Dragon8217;s missiles

In what is possibly the final act of the Clinton administration on the non-proliferation front, China has been let off for misdemeanours which Washington stonefacedly refused to admit Beijing had ever committed. The transfer by China of complete missile systems to Pakistan in or around 1993 was a breach of the Missile Technology Control Regime which under US law should have triggered category one, the most severe, sanctions against China. But for almost as long as the Clinton presidency has lasted, the administration stalled and prevaricated. The excuse was that it could not impose sanctions because it could not make a determination that missile proliferation had occurred. India complained and urged action but nothing happened. US intelligence agencies made a joint finding that missiles had indeed been transferred from China to Pakistan and still the administration waffled. It could not come to a decision because it did not want to come to a decision. Now, at the end of his tenure, in a kind of shabby burialfor a failed and shabby policy, Bill Clinton has waived sanctions against China for transferring missiles to Pakistan and Iran.

This public acknowledgement of Beijing8217;s wrongdoing vindicates all those who accuse Washington of applying double-standards. That charge is reinforced by the other half of the sanctions announcement on Wednesday. The proliferator goes scot-free, promising better behaviour in future. There are no such loopholes for Pakistan and Iran both of which have been slapped with sanctions. Logic and justice are hard to discern here. The most likely conclusion that will be drawn around the world is that commerce and overanxiety about raising hackles in Beijing have driven Clintonian foreign policy from start to finish. Neither breaches of the MTCR 8212; nor the separate issue of suspected illegal acquisition of US space technology 8212; appear to be quite as important as the lobbies angling for deals with China for the launch of commercial satellites.

The next American administration ought to recognise early how deeply flawed Clinton8217;s non-proliferation policy has been and abandon it on the dustheap of history. Non-proliferation was for many years Clinton8217;s sole agenda in South Asia. The singleminded manner in which it was pushed offended Indian national pride and naturally alienated New Delhi. It delayed a rapprochement between two countries which, in the post-cold war era, had no conflicts of interest and many common concerns, especially in Asia. As events have shown, the policy was not only unworkable, it was counter-productive. There is a further problem. The US sanctions regime, a construct of the US Congress, obstructs US commerce and leaves the field open to competitors who have no such restrictive domestic laws without achieving US policy aims. The law should be scrapped or drastically rewritten. Instead, ad hoc modifications have been introduced to make it flexible. The resultant arbitrary application of the law, as with China, leads to manyquestions about American objectives and intentions and, in many eyes, makes Washington unfit to lead the non-proliferation movement.