Columnist Charles Krauthammer's recent column on "The Real China Scandal" should be required reading. He says the current scandal is part corruption and part incompetence. But there is even more than that.
First the corruption. The recently released Cox report doesn't really delve into the campaign finance scandal, but the implications are there for anyone to see. He says, "It is clear that an administration in which the president sips fund-raising coffee with a Chinese arms dealer and in which his own Johnny Chung takes $300,000 from known agents of the Chinese military is an administration that will be reluctant to take serious steps when Chinese misconduct is suspected." He says another scandal is "Clinton's secretary of commerce auctioning seats on his trade mission to China--near guarantees of preferential treatment--to large Democratic donors."
Then there is incompetence. This includes "a national security adviser who reacts with astonishing equanimity to reports of the greatest nuclear theft since the Rosenbergs" and "an attorney general who refuses FBI requests to tap the phones of the chief suspect in the Los Alamos leaks."
But he also says that the scandal is about a policy and an idea. The policy is what this administration calls "engagement"--a willingness to embrace trade and ignore human rights. And it is an idea: the idea of globalism. This is "the notion that we are entering a new era--a high tech, Internet, info-highway, McDonald's-in-every-capital era--in which borders and sovereignty are becoming obsolete." The old globalist mantra has been that no two countries that have McDonald's have ever gone to war. Well, that idea has being left in ruins with our war in Yugoslavia and the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
China does not see itself as a U.S.-dominated McDonaldland. It sees itself as a rising power and our strategic rival in the 21st century. The fact that this administration ignores that fact is the real China scandal.
I'm Kerby Anderson of Probe Ministries, and that's my opinion.