Commentary : Hawk Plus Dove Makes Unpersuasive Policy : A Rand report calls for a middle course on China between hostility and engagement; it’s not a solution that will sell.

Most complicated policy issues are susceptible to a simple solution only in the minds of the simple-minded.

Take U.S. policy toward China. It’s too complex to be compressed to a sound bite. But American hawks would all but smother the Chinese Communists with military muscle; U.S. doves would all but coo them into docility with mutual understanding. The truth is that most Americans do not know what to make of China at all.

That latter group should be aware of a major new report, published this month by the Rand think tank in Santa Monica, that tries to thread the tricky needle through U.S.-China policy and sensibly suggests that neither hawk nor dove has the answer. Rand proposes a new third way. For starters, it posits a relatively bare cupboard of tangible results from the Bush-Clinton policy of what it sees as Pollyanna-ish engagement. My own view is that the policy has not been so bad; let the point go. For, in a levelheaded way, the report also shrinks from advocating a reversion to raw containment, a reversal of policy that the report suggests might well foster conditions leading to military confrontation by creating a self-fulfilling atmosphere of bilateral doom and gloom.

Instead, Rand says, let Washington steer far away from the dangerous, stormy either/or shoals of containment or engagement and chart a new, safer course. Dub it, if you will (as the report does): “congagement.” Neither Cold-War containment nor uncritical engagement, say the authors, is adequate for dealing with China, an authoritarian country whose power is growing but that at times pursues policies hostile to the United States and whose future orientation remains highly uncertain.

The Rand brains, headed by senior strategist and former Bush Defense Department official Zalmay M. Khalilzad, also warn against the unblushing rush to make excuses for China when it does bad things and the willingness to continue aid programs that can make China militarily stronger. And they warn, quite rightly, against slighting allies Japan and South Korea in the rush to engage China.

The report rightly points out that over the long run, the key to any sustainable U.S.-China policy is public support. Yet, in recent months, the U.S. public has been socked with unnerving (but largely unproved) allegations in the Cox report of Chinese spying in the U.S. It has been exposed to other (even murkier) charges about illegal Chinese political contributions that allegedly compromised Clintonian engagement decisions. So what is the average citizen to think--or to do? This middle-ground direction posited by Rand is likely to appeal to the American sense of balance. A new right-wing containment policy would probably be perceived by many fair-minded Americans as lacking sympathy for the world’s most populous nation, and one of the more poverty-stricken. An unblinking policy of engagement will probably be viewed as lacking an adequate outlet for moral outrage when Beijing’s policies conflict with U.S. public idealism.

But the Chinese, and in fact many of our Asian allies, are not likely to see the matter this way. Many in Asia, not just in China, will parse this provocative report as part of the slow drift of America away from cooperation and toward confrontation. They will see in it the clammy-handed work of old cold warriors in fancy new gloves. They will read its passages on how best to handle China as irritating, condescending and self-deceptive, as if Washington were categorically any less inclined than Beijing toward unpredictable, neurotic and juvenile behavior. Fellow Americans, we look a lot different to the world than we do to ourselves! Some observers abroad will even cynically view the report as campaign speech fodder for the Republican presidential campaign of Gov. George W. Bush. After all, the young Bush, while on the road to the White House, will have to figure out some clever way (congagement?) of politely stepping over former president Dad’s own engagement policy if the GOP candidate intends to stomp all over President Clinton’s ongoing engagement policy.

A public relations policy of congagement, however thoughtfully laid out, can only serve to assure U.S. public opinion that U.S. policy is in fact on an even keel. As a serious foreign policy prescription, congagement--a little of this, a little of that; lean a little left, then to the right--is just not imaginative or dynamic enough to meet the millennial challenge of America’s most difficult bilateral relationship. For certain kinds of overarching world problems, there is little substitute for true diplomatic innovation, if not genius. The truth is, if the U.S. and China fail to get their bilateral relationship right, peace and prosperity in Asia is inconceivable. For the drift toward some kind of military confrontation with China will seem all the more inescapable.