China fears repeat of Reagan strategy

By Ching Cheong

SINGAPORE: The recent downturn in Sino-American relations has made the Chinese refocus their attention on U.S. policies that led to the downfall of the former Soviet Union.

This is because they find stark similarities in the policies of U.S. President George W. Bush towards China and former President Ronald Reagan towards Russia.

"The need to study seriously how Reagan brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union becomes imperative now," said social scientist Lu Jianhua, who specializes in China's foreign policies.

"It is not just an academic issue but one that concerns life and death," added the researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Political Studies.

Citing Peter Schweizer's book, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened The Collapse Of The Soviet Union, Lu found that Bush's policy towards China is surprisingly similar to what Reagan did to the Soviet Union two decades ago.

The author was a fellow at the Hoover Institute of Stanford University. His book was written in 1994 using highly-classified documents like National Security Decision Directives (NSDD).

He also interviewed key personnel in the Reagan administration, such as Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, National Security Adviser William Clark and Secretary of State George Shultz.

The former Reagan stalwarts also helped review the manuscript to ensure its accuracy and validity. This amounted to an endorsement by the top executors of the plot. In his book, Schweizer concluded that Reagan's strategy, which attacked the very heart of the Soviet regime, included four main thrusts:

Covert financial, intelligence and logistical support to the Solidarity movement in Poland that ensured the survival of an opposition movement in the heart of the Soviet empire;

Substantial financial and military support to the Afghan resistance, as well as supply of mujahideen (pan-Islamic separatists in Russia) personnel to take the war into the Soviet Union itself;

Attempts to ruin the Soviet economy by launching a campaign to reduce dramatically its hard-currency earnings through driving down the price of oil with Saudi cooperation and limiting natural-gas exports to the West;

Aggressive high-tech defense build-up, like the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), designed to strain the Soviet economy severely.

These were set out in several top-secret NSDDs signed personally by Reagan early in his administration.

NSDD-32 stated that it was U.S. policy to "neutralize" Soviet power in Eastern Europe.

NSDD-56 fired the first shot in the economic war that helped bankrupt the Kremlin.

Said Lu: "Although it was a story about the Soviet Union, yet, if one substitutes China for the Soviet Union, Taiwan for Afghanistan, Hongkong for Poland, Radio Free Asia for Radio Free Europe, and national missile defense (NMD) for SDI, then the parallels become apparent.

"In particular, we found Bush's May 1 announcement on installing the NMD and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's May 8 statement suggesting the weaponisation of outer space particularly disturbing ... according to Peter Schweizer, an integral part of the strategy outlined in NSDD-75 was to commit the Soviet Union to an arms race that eventually bankrupted its economy."

The NMD was estimated to cost between US$60 billion (S$108 billion) and US$100 billion over the next 10 years, according to Pentagon estimates.

As for the development of space weapons, roughly US$6 billion a year has already been spent in the past few years, according to Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York.

If China were to engage in such an arms race, its economy would be strained severely.

In his book, Schweizer wrote that NSDD-75 declared it would henceforth be administration policy to exacerbate Soviet economic problems in the hope of plunging the system into a crisis.

It was signed by the president for a specific purpose, which was to squeeze the Soviet economy by both reducing income and forcing an increase in expenditure.

Said former National Security Adviser Bill Clark, who was quoted in the book: "Ronald Reagan wanted a complimentary relationship between the U.S. military build-up, futuristic defense-related technologies like SDI, and econo- mic-security policies directed at Moscow.

"Frankly, our intention was to divert priority Soviet resources to meeting future U.S. capabilities beyond their grasp."

If Reagan's plot brought about the implosion of the Soviet Union, the social scientist added, "we had reason to be skeptical of Bush's current policy towards China, which bore much semblance to Reagan's".

"NMD and space weapons aside, there were other similarities.

"Bush's Taiwan policy was comparable to Reagan's support for the mujahideen which eventually developed into the separatist war of Chechnya a decade later," he said.

Beijing had objected to Bush's arms sales to Taiwan on the grounds that it would embolden separatism.

"This is taking the war into China, like what Reagan did with the mujahideen," Lu said.

When Schweizer's book was first published, only the orthodox Marxist ideologues in China paid serious attention to it but, now, Bush has forced everyone, including the liberals, to revisit the Reagan plot, he added.

-- The Straits Times/Asia News Network