With the media’s fixation on Karl Rove’s chatty telephone habits,
President Bush’s greeting this week of two prime ministers almost
escaped notice. It shouldn’t have.
Indeed, it took an Australian correspondent in Prime Minister
John Howard’s press retinue to break through our homegrown
journalists’ myopia. He waited patiently, this scribbler from Down
Under, as his Yankee counterparts could only obsess about who
leaked CIA employee Valerie Plame’s name.
Sensing that the East Room needed some substance, he asked
Messrs. Bush and Howard about how the two countries would manage
relations with China. Beijing’s mounting influence, by turns, seems
to welcome Western commerce and threaten global peace.
The two leaders seemed visibly to be thanking their lucky stars
for serious journalism. The query occasioned comments from both
men, center-right standard-bearers in both countries, about the
beneficent impact of capitalism, individual freedom and family
solidity.
China, of course, has embraced the first ingredient — even
while its Communist leadership still maintains an iron political
grip. The darker side recently was accented by a startlingly
bellicose People’s Liberation Army general, who suggested America’s
insistent defense of Taiwan’s independence might tip into nuclear
warfare.
Prime Minister Howard, whose continental nation has traded with
China longer, and whose proximity affords clear-eyed perspective,
offered the sanguine view that no such holocaust was likely. He,
too, saw trade as the classical path to peace.
President Bush echoed the free-traders’ notion that capitalism
creates demand for more liberty and democracy. For evidence, he
could have cited his previous day’s visitor: India’s Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh.
Dr. Singh is the Oxford-trained economist who’s credited with
opening up, as finance minister in 1991, the Asian subcontinent to
free-market economics. That step marked a dramatic turn for India,
which throughout its post-colonial period had struggled with a
sluggish socialism introduced by English theorists.
The collapse of socialism, most notable in the former Soviet
bloc, also reached India — whose Cold War “neutrality,” of course,
was belied by its affinity for Kremlin-designed foreign policy. But
India’s history, its English language and legal system, gave it an
advantage in the world economy.
India’s boom suggested to Western diplomats that its vast size
and teeming population could be employed to offset Chinese hegemony
over Asia. Fine, said New Delhi, so help us develop nuclear power.
Give us a seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Singh did not leave Washington with the UN accommodation. But he
did go with the Bush administration’s promise to share nuclear
technology — an override of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty,
which requires signatory nations not to grow nuclear warheads.
India did not sign that treaty. But its turbaned prime minister
did help George W. Bush and John Howard knit together a newer world
alliance, English-speaking and liberty-loving. That will be
remembered when Karl Rove is a footnote and Valerie Plame and her
once-a-diplomat husband — what’s his name? — will be
forgotten.
