Just Say No to Questionable Money

Ethics is not an exact science. Right, but is every ethical question so complicated that it takes a rocket scientist to figure it out?

Consider the controversy over campaign contributions from Indonesia and Korea. What’s the advanced-calculus question? Is the planet’s richest country really so financially--and morally--bankrupt that it has to accept the money of foreign billionaires and corporations to finance its presidential campaigns? Please, give Americans a break!

Just look at these questions: Did the U.S. avert its eyes about Indonesian government repression because almost $1 million in under-the-table contributions slithered into Clinton’s reelection cookie jar? And how about that radioactive $250,000 from a South Korean industrialist that was returned to sender last month only after The Times blew the whistle on it? And might other dirty monies have induced the Clinton administration, once so gung-ho on human rights, to take that issue off the table in trade talks with China?

It was an exasperated U.S. Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor who phoned from Washington over the weekend: “To suggest that one person or contribution can affect U.S. foreign policy is ludicrous,” he told me.

In fact, some Asian officials think we’re too tough on Indonesia. Weeks before all this broke, an Asian government official, a non-Indonesian, asked me, in a tone of point-blank incredulity, why Indonesia was getting such a going-over on worker rights from the Clinton administration. “Indonesia is terribly terribly important to you,” said the cabinet minister. “We just don’t understand.”

I have no doubt about that. But Americans have the deeply embedded need for a foreign policy that more or less reflects national ideals. If foreign governments want to bond with more than just U.S. business circles, they are going to have to accept that public opinion compels our officials to raise the kinds of persistent questions one might expect of a culture with a Bill of Rights and a long, proud record of opposing tyranny.

Still, Americans do need to appreciate that Indonesia, for all its problems, has been a vital U.S. ally in Southeast Asia. This far-flung archipelago of 13,700 islands, necklaced amid vital shipping lanes, could prove key to any balancing act between China and India. Yes, Jakarta’s all-powerful military is always brittle and at times brutal in the face of internal dissent. And it still bears the great moral scar of East Timor, where repression by the central government has led to many deaths and much suffering. But at the same time, the world’s fourth most populous state, largely Muslim, tolerates a good measure of religious freedom and has been opening up its economy and starting to respond, however grudgingly, to international labor-rights criticisms. So why should we have one slam-the-door standard for Jakarta, when we have another, play-ball standard for unapologetically repressive Saudi Arabia?

And consider China. In truth, U.S. policy toward the world’s largest nation has been slow on the uptake. Washington is standing in the way of Beijing’s admission to the World Trade Organization. A mistake. But if the policy were to change tomorrow, how many people might say: Oh, yes, a very slow boat from China must have just dropped off a very large paper bag. That’s the suspicion that cynics, and not all of them Republican, may now have, just as the odor of the illegal Indonesian contributions obscures the argument for doing business with the Suharto government while maintaining human-rights pressure.

Understand that the issue is foreign money, nothing else. Whether Asian American or otherwise, people who contribute to candidates are exercising their American rights. But money from outside the U.S., whether from Asia, Europe, South America or the South Pole, doesn’t belong anywhere near a U.S. campaign, is morally wrong to accept and could wind up undermining the genuine interests of the American people in areas of trade law, economic relationships and even security alliances. Not a close call.

Why does the Democratic National Committee or any Republican fund-raiser need a new campaign-financing law to tell them that accepting money from abroad is reprehensible? When the actual source of the money is vague, they should just say no.

Before this ugly issue surfaced, Asian Americans were becoming increasingly more active in America’s political life. What an invaluable contribution they have been making. For Clinton’s poorly articulated Asian policy leaves much to be desired. The U.S. has vital interests in a part of the globe that in the next century will spawn at least two superpowers. Enlightened U.S. leadership there is essential; so is the civic involvement of Asian Americans in American politics. But will they now shrink back for fear of a wide-sweeping taint? And is the key question about U.S. Asian policy now not its coherence or vision, but its basic integrity? For shame, America. I had wanted, indeed prayed, for U.S.-Asia policy to become a vibrant part of the 1996 presidential debate. But not like this. Not like this at all.