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Monday, March 26, 2001

The Cold War is still over, but White House aides insist the tough line Bush is taking toward former U.S. adversaries is part of a new ''realism'' he hopes to inject into American foreign policy.

Whether the issue is Russian spies, Chinese chest-pounding across the Taiwan Straits or North Korea's alleged ballistic missile program, Bush is signaling that not all is well in U.S. relations with former Communist foes many had hoped would become American partners in the age of globalization.

''The message the president is sending is that his foreign policy is going to be based on reality,'' White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Thursday. ''He's going to have a realistic approach to foreign policy.''

Bush's approach marks a departure, in many ways, from the policy of diplomatic engagement that former President Bill Clinton pursued with Russia, China and North Korea.

Clinton's critics charged that he went too far in trying to accommodate governments in those countries with policies that bordered on appeasement.

''If you start mollycoddling China, you run the risk of basically appeasing them,'' said former U.S. diplomat John Tkacik, president of China Business Intelligence, an Alexandria, Va., consulting firm. ''Who knows what the Chinese will do?''

The Bush tack also carries risks, however, including the possibility of missing opportunities to make partners of former foes or a miscalculation that could spark countermeasures.

Critics of the Bush approach even suggest that it threatens to undermine progress made during the past decade, as Russia has embarked on democratic and free-market reforms and China has worked to open its economy and much of its society to the outside world.

"The single greatest challenge of this early part of the 21st century is to integrate Russia and China into the international democratic and economic system," said Robert Pastor, political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta.

"A lot of the statements that [members of the Bush foreign policy team] are making to try to reflect a new toughness makes sense if your vision is a new Cold War," Pastor said. "But it sure doesn't help you to facilitate [Russia's and China's] integration into a new world system. It just gets their backs up. It elicits from Russia and China the kind of negative and hostile activities that are really a thing of the past."

Bush has suggested he isn't spoiling to renew frictions between the United States and its Cold War rivals, with whom he hopes to cooperate on increased trade and in addressing global ills ranging from AIDS to terrorism.

''Nothing we do is a threat to you,'' Bush told Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen in an Oval Office meeting Thursday, striking a similar note the next day with respect to Russia.

"I believe we can have good, strong relations with the Russians," Bush said. "They'll just understand my administration is one that takes firm positions when we think we're right."

Some of what appears to be a shift in policy could be little more than a change in the rhetorical tone between Bush, who describes himself as something of a linguistic minimalist, and Clinton, who was ever ready to go on at length to lay out nuanced and specific foreign policy positions.

"People will find that I'm a straightforward person," Bush told Qian, "that I represent my country's interests in a very straightforward way."

In recent weeks, though, Bush has clearly toughened the edge on U.S. relations with China, Russia and North Korea.

Secretary of State Colin Powell expelled four Russian agents here on diplomatic passports, claiming each was ''directly implicated'' in the case of Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent arrested last month and charged with spying for the Russians.

Powell told Russian Ambassador Yuri Ushakov that other Russians would have to leave as well, in reductions that could ultimately affect dozens of Russian agents, the largest such expulsion since the Reagan presidency.

That action didn't go down well in Moscow.

Russia expelled four American diplomats in a retaliatory move, and Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov called the U.S. measure "a hostile act, aimed at increasing tension in Russian-American relations." Ivanov warned that "those trying to push mankind and the United States toward the Cold War and confrontation will fail.''

U.S.-China relations have been tested, as well, as the Pentagon considers whether to sell advanced Aegis radar defense equipment next month to Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province.

And, in his meeting with Qian, Bush openly criticized China's record on human rights and religious repression.

Next door to China, on the Korean Peninsula, Bush said earlier this month that he would largely abandon the Clinton approach of detente and diplomacy. That approach had produced a two-year moratorium on North Korea's missile development and production and had taken the two countries to the brink of an accord that might have ended a half-century of enmity between the Cold War foes.

Bush said the Clinton approach lacked verification. Powell said the Bush administration is reviewing the U.S. approach to North Korea, still a harshly repressive totalitarian state.

"We will do it in a measured way, with clear-eyed realism," Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "and, at a time when we're ready and a time we're prepared to engage, we will engage them at that time."

Copyright 2001 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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