own nose. With the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe drawing closer daily to the West, it is China that will be left behind if it isolates itself. Deng Xiaoping and his comrades will find their country weakened and domestic discontent heightened.

George Bush has had the great good fortune of becoming President just when America’s international position is more favorable, more pregnant with opportunity, than perhaps at any other time in its history. The forces for progress are running so strong that he has been called upon only to give them a judicious hand. But in his recent dealings with China, he has done the opposite. If he muffs this epochal opportunity to help communism into the grave, few will remember him as the President who liberated Panama.