OF COMMERCE & WARFARE
Sensational charges that U.S. lobbyists and Chinese campaign contributions lulled the Clinton administration into unwittingly giving China access to critical missile technology obscure real security challenges facing the United States. While Washington bickers over which political party was least irresponsible in approving satellite launches on Chinese rockets (Republican administrations allowed nine, Democratic 11), U.S. leaders should focus on far more serious threats arising from the seamless link between commerce and warfare in the post-Cold War era.
It is folly to think that, beyond controlling exports of only the most unambiguous weaponry, the Clinton administration or its predecessors could separate political, commercial and national-security concerns involved in satellite launches or any other business transaction. A partnership between U.S. high-tech space companies and Chinese missile makers inherently requires countless technical and engineering exchanges to deploy satellites worth hundreds of millions of dollars. U.S. policy guaranteed that China’s launch capabilities would improve.
Administration critics contend that candidate Bill Clinton campaigned against Reagan-Bush policies permitting Chinese launches of U.S. satellites even as China sold missiles to countries in the Middle East. Yet, as president, Clinton put the Commerce Department in charge of foreign satellite sales, scrapped technology-export controls and ignored continuing evidence of Chinese missile sales. When Washington’s attention waned, U.S. satellite makers, exploiting China’s low-cost launchers, grew more careless.
In 1996, experts from Hughes Electronics Corp. and Loral Space & Communications Ltd., two companies heavily involved with Chinese aerospace, analyzed for insurers the crash of a Chinese missile launching a $200-million U.S. communications satellite. Loral reportedly faxed portions of the report to Chinese officials before obtaining U.S. clearance. Last February, Clinton allowed Loral to sell China another satellite despite State Department objections that a Justice Department investigation of whether the two U.S. companies divulged militarily sensitive technology to the Chinese in their analysis of the 1996 crash could be compromised. (During House committee hearings last week, it was disclosed that China may have stolen an encoded circuit board missing from the crash wreckage.) Loral and, reportedly, Chinese government officials were large Democratic Party contributors.
Apart from their possible influence-buying implications, these facts have ignited a debate over whether sensitive military information can be gleaned from complex deals like launch sales. To believe otherwise, however, is sheer fantasy. It’s inevitable that transactions like the marriage of U.S. payloads with Chinese Long March missiles affect the balance of power. The Clinton administration is hardly unique in justifying controversial Chinese satellite sales with unconvincing claims that military concerns were completely divorced from commerce.
The Reagan administration first proposed launching U.S. satellites on Chinese missiles after the 1986 shuttle disaster crippled U.S. domestic capabilities. U.S. satellite companies strongly supported the idea. U.S.-Chinese collaboration, furthermore, was consistent with the GOP policy of “engagement,” which aimed to transform China through multiplying its economic ties with the West.
But U.S. missile makers opposed the use of cheaper Chinese rockets to hoist American payloads. Security analysts feared that such deals would help China upgrade its nuclear arsenal. Chinese missile sales to countries like Pakistan, Iran and Syria raised proliferation concerns.
In late 1988, AsiaSat, a company seeking to buy a refurbished U.S. communication satellite and launch it on a Chinese Long March missile, played a key role as Washington weighed the new policy. A major AsiaSat investor was CITIC, a Chinese investment firm.
AsiaSat deployed an army of lobbyists to stifle concerns about China’s unfair launch-price competition. Under pressure, the State Department concluded that transferring technology about missile structural integrity, dynamics, acoustics and electromagnetic interference to the Chinese would not affect national security. Such know-how is what many think China learned from satellite sales the Clinton administration approved.
When CITIC’s lobbyists were told by National Security Agency staff that Chinese officials would have to meet “personally” with U.S. officials to allay proliferation fears, the Legal Times reported that CITIC passed the information to Chinese Premier Li Peng. Peng met with U.S. Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci in September and gave “positive indications” that the Chinese would not sell “intermediate-range missiles to volatile areas.” The day after Carlucci returned from Beijing, President Ronald Reagan approved AsiaSat’s license.
Evidence quickly mounted, however, that China was still selling missile technology to Middle Eastern countries. In June 1989, Chinese hard-liners massacred pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananman Square. To sanction China, all satellite sales were suspended, subject to reinstatement only by presidential waiver.
The incoming Bush administration believed deeply in “engagement” and felt that it could make nonproliferation pledges stick. In late 1989, Deputy Undersecretary Lawrence S. Eagleburger and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft were secretly dispatched to assure China that satellite technology would be transferred despite sanctions and to plead for arms-sale restraint in return.
This strategy provoked a political firestorm. Just months earlier, Eagleburger and Scowcroft had disclosed in Senate confirmation hearings that they were paid several hundred-thousand dollars by a strongly pro-China consulting firm run by former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. In late 1988, just as AsiaSat’s license was under review, CITIC had poured $75 million into another Kissinger company. When news of a secret Eagleburger-Scowcroft trip broke, even Kissinger admitted he was “astonished” that people so close to him were sent to pursue policies “with which I’m partly identified.”
President George Bush brushed aside such criticisms, announcing that Scowcroft had achieved yet another “understanding” (which would again prove elusive) about Chinese arms sales. A week after the December mission, and six months after the Tiananman massacre, he waived sanctions and reinstated the pending satellite licenses.
In March 1997, a year before the current uproar, Loral’s head of Asian business, Henry Stackpole, casually told the Associated Press that Chinese firms used foreign technology to improve their rockets and launching procedures. Most aerospace experts concede the idea of “black box” collaboration--that U.S. payloads are “shipped” on Chinese missiles as anonymously as mailing a letter--is dangerously misleading. As Hughes and Loral discovered, far more interaction is necessary to fit different payloads to always-changing rocket boosters and assure successful launches.
Critics on both the left and right reject a policy of engagement for precisely these reasons. Nations like China, they argue, should meet U.S. social, political and security standards before we enrich them and risk corruption at home through commerce.
But unless U.S. decisions about which countries deserve commercial relations are honored by all nations, something few think possible, unilateral action would hurt U.S. firms for little gain. Isolation also cuts off the beneficial contacts commerce does provide even in difficult cases like China. New power blocks might be fostered that could quickly become powerful adversaries.
The debate over whether we are facilitating Chinese technical know-how through commerical relations makes painfully clear how easily the United States can be distracted from far more complex threats. Even if every fear about improved Chinese missile accuracy is true, for example, the U.S.-Chinese balance of power only would change marginally, at worst. The United States enjoys overwhelming nuclear and conventional-force superiority.
In contrast, the possibility that former Soviet warheads and missile technology could spread to outlaw states is an incomparably more pressing danger. When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the United States helped move “loose nukes” stranded in Ukraine and Belarus into Russia. It encouraged U.S. missile manufacturers to link with Soviet defense firms so the region’s rocket experts would not be tempted by offers from rogue nations. Boeing’s commercial sea-launch program, for instance, is powered by Ukranian Zenit boosters made by the same company that built the SS-18, a Cold War missile so terrifying the Pentagon called it “Satan.”
“Loose nuke” containment critically depends on Russia’s economic and social stability and keeping its skilled missile makers happily at work. Yet, the same global capital flows that devastated Asia are pushing Russia toward economic collapse. Russian leaders, furthermore, refuse to confirm how many nuclear arms exist, where they are and how safely they’re being protected. This ominous situation receives virtually no attention, while Chinese missile threats are wildly overstated.
Today’s China incident may yet prove valuable if it highlights how unprepared we are for the post-Cold War era. The crisis isn’t whether marginal improvements were made to a handful of Chinese rockets. It’s the paucity of honest thinking and consistent policy about the new realities of commerce and war our leadership betrays.
