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Nor is it too soon to think about rolling back other U.S. security commitments outside Europe. If the Soviets will finally pack up and pull out of their air and naval bases in Viet Nam, why shouldn't the U.S. vacate its facilities in the Philippines? One objection is that the peoples and governments of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim want a permanent, visible American military presence in that region as a counterbalance to China and Japan. That is a bit like suggesting, as many are suddenly doing, that now more than ever the world needs NATO -- and the Warsaw Pact -- to fend off the specter of German reunification and remilitarization. New rationales are being concocted for old arrangements.
Maybe a transformed international order does require American (and Soviet) troops in a divided Germany, or American warships in the South China Sea. But the objectives for those deployments should be honestly and clearly defined; they should be vigorously debated and politically supported on their own terms. If the U.S. obfuscates or misrepresents its purposes, it will be able to sustain neither domestic political support for its overseas missions nor the hospitality and cooperation of its allies.
When the global revolution against communism came to China this year, stimulated in part by Gorbachev's visit in May, the U.S. Government was seized with ambivalence. It welcomed the outburst of democratic spirit, up to a point. At the same time, it feared instability, not just because widespread trouble could cost the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of students, but because it would jeopardize a long-standing relationship between the U.S. and the now so obviously misnamed People's Republic. The Administration was so eager to repair relations that it seemed willing to do so on the terms laid down by the decrepit tyrants in the Forbidden City. Bush first sent his National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and the Deputy Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, to Beijing secretly in July. Another visit earlier this month was not announced until after the emissaries had arrived at their destination. The whole thing looked sneaky, as though the Administration were trying to pull a fast one (which in a way it was). As a result, the U.S. humiliated itself, insulted the forces of democracy in China, dishonored the martyrs of Tiananmen and reminded the world that old thinking from the 1970s still dominates on certain issues of American foreign policy. The misguided mission also seemed intended to send a distinctly ominous signal to the Soviet Union, quite out of keeping with the one Bush had sought to convey a few days earlier in Malta. Gorbachev and perestroika may fail. The U.S.S.R. may revert to its misbehavior of the past. But the Kremlin should beware: the U.S. is hedging its bets with good old-fashioned triangular diplomacy; however often its existence has been denied, the infamous China card is available for whatever poker games the future may have in store.
The U.S.'s treasured "strategic partnership" with China is valid and worth preserving only if it can be redefined beyond its original anti-Soviet reason for being. The same goes for all the U.S.'s security arrangements, in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East.