Term Limits
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
It’s been quite a stretch for ex-presidents getting into foreign policy. First Jimmy Carter popped up in the New York Times with an op-ed dispatch sneering at the elected prime minister of Israel in terms that were memorably nasty even for Mr. Carter. Then Bill Clinton fetched up at Hunter College, with a cockamamie proposal to insert American GIs into the Middle East in a role that would almost certainly guarantee they’d end up in conflict with the armed forces of Israel. This idea was so absurd that it came as a relief when President Bush sent him off with the American delegation marking the newly-gained independence of East Timor.
But the prize of the week goes to the 41st president, George H. W. Bush, who turned up at a conference in Red China where he put a noticeable amount of light between not only himself and his son, the 43rd president, but between himself and the American congress. Few reporters were present, but one seasoned reporter, Joshua Gerstein, has the story on page one of today’s Sun. The Elder Bush seemed to praise the repressive regime when he claimed that “there are far more individual liberties in China today” than was the case when he was the American representative to Beijing in the 1970s. According to China’s state-run Xinhua news service, the former president also pledged America would continue its “one China” policy, which denies the sovereignty of Democratic Taiwan.
Mr. Bush’s criticism of the steel tariffs is something a lot of us will agree with. But it seems amazing that a former president would go to a conference in an anti-democratic, communist country and show some light between himself and the American administration, never mind that it is led by his son. It is confusing enough for to have two different Washington policies, one from the Secretary of State and another from the Secretary of Defense. We have the feeling that the actual president of America, not to mention the rest of us, would be better served if the former presidents went back to sky-diving, golf, and making furniture in their garages.
