Sowing Nettles

Javier Solana’s position in favor of selling arms to China is irresponsible, to say the least. The European Union’s top foreign-policy official argues that China has made progress on human rights, and with this he justifies lifting the arms embargo that Europe imposed on China because of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. In reality, whatever advances in human rights may have occurred in China have not changed the fact that these rights are still openly violated under the regime.

As an example, consider the case of the journalist Zhao Yan, a correspondent for the New York Times, who was arrested for supposedly “revealing state secrets” by writing a news story that predicted Jiang Zemin’s retirement. This journalist has been in prison for six months, held incommunicado, without trial and without a lawyer, defenseless against the abuses of his own government. Is this the government Solana wants to sell arms to?

At this moment, when China has just passed a law authorizing the use of force if Taiwan secedes, selling arms to China would be like pouring gasoline on a fire. It could start an arms race, in which Europe would supply arms to China, while the United States supplied them to Taiwan, completely destabilizing the delicate current balance in Asia. It would be better for everyone to seek, by nonviolent paths, sustained progress toward a permanent peace.

Such a stance on Solana’s part is inexplicable to me. Perhaps he hopes that the sale of arms to China will result in an injection of cash for Europe, while at the same time the growth of China as a military power takes power away from the unipolarism of the United States. This geopolitical stunt is extremely dangerous, and European leaders must resist the temptation to obtain economic benefit at the expense of world stability.

Incidentally, other errors—equally disastrous—are being committed by Junichiro Koizumi, prime minister of Japan, a country with a long history of war against China; errors such as changing the name of Japan’s army to replace its defensive designation with a more aggressive one, and reinstating the teaching of nationalism in Japan.

The causes of many great wars must be sought in this kind of “small” strategic error, like the ones Solana and Koizumi propose. Planting these seeds of war and expecting peace as the result is like sowing nettles and expecting roses to sprout.