Jimmy Carter passed away recently at the age of 100. His presidency is a byword for failure, and I’m not much of a fan of his post-presidency, either, which included a lot of charitable good works but also some weird free-lance foreign policy meddling. But since we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead—at least not until after a slight delay—I did manage to find a case for one good thing Carter did as president.
After Carter defeated Republican Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election, his incoming administration asked to read the secret records of Nixon, Kissinger, and Ford’s negotiations with Mao and Zhou Enlai. Perhaps conscious of what they’d given away in early, excited visits to China, Nixon and Kissinger obfuscated. They only provided the records when Carter’s government threatened to sue. Carter was shocked by what he read. “We should not kiss-ass them the way Nixon and Kissinger did”, he concluded….
In the first summer of his term, Carter sent his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, to China. In part because Carter knew he’d soon have to shepherd the Panama Canal treaties through Congress, the president told Vance to put forward the maximum position on Taiwan suggested by Kissinger at the height of the Watergate crisis in 1974, asking Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to agree to continued US governmental ties to Taiwan after diplomatic normalization, perhaps similar to the semi-official ties that the US had with the People’s Republic at the time. Carter added a further request: to allow the United States to continue to sell arms to Taiwan after recognition.
On the face of it, Vance’s suggestion was flatly turned down by Beijing. Today, when Vance’s trip is recalled at all, it is remembered as a failure. But, back in Washington, Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had noted what he called a “loud silence”: Deng had said nothing about arms sales. This was the first suggestion that Carter might be able to square the circle of establishing diplomatic relations with China and preserving a meaningful say over the future of Taiwan.
Carter pushed through and eventually got what he wanted. The continued existence of an independent Taiwan supported by US military power is partly his legacy. So, to some extent, is Taiwan’s example of a Chinese democracy.
Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, realized that the only hope for his regime after de-recognition was to win broad American support all over again, including for the nature of the Taiwanese government. Chiang went from Taiwan’s most feared policeman to the president who oversaw—however begrudgingly—the island’s democratization.
This, at least, is the case made in this article.
By the way, that link also references a wave of ignorant Zoomers becoming angry at an upcoming ban of TikTok, the Chinese-controlled, video-based social media platform. The case against TikTok, made here by Jonathan Last, is that it is basically a Chinese intelligence operation controlled by Xi Jinping, which steals US viewers’ data and uses its opaque algorithms to boost messages the Chinese government wants to broadcast to the under-30 set in the US. I certainly don’t see this as an issue of freedom of speech, any more than the shutdown of RT America. Foreign dictatorships and their propaganda operations do not have free-speech rights.
But the story is that a bunch of angry kids from TikTok have been departing for RedNote, a literal Chinese social media site, as a free-speech protest. But then they’ve been discovering that RedNote is—surprise, surprise—heavily censored by the Chinese government, which has been scrambling to suppress discussion of banned subjects like Tiananmen Square and homosexuality and to prevent its Chinese users from seeing posts from its new American users. Oh, and TikTok has always been banned by, you guessed it, China itself.
I guess this is a lesson our miseducated next generation is going to have to learn all over again.
The Ultimate Resource
Before they moved on to global warming, environmentalists used to claim we were going to run out of resources. So I perked up when I saw a post from Ed Conway, author of an interesting-looking book called Material World, on how there are no “lost” minerals.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Tracinski Letter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.