A Turning Point : Why Trade Must Defer to Human Rights

After years of heavy anti-Soviet lifting, it seemed Washington could finally strike the grim Cold War set and install the homier scenery suitable to a world marketplace. We could no longer count on our military. Instead, we would do business, reconceiving our foreign policy as one big trade mission, to the tune of “Let’s Make a Deal.”

But that illusion is over. Recent events abroad have reminded us that a) many countries’ politics are far more brutal than ours, and b) the brutality is of a scale and type that even a nation of peaceable traders can’t ignore.

The biggest story is from China. Chinese American human rights activist Harry Wu endured 19 years in Chinese forced-labor camps and now devotes himself to publicizing their horrors. Wu has mightily annoyed China’s government. So three weeks ago, when he tried to enter China bearing a valid passport and visa, the authorities threw him in the slammer.

The good news is that Wu has finally been allowed to see a U.S. official. The bad news is the Chinese have charged him with crimes punishable by death.

China has done a lot of this carrying-on lately.

When the United States began trade proceedings against China, on the ground that it not only allows widespread piracy of American intellectual property but actually owns part of the counterfeiting apparatus, the Chinese were imperially miffed.

When Washington let the Taiwanese president visit here privately, the Chinese yanked their ambassador and demanded that President Bill Clinton issue a “personal denunciation” of Taiwanese and Tibetan independence.

On the issue of Tibet, China has also criticized India, which allowed a large celebration of the Dalai Lama’s recent birthday. Since conquering Tibet, the Chinese have waged war, complete with executions and torture, on the Tibetan Buddhism that the Dali Lama symbolizes. Evidently, they consider it rude for others to bring up the subject.

Yet, reminders of the world’s brutality do not come from China alone.

In Myanmar, formerly Burma, the ruling junta, hungry for Western favor, has finally released Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. For championing pluralist politics, she was placed under house arrest, isolated from most human contact, for six years.

The United Arab Emirates has just tried a Filipino housemaid who killed her employer. She said he had raped her at knife point before she managed to grab the weapon and stab him. The court believed her and awarded her damages--but convicted her of manslaughter and sentenced her to seven years in prison.

A UAE official called the sentence “quite minimal.” The maid “should have been hanged” under Islamic law. “We were at ease with the trial,” he said. “That is why we reported it in our papers.”

In the bad old imperialistic days, the worst of the behavior we see in such abundance today was called barbarism and was considered a perfectly good reason for sending out gunboats, civil servants and disinfectant. The old imperialists did not do this from altruism: Trade followed the flag, and a colonizing nation did well by doing good.

After 1945, fewer people talked this way. In America, as the Cold War slogged on, the interests of business and defense were often sharply opposed. The former wanted calm relations with friends and foes and favored liberal technology-export policies to help them compete internationally. They usually opposed an emphasis on human rights, because such issues inflamed Americans and forced U.S. foreign policy-makers into making unpleasant protests.

These pacific sentiments became a powerful political force. Yet, during those years, the needs of military and ideological warfare generally overrode those of trade. Indeed, as Western governments learned how powerful human rights was in destabilizing communist regimes, they became more aggressive in its use. It felt good and it worked, a rare and satisfying combination.

Today, by contrast, no Cold War keeps us in line. We are gung-ho for trade and for the proposition that we can best do good by doing well rather than vice versa. Politicians reflect this sentiment, free from the cross-pressure once applied by anti-communist ideology.

Yet, the world is still full of government practices that offend proper notions of law and are repellent to anyone with a minimal regard for human life and freedom. What do we do about them? Can we fairly expect Americans--including business people, consumers who benefit from U.S. strength in world markets, and the politicians who represent both--to condone the politics of human rights protest even if it disrupts short-term trade and other relations?

Well, yes, actually. Leave altruism and self-respect out of it. It is suicidal for us not to press other governments to observe fundamental, internationally recognized standards of behavior.

True, some American companies will always manage to cut profitable deals with autocratic and totalitarian regimes. But, in the long run, trade does follow the flag, just as the imperialists said. The flag in question today is not the U.S. flag; it is the flag of certain basic Western values. U.S. businesses kid themselves if they think they can have long-term relationships with regimes that flout these values.

As long as the Chinese can simply lock up a U.S. citizen, China is not a safe place for other U.S. citizens. In the Gulf states, domestics are not the only foreign workers at risk: Doing business in Saudi Arabia will remain perilous as long as private Saudi individuals and royal relatives can coerce settlements of business disputes by means of detention and torture.

In the same way, it is hard to see how owners of intellectual property--print, audio or video--can develop a secure place in China when the government itself steals their works. The same is true for other countries that permit such theft to flourish.

More generally though, the whole world is dangerous, countries ruled without a semblance of consent or due process will be especially vulnerable to unrest in coming years. Political disorder is bad for business.

Author John Chettle has recently pointed out what he calls the “good cop-bad cop” pattern of recent U.S. foreign policy: By virtue of our pluralist politics, he says, we simultaneously lure and hector other nations into democratic reforms.

American businesses, by their nature, are likely always to be among the “good cops” in this division of labor. The “bad cop” role will be played by human-rights groups, the press or the U.S. government--which, despite reluctance to use military force, still has lots of big truncheons at its disposal in the form of economic and legislative power.

We can’t ask business people to do too much of this work; they are not supposed to be human-rights enforcers. Yet businesses should be discouraged, for their own long-term sake, from interfering too strenuously when governments guilty of serious human-rights offenses are brought into the station house. When the bad cop approaches the suspects with menace in his eye and threat in his voice, it is not too much to ask that the good cop sigh, commiserate about his partner with the alleged perpetrators--”What can I do? He’s crazy!”--and quietly leave the room.