A Clinton Deal Will Let China Off the Hook : Money comes first. Remember the Vietnam embargo?

Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s trip to Beijing was the most disastrous expedition to Asia by an American since William Westmoreland went to Vietnam. The Clinton Administration’s stated policy is that China’s most-favored-nation trading status will not be renewed this June unless China shows progress on human rights. Yet when Christopher nudged the Chinese, they shoved him right back.

So what will happen--trade war? Nope. This is what will happen: President Clinton will make a deal. He’ll seek to save face, of course, so White House aides will heap as much blame as they can on poor Christopher for misadvising the President, short of provoking his resignation or blowing their own anonymity. But in the end, Clinton, the man who promised a tax cut to the middle class and easy entry to Haitian boat people, will find a way to switch off what could otherwise escalate into a systemwide crash of the planet’s economic hard drive.

What of the Chinese dissidents? Will Clinton abandon his commitment to them? In Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” the Walrus and the Carpenter are gobbling up oysters. The Walrus says to his bivalve breakfast food: “I weep for you.” And then, with “sobs and tears he sorted out those of the largest size.”

A 19th-Century diplomat once said that nations don’t have permanent friends or allies, just permanent interests. Sometimes, for reasons of state, the big interests must swallow the smaller ones. Clinton has already demonstrated his appetite for Realpolitik. Last month, he lifted the trade embargo on Vietnam, even though there is strong evidence, unearthed by John Corry in an 8,000-word piece in the February American Spectator, that not only did we leave U.S. servicemen behind in Southeast Asia, but also that the American and Vietnamese governments have been conspiring to suborn the truth. Corry concludes that this two-decade cover-up is “an ever-widening moral stain” on our national honor.

The fate of POW-MIAs has never been as fashionable a cause celebre as Chinese intellectuals, but even the trendiest dissident chic goes to the back of the bus when jobs, jobs, jobs are at stake. Today, U.S. exports to China employ 200,000 Americans, but that’s just a fraction of what could come tomorrow. Last Friday, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen traveled to Los Angeles to underline that point. Reminding Californians that two-thirds of their exports go to the trillion-dollar Asian market, Bentsen’s point was unmistakable: Pushing exports is more important than pushing human rights.

China-MFN is reminiscent of last year’s NAFTA struggle. Clinton endorsed NAFTA during the campaign but let it languish once he got to the White House. It wasn’t until the fall that Clinton realized that if he let NAFTA fail, he would go down as the worst international-trade President since Herbert Hoover and his Depression-deepening Smoot-Hawley tariff. Clinton got to work, dealing away every bridge but the Brooklyn to pork-minded members of Congress in return for their yes-on-NAFTA votes.

One thinks of the climactic scene in the 1976 movie “Network.” Ned Beatty plays a global mogul alarmed at the populist antics of TV showman Howard (“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more”) Beale. Such rabble-rousing could disrupt the smooth flow of monopoly capital, so Beatty calls Beale into a darkened room to deliver a stern message. “There is only one holistic system of systems,” Beatty roars, “one vast and interwoven interactive multivariate multinational dominion of dollars.” Calling down the wrath of the overarching financial empyrean, Beatty thunders: “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And you will atone!” Like Saul on the road to Damascus, Beale is transformed. Big money does that to people.

The new world order is not military or diplomatic but financial and technological. And it is extending even unto the heavens. This week, Microsoft and McCaw Cellular announced a $9-billion joint venture to bring telecommunications to the entire planet. In a rich irony, the consortium will use “Star-Wars” technology to send 840 satellites aloft; the information superhighway will become the info-astrodome. Leave it to capitalism to beat swords into profitable plowshares.

Clinton’s path has zigged and zagged since he moved away from Hope as a young boy. He is a survivor. Clinton’s threat to MFN was an affront to the great system of systems. But now, as with NAFTA, he will atone.