In Washington’s corridors of power there is no shortage of good advice. Seldom, however, do US leaders take heed of wise counsel — even when it comes from professionals officially responsible for guiding government decision-makers as they formulate American foreign policy.
A case in point is America’s relationship with the Peoples Republic of China. Last December, US President George W. Bush granted permanent normal trade status to China, saying his decision was “a final step in normalizing US-China trade relations.” Bush also terminated the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Law a measure targeted at China that forbids American firms from having trade relations with any Communist state that restricts emigration.
Jackson-Vanik has been at the center of Congressional debate over China’s consistently abysmal human rights record, which many observers agree hit bottom in 1989 when Beijing violently cracked down on political protesters at Tiananmen Square.
The Bush Administration’s decision to reverse American foreign policy toward China runs contrary to evidence presented to the White House last summer by US intelligence agencies, which are responsible for providing US government leaders with intelligence necessary to make well-informed policy decisions. US intelligence officials had told the White House that Chinese firms had broken numerous promises — most recently in November 2000 — not to sell sensitive missile technology to Pakistan and other countries.
New intelligence sent to the White House several weeks later was even more compelling: The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) produced an “intelligence estimate” of China’s current and long-term military capabilities. One of the most alarming findings in the estimate was the revelation that China is aggressively enhancing its strategic missile force, converting its arsenal of land-based — and highly vulnerable — intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) into missiles that can be made more securely deployed from mobile launchers.
The intelligence estimate represents a consensus view of key US intelligence agencies, including the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency (NSA), State Department intelligence, and military intelligence units.
An unclassified version of the estimate, “Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat Through 2015,” is available on the CIA’s Web site: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/pubs.html.)
“The intelligence community projects that Chinese ballistic missile forces will increase several-fold by 2015,” the National Intelligence Council, an interagency analysis group based at CIA headquarters, states in the estimate. The authors of the CIA estimate also say that China’s future ballistic missile force will be “deployed primarily against the United States” and will number around 75 to 100 warheads. They also caution that North Korea, Iran, and Iraq are continuing to work on long-range strike weapons. The CIA advises that, in addition to China, many countries possess or will soon possess missiles capable of striking cities within “the United States with a nuclear weapon-sized ...payload” of several hundred pounds.
“Most US intelligence community agencies project that during the next 15 years the United States most likely will face an ICBM threat from North Korea, Iran and possibly Iraq, ... in addition to the strategic forces of Russia and China,” the report says.
The CIA estimate says the proliferation of missile exports, mostly from Russia, China and North Korea has boosted efforts of developing nations to build missiles. It cites, as an example, China’s sales of M-11 short-range missiles to Pakistan, saying the Chinese arms transfer enabled Islamabad to build longer-range missiles.
The estimate also warns that Beijing’s aggressive ballistic missile modernization effort will make it more difficult for the Western allies to find China’s relatively small force of about 20 CSS-4 ICBMs — which are capable of hitting the United States — and about 12 CSS-3s — which can hit targets in Russia and Asia. However, President Bush’s decision to ignore CIA warnings and to grant normal trade status last December 27 pales in comparison to his pronouncement six days later to more than double the limit on the speed of supercomputers that US companies can sell to such to China, a move that many military experts — including Bush supporters — say endangers US security and puts American troops at risk. Under Bush’s new trade guidelines, US producers of supercomputers can export hardware capable of running at 190,000 millions of theoretical operations per second (MTOPS) without notifying the appropriate US government agencies, such as the Department of Commerce, Department of Defense and State Department. The current MTOPS cap for exported US computers is 85,000.
“The president’s decision will promote national security, enhance the effectiveness of our export-control system and ease unnecessary regulatory burdens on both government and industry,” the White House said in a fact sheet released simultaneous with the President’s decision.
Critics, however, call that claim laughable, noting that supercomputers that run at such high speeds are used only for two purposes: Decryption of sophisticated coded messages and the development of nuclear weapons. “This has nothing to do with national security,” Gary Milhollin, director of the Washington-based Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, tells reporters. “Their argument is that our computer companies will make more money, and what’s good for the computer industry makes America stronger because it creates jobs and brings money in. National security’s being equated to profits.”
“That’s what they mean when they say that. It’s not true, of course,” adds Stephen Bryen, a former Defense Department official during Ronald Reagan’s presidency who now works as a Washington trade consultant. “What they really have in mind is keeping alive the supercomputer companies. That’s the only argument they can make that fits. The entire supercomputer industry is underwritten by the NSA, the Defense Department, and Los Alamos [National Laboratory]. That’s really where most of the purchasing is done.”
Bryen says Bush’s decision puts US troops in jeopardy. “We’re putting our fleet at risk because tactical communications there are all encrypted. This sort of thing creates real dangers because the Chinese can now listen,” he says.
The White House says the United States will continue to maintain strict limits on computer exports to nations under US sanctions, such as Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, and Syria.
The issue computer exports was contentious during US President Bill Clinton’s eight years in office: Congressional Republicans — and many Democrats — opposed Clinton’s effort to raise the MTOPS caps and to drop any distinction between military and civilian buyers. In October 2000, then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina) and Senator Russell D. Feingold (D-Wisconsin) strongly objected when Clinton raised the cap to 28,000 MTOPS, a threshold that has been raised since.
“This is basically the computer lobby getting its way again, as it has been doing under the Clinton administration for the last eight years,” says Milhollin. “They’re seeking the same campaign contributions that the Clinton people did and they’re doing the same thing to get them.”
