This month marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of communism in Eastern Europe and, a couple of years later, the demise of the Soviet Union.
While the free world and those imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain celebrated with tears and exuberance when the wall came down in 1989, one individual was noticeably subdued at the news: then-US president George H.W. Bush.
Asked in an Oval Office news conference that day why he did not seem “elated,” Bush said: “I am not an emotional kind of guy.”
However, in later remarks to his Cabinet and staff, he revealed a deeper motive. He did not want any “dancing on the Wall” or “rubbing the Soviets’ noses” in their catastrophically historic defeat. Bush said his reticence came from his mother’s Yankee sense of modesty in social relations.
Five months earlier, he had decorously saved the other communist power’s “face” when he downplayed the Tiananmen Square Massacre, dispatching his national security adviser and deputy secretary of state to clink glasses with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) and assure him that it would be “business as usual” with the US.
The men carrying out the mission of comfort to Beijing were Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, two intimates of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who himself had virtually insulated Deng from international condemnation by declaring that no national leader would have tolerated the occupation of a capital city’s public square.
Whether it was a communist “victory” or defeat, the constant theme of US policy was to indulge the feelings of the oppressors’ leaders, not those of the liberated Eastern Europeans or the students and workers in China.
Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, said the US strove “not to be braggadocio or triumphalist in our comments. We still had a lot of work to do with the Soviet leaders.”
Yet, former US president Ronald Reagan, whose straightforward policies had helped start the peaceful Soviet unraveling, managed to eschew “braggadocio” when he talked about a “great wave of democracy sweeping the world.” Nor did he sound “triumphalist” when he said that communism had been tried for several decades and “it didn’t work.”
The Reagan-Kissinger divide on US foreign policy dramatically erupted in 1976 when Reagan challenged then-US president Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, primarily because Kissinger espoused a detente with the Soviet Union at the expense of concern for human rights and democracy.
Kissinger had persuaded Ford not to invite visiting Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the White House in 1975 for fear of offending Moscow.
Five years earlier, a Lithuanian sailor jumped from a Soviet trawler onto a US Coast Guard cutter off Cape Cod and tried to defect.
Kissinger, then US-president Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, reportedly directed that he be returned to the Soviets, who proceeded to drag him from the cutter and beat him into submission.
These historical incidents resonate today in the constant tension between prudence (or “accommodation”) and assertive morality (or “provocation”).
US Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have made speeches focusing on communist China’s multidimensional challenge to the West, including its egregious violations of universal human rights in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
Still, US President Donald Trump has tried to soften his administration’s tone on both issues so as not to jeopardize prospects for a trade deal and Chinese cooperation on North Korean denuclearization.
On the latter security objective, Trump also has abandoned his earlier attention to Kim Jong-un’s criminal treatment of his own people, which seemed to suggest the need for regime change and contributed to Kim’s initial willingness to negotiate.
While saving face for an adversary sometimes facilitates a relatively peaceful way out of a confrontational situation with a normal state, that civilized approach does not necessarily work when dealing with the face of evil.
Bush could argue then that low-key strategic patience enabled the peaceful demise of the Soviet system — but it is doubtful it would have happened without the previous years of internal and external pressure on what Reagan unapologetically called the “Evil Empire.”
Similarly, Trump’s demands for structural economic change in China, if actually implemented by Beijing, could finally bring the accompanying political reforms that were supposed to occur when the West allowed it to join the WTO.
That would be more likely if accompanied by a sustained information campaign to the Chinese people. The combined efforts — while maintaining a security shield on Taiwan and the South and East China seas — could enable a relatively peaceful transition for the communist regime.
It would help if Trump could emulate Reagan and demand: “Mister Xi [Jinping, 習近平], tear down those concentration camps and stop the Hong Kong crackdown.”
Joseph Bosco served as China country director in the office of the US secretary of defense. He is a fellow at the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies and a member of the advisory committee of the Global Taiwan Institute.
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