United States Relations with China

A Reasoned Policy

The Bush Administration made a reasoned policy response to the push toward democracy staged in Tiananman Square and to the reprisals meted out by China's aging leadership.

The response was based squarely on a pragmatic assessment of what China is and is not. By not catering to emotional calls to force China's leadership into public admission of wrong-doing by American standards, the Bush Administration avoided forcing China's leaders to take even more reprisals in order to save face.

2000 Years of History

Apart from the fact that China's legal and moral concepts, based on over 2000 years of history, are unlike those of the United States; no nation, least of all China, will accept interference in its internal affairs. It is naive for some members of Congress to issue demands to the Bush Administration to tell China it had better shape up or else. Some did not learn the lesson of Panama, or Nicaragua, or South Africa, or Cuba! They are examples of American officials, possessing those peculiarly American beliefs, concepts and attitudes that lead to poor foreign policy decisions. (Commentary on American Foreign Policy, We the People, October 1988, Vol. 3 No. 3.)

The Fog-horn has Little Effect

A colleague, retired after a long and distinguished diplomatic career, said it well: ...self-interest is the key, not ideology. We can preach ideology, like Senator Helms, until the fog-horn wears out. It has little effect other than to arouse resentment and ridicule,...

. . . Robert Sturgill . . .

Life, Liberty...

Nobody's Perfect

Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson owned slaves and the death penalty was in full bloom in his day. Yet his words are there — Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — by his definition, Unalienable rights. Well, nobody's perfect right? Wrong! The Founding Fathers knew they did not live in a perfect world. They understood the evil of entrenched institutions since they were busy overthrowing them. But they couldn't do everything at once. After a fruitless attempt to make State's Rights work in the Articles of Confederation they abandoned States's Rights as unworkable. The Convention that met in Philadelphia in 1787 was supposed to tinker with the Articles and make them work. That idea was tossed out the window at the start. Everybody present knew that a major overhaul in the government was needed. The Constitution of the United States resulted from that realization.

The Owner's Manuals

The basic operating documents of the nation, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were both conceived as approximations of reality in an imperfect world. The one said that certain Creator given rights were unalienable, the other said it was being done to create a more perfect Union. The Constitution has a mechanism to amend it, the Declaration does not; it is immutable. Madison had the good sense to insist the Constitution be ratified by the people and not the States. His effort probably did more to make this one nation than any other single thing. His insistence on the ratification by the people has kept the hounds of States rights at bay all these years.

Unfinished Work

The Founding Fathers legacy to Us the People is the immutable unalienable rights and the perfectible Union. The death penalty does not fit this system. True, it can be argued that the Fathers themselves had slaves and executed people. The fact that we do not now have slaves is evidence of perfectiblilty and the fact that we have capital punishment is evidence that the work is not done.

For the Supreme Court to extend the death penalty to new classes of citizens, minors and the retarded, instead of striking it down for all citizens is evidence that we have a great distance to go. When the Constitutional body that is established to protect our unalienable rights removes them from yet another group of people we can only lament their action.

The Borders of Depravity

What does the State gain by committing yet another killing? What sort of mentality keeps prisoners on death row waiting for death and retirement on the Supreme Court and new appointments that would allow the taking of their lives? It borders on depravity to say the least. (I was going to say barbaric instead of depraved but there were actually some good barbarians. We owe some our democratic traditions to them.) The States which do not have the death penalty do not suffer the lack. The high homicide States that have it do not benefit from it.

Animal Morality v Humane Morality

The death penalty is a vestige of animal morality, the rule of the talon. It would not occur in a society with a humane morality. When will we get a majority on the Supreme Court that understands that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution taken together make up our fundamental rights? This is not a novel legal theory, but a glaring omission in our system of jurisprudence, on a scale equivalent to writing. All men are created equal.., when you own slaves. We got past slavery, let's get on to the unalienable rights.

. . . Ted Sudia . . .

© Copyright 1989
Institute for domestic Tranquility