As President Clinton prepares to go to China this week, the central foreign policy drama in Washington is the increasing congressional furor over the administration's engagement policy, in particular the sense that Clinton is damaging national security in his eagerness to promote relations with Beijing.
Congressional leaders, mostly Republican, argue that Clinton and the executive branch are ignoring a pattern of Chinese exports of dangerous nuclear, chemical and ballistic missile technology. The motive, the critics say, is that the White House wants to avoid imposing the sanctions that the law requires.The administration is also under new attack for authorizing the export of satellites for launching aboard Chinese rockets, a process that may have provided technical details that China could use to improve the accuracy of its nuclear-tipped missiles.
At the White House there is an equal and opposite frustration with Congress for trying to "micromanage" relations with China. Since the 1989 crackdown on student-led demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, Congress has passed nearly 12 laws and amendments that try to govern how the executive branch has to deal with proliferation. Each measure has different standards of proof and rules of enforcement, and some are so sweeping that billions of dollars of trade are at stake.
Administration officials complain that Congress confuses voting on sanctions legislation with formulating a working policy on nonproliferation and that Congress sets even stricter requirements for Chinese behavior than international agreements do. In essence, the officials complain, Congress does not allow the president to take a broader, more nuanced view of American national interests.
"There are some staffers up on the Hill who think that if we embargoed every country, we'd have the world's best nonproliferation policy, whether it impeded anyone or not," said a senior official with nearly a decade of work on those issues.
But a senior congressional staffer with equal experience said with equal bitterness: "When it comes to implementing sanction laws, the executive traditionally takes the view that ends justify the means. But the problem is that it degrades the credibility and, thus, the deterrent effect of these sanctions if they're not implemented when flagrantly triggered, even if the executive finds some legal loophole."
The intense argument between the executive and legislative branches reflects two approaches for dealing with China that are not, at their core, partisan differences, although the renewed pre-summit debate is intensely political. Although Republican leaders, including the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Speaker Newt Gingrich are among Clinton's most vocal critics on Chinese proliferation, Democratic senators including John Glenn of Ohio have long shared some of the same concerns.