The real China scandal

Yet whatever we make of Trulock, the heart of this story is really about the culpability of congressional Republicans and much of the national media in turning this story into a political firestorm. The firestorm did not ignite out of thin air; it was carefully cultivated. Ever since the end of the last decade, when the Republican political coalition began to crumble in response to the end of the Cold War, the party's older, ultra-conservative and isolationist impulses have reasserted themselves with a vengeance. And nowhere has this been more apparent than in the increasingly shrill and angry rhetoric the party aims at China. With China's mix of communism, resistance to missionary Christianity and widespread use of abortion, the China issue strokes all the exposed nerve endings of the conservative body politic.

This impulse from the right has been joined by many members of the GOP's foreign policy establishment who see U.S.-China confrontation as a way to resurrect the Republican-friendly Cold War politics that prevailed before 1989. It's not that there is nothing about China to be criticized or that our relations with the Chinese do not present a significant foreign policy challenge for the United States. But the larger context of these dark impulses has remained largely unexplored in the various China-related stories filling newspapers in recent years.

There is an odd symmetry at work here, because a similar set of circumstances afflicted our politics in the early years of the Cold War when congressional Republicans made hay with the notorious rallying cry of "who lost China?" Then as now, congressional Republicans were not content with disagreements over policy but rather indulged their appetite for wild-eyed charges about a Democratic administration selling out the United States to the communists or foolishly leaving the country vulnerable to some imminent Chinese attack. What is so disappointing is that the Washington political press broadcast the charges with so little sense of these rather transparent parallels.

The reality behind the scandal turns out to be both less sinister and more complex than the comic-book version that blanketed the airwaves last spring. Few doubt that the Chinese made some use of American technological specifications in making a breakthrough in the miniaturization of their warheads. What is less clear is whether they got that information from a spy, or whether they got it from artfully gleaning from information sources in the public domain.

One of the most telling ironies is that perhaps the best article written to date on this whole complex subject was by William Broad in the New York Times Sept. 7. What makes this ironic, and not simply praiseworthy, is that Broad covered much of the same ground Times reporter Jeff Gerth did in "breaking" the Trulock-Wen Ho Lee story earlier this year -- but without all the breathless detail and implication of scandal and national-security disaster.

Broad's article reported that experts are not at all certain whether the Chinese achieved their success in warhead miniaturization by espionage, hard work or some mix of the two; that the common wisdom of a few months ago alleging "espionage" probably placed far too much emphasis on the Los Alamos Laboratory and on Wen Ho Lee in particular; and that even the extent of the damage to national security may have been greatly overstated. It put the Times in the odd position of correcting the mistakes, rushes-to-judgment and misapprehensions that the paper itself disseminated in the first place.

That hasn't been missed by observers who questioned Gerth's reporting on the Trulock story from the outset. "Broad reinterviewed all of [Gerth's] sources," New York Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson says. "You don't do that to a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter unless you have real doubts, unless you think he's made a major mistake."

The unraveling Chinese spy scandal has revealed once again that too many members of our elite political press have ferocity and doggedness in abundance without the historical consciousness or political acumen to make sense of what they report. From start to finish, the Trulock-Wen Ho Lee affair now looks like a case wherein last year's Lewinsky-style "print it first, think it through later" reporting got applied to the real-life world of foreign policy and national security. Only in this case the stakes are much higher.

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