President Ronald Reagan is right about the Soviet Union. It is, in its political structure, an empire tightly controlling a large number of non-Russian peoples. Its dictatorial rulers are hostile and, when circumstances permit, aggressive toward the outside world. The Soviet communist Party's centralized totalitarian system is a cruel anachronism in modern society. Oppressing its own people, the Soviet Union sets itself up as the main strategic adversary of the United States.
Soviet leaders clamor for the empty détente of the early 1970s, which enabled Moscow to build up intimidating military power and extend its influence into Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. Soviet rulers react to the facts of power, not rhetoric, and this is why Mikhail Gorbachev, present chief executive of the Soviet Communist Party and State, met with Reagan in Geneva in November 1985.
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), and the technological threat it represents, brought Gorbachev to the negotiating table to try to get the United States to relax tensions, as it did in the 1970s under the détente illusion.
Tragic Errors
Unfortunately, in another strategically important part of the international forest, the president appears to be allowing himself to slip into tragic errors, contrary to his own personal beliefs, in his relations with the second giant communist state on the face of the globe, the People's Republic of China (PRC). The Reagan administration treats the government of a billion Chinese people, with immense potential for good or harm and now under the fist of a communist dictatorship, on the basis of sentimentality rather than realism. Bureaucrats in the U.S. State and Defense departments, who persuaded President Jimmy Carter to abandon American long-time alliance with the energetic 19 million freedom-minded Chinese people of Taiwan and to pursue Peking as a strategic partner against the Soviet Union, have gone right on with this policy under Reagan. The president has gradually let the wishful thinkers about China commit the United States to continuing the humiliating restrictions on relations with the Republic of China (ROC), while offering high technology and military equipment, as well as economic assistance, to the impoverished totalitarian mainland.
This help to the PRC will never be used for American benefit. It is likely to be used against American interests in Asia, first and foremost against the U.S. strategic outpost island of Taiwan and subsequently against other friends of the United States in East Asia.
It appears that President Reagan has been hijacked by the pro-Peking clique in the U.S. Foreign Service. This group has never considered Chinese communists to be unfriendly even when Mao Zedong was murdering his own people by the millions and assisting in the murder of American soldiers in two regional Asian wars, one in Korea and the other in Vietnam.
This China policy may be good domestic politics with people who are always charitable and trusting toward communist regimes and harsh on free societies.
The question is, is wooing the PRC right for Asia and for the United States during the rest
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