A ‘Hit ‘Em While They’re Down’ Policy?

Too many discordant voices spoil the chorus. In the last few weeks, three different administration officials have mouthed off about Asia. And none of them was the secretary of state or the president. That’s a serious problem.

The cacophony comes at a particularly bad time; the last few months have been tough on just about everyone in Asia. The baht crisis--the regional currency collapse that was born in Thailand and replicated across Southeast Asia--has left almost everyone still shaking, even nearby South Korea. This is the world’s 11th largest economy and one of our best allies. Yet it looks to be headed for trouble. And Japan, the world’s second largest economy, with whom we have been renegotiating a delicate military-security pact, is teetering on the edge of another recession. Yet, despite our own soaring economy, Korea’s troubled one and Japan’s sagging one, we are attacking Japan and Korea anew.

Funny, but I thought Tokyo was a key ally. Not so, I guess. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, ordinarily soft-spoken and intelligent, was in Asia, berating the Hashimoto government for the usual closed-market offenses. Many Asians refer to the powerful Rubin as America’s prime minister. So they take him very seriously indeed. Such a public rebuke right now is bizarre: With the U.S. economy in one long boom and with unemployment below 5%, blame the Japanese--for what? In politics as in life, timing is everything, and while the U.S. and Japan have serious differences to work out, is this the best time?

Then there was Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, taking on the Koreans. Though this sharp-eyed public servant does not relish bashing foreign governments as did her predecessor, Mickey Kantor, a measure of confrontation is more or less etched into a trade representative’s job description. But to sharply reproach South Korea for not opening its auto market to U.S. cars at a time when our Asian friend is struggling to escape a serious economic downturn makes you wonder how ugly the Ugly American wants to become. Korea is in near-tumult over Barshefsky’s blitzkrieg. Giant Kia Motors is on the brink of collapse, so Korean officials are bitterly accusing Washington of trying to destabilize their already shaky car industry. Seoul may file a complaint in the World Trade Organization if Washington imposes retaliatory sanctions on its car exports. Is this any way to run an important alliance?

Finally, we have America’s third pretend secretary of foreign affairs, William M. Daley, the commerce secretary, who was in Beijing last week. Perhaps just to impress Congress that the Clinton administration can be tough on China, Daley was knocking China for running up an alleged $40 billion plus, Japan-size trade deficit with America. In reality China, as well as Japan, socks a lot of its trade-surplus cash into U.S. government bonds. This helps to prop up the dollar worldwide and keep interest rates down in America. Ah, but why get bogged down in details when you can bash Asians? Then again, why bash China at all when you’re about to welcome its president to Washington for the first significant Sino-U.S. summit meeting in two decades? The trade deficit issue is obviously going to be with us for many years.

But foreign policy confusion is exactly what you get when too many people speak for the president, and when the president himself too infrequently bothers to speak about foreign policy at all. Take another Asian issue: Tibet. It’s an open sore with a lot of Americans because of China’s brutal suppression of the Dalai Lama’s supporters on the suspicion that they are independence freaks. In the West, no less than five films on Tibet are in sight, including “Seven Years in Tibet,” which opened last week. By the time Hollywood is finished with this issue, China may come to realize that irritating the State Department is a non-risk business compared to giving Hollywood a hot-ticket story line to exploit.

So, where does that State Department stand lately on Tibet? On July 29, it announced the creation of a so-called special coordinator for Tibet. I telephoned State last week to interview the holder of that office. Turns out, after all the media ballyhoo, the position is still unfilled and no one has any idea when he/she will be named. So I called Susan Shirk, formerly of UC San Diego. She’s the new deputy assistant secretary of state and she’s reputed to know a lot about China. I then telephoned Stanley Roth, the new assistant secretary of State for Asia. He is supposed to know about these things. I’m still waiting for the calls to be returned. I’m not surprised, though. In this administration, either too many people have too much to say, or no one has anything to say at all.