An Un-American Police

WASHINGTON — Americans tend to judge U.S. foreign policy from the perspective of fostering American values. The United States militarily intervenes in Kosovo, Rwanda, Haiti and other spots around the globe to fight oppression and restore order. Whether from the right or left, they define foreign-policy objectives in terms of promoting democracy and human rights in regions from Latin America to East Timor to the former Soviet empire. When U.S. foreign policy undercuts American values by supporting dictatorships or seeking to overthrow elected leaders, it comes in for justified criticism.

But there is one aspect of U.S. foreign policy--now the subject of a heated debate in Congress--in which those American values seem to have been forgotten. In the South China Sea, a well-known totalitarian force threatens a fledgling democracy with talk of invasion and denies the right of the democracy to exist. The United States has an ambiguous security commitment to the fledgling democracy, carefully limiting arms sales to it to avoid offending the totalitarian power. It cautions the democracy not to assert its right to independence and self-determination too loudly and supports the totalitarian power's effort to deny the democracy international recognition. In fact, the United States itself refuses to formally recognize the democracy.

Although it may sound incomprehensible to most Americans, the paragraph above accurately describes U.S. policy toward the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, and it is a policy followed by both Republican and Democratic administrations, although Congress is now moving to change it. It runs against the most basic values of the United States to side with a totalitarian country against a vibrant democracy, but that is exactly what the United States is doing in the struggle between Beijing and Taipei.

The complex histories of China and Taiwan are part of the explanation for this anomaly in U.S. policy. The current government of Taiwan traces its roots to the Nationalists who ruled China during World War II. Shortly after the war, Mao Tse-tung's communists ousted the Nationalists from the mainland and drove them to Taiwan, where the defeated forces set up their own government. Predictably, tensions were high between Taiwan and the mainland as each claimed to be the legitimate government of China.