Salon | The skeleton in the GOP's China closet

---------The skeleton in the
-----------------GOP's China closet
---The Los Alamos spy scandal occurred on Bush's watch and grew directly out of the wave of "privatization" launched by Reagan.

Despite all their professed outrage, many Republicans seem oddly delighted by the recent revelation that China may now be able to arm its missiles with smaller nuclear warheads on multiple re-entry vehicles. Perhaps conservatives feel they have finally discovered a suitably scary substitute for Soviet communism, the defunct threat that used to give unity and coherence to their own movement. Just the other day, the Washington Times -- a daily compendium of right-wing propaganda subsidized by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, also known as the Messiah -- published a drooling front-page story comparing the current "Chinese espionage scandal" with the capture and trial of the Rosenberg Soviet spy ring in the 1950s.

Bursting their bubble may be dirty work, but somebody has to do it, because playing with this fire could leave the right-wingers scorched worse than their liberal enemies. Not only did the alleged theft of nuclear secrets by China occur on their watch, during the Reagan and Bush administrations, but there is a likelihood that the security breaches at Los Alamos and the other national laboratories were made worse by one of the right's favorite public policies: privatization.

First, however, let's dispense with the righteous nonsense about freezing relations with China because their spies may have spied on us. If the United States used espionage as the chief criterion for judging allies and enemies, we would have few allies bigger than Burkina Faso and all too many enemies. And if other countries applied the same ludicrous test to their relations with the United States, we would have no allies and countless enemies.

As everyone who can read should know by now, we spy incessantly on friendly governments and hostile regimes alike, employing the largest, most technologically sophisticated and expensive espionage apparatus the world has ever seen. Our closest allies spy on us in return, and rather than cut off relations, we share intelligence data with them and send billions of dollars in annual aid. When Jonathan Pollard was caught selling U.S. military secrets to Israel, he was sent to prison for life -- and relations with his spymasters went on undisturbed. It is safe to assume that our friends from Paris, Moscow, Berlin and even London gather intelligence about our statecraft and defense whenever their own national interests are implicated.

That doesn't mean the Clinton administration's policy of engagement with China is necessarily wise or moral. Having covered the Tienanmen Square massacre and its aftermath in Beijing almost 10 years ago, I regard the dictatorship there with revulsion and deep suspicion. Back when the president first announced his turnabout on trading with China in 1994, I complained that he had buckled to the business-dominated China lobby and given comfort to the aging oppressors of democratic Chinese youth. But the debate over how to cope with the world's biggest nation, with its human rights abuses and military adventurism, has little to do with whether the Chinese spy on us. They do -- and we spy on them, as we have done for a half century. Otherwise how would we know anything about their nuclear arsenal?

N E X T_P A G E | Republican shock is mere politics