A movement by an enclave in the communist bloc to grant its people the greater freedoms enjoyed in the West — that’s the drama playing out in Hong Kong today. Yet as youthful protestors wave American flags and sing our national anthem, American support for their cause is being tepidly expressed, at best.

As Communist China’s strongman, Xi Jinping, deploys his troops at the border of the former British Crown Colony, clearly threatening armed intervention, the best President Trump has offered is to urge him to “quickly and humanely solve the Hong Kong problem.” To what “problem” is the president referring? What prior example of the regime’s humanity is he summoning?

It may be that there’s more going on behind the scenes than Mr. Trump has let on, but he at least appears not to grasp that it’s China’s intent to systematically strip the city of its special status guaranteed by the Sino-British declaration of 1984. That parchment supposedly guaranteed that Hong Kongers “rights and freedoms, including those of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association” would be “protected by law.”

They are, though, communists. So as the fate of millions hangs in the balance, let us recall the anniversary of another communist assault on democracy in the territory of one of its semi autonomous constituencies. On August 21, 1968, a quarter million Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops entered Czechoslovakia to crush the movement known as the Prague Spring.

Alexander Dubcek became First Secretary of the Czech Communist Party in January of that year. Hardly an anti-Soviet counterrevolutionary, he sought to revive a stagnant economy and restore a modest level of civil liberties under the banner of “socialism with a human face.” He and the Czech president, Ludwig Svoboda, whose very name means freedom, assured their masters in Moscow that Czechoslovakia would remain a faithful member of the Eastern bloc.

As in Hong Kong today, it turned out that the spirit of liberalization could not be contained, and students marched in the streets demanding even greater reforms. Their famous chant was “Dubcek! Svoboda!” In July negotiations, Dubcek tried to forestall Soviet intervention, but to no avail. Developments in Prague, it turned out, were too much for Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviets.

Meantime, America was in turmoil, President Lyndon Johnson was a lame duck. He hoped a path toward detente with the Soviets might be a part of his tangled legacy and was eager to avoid any entanglements that might compromise that goal. Secretary of State Rusk, a hawk on Vietnam, failed to make the moment his finest hour. “This is a matter for the Czechs first and foremost. Apart from that, it is a matter for the Czechs and the other nations of the Warsaw Pact.”

The message to the Czech democrats was clear. There would be no support from Washington.

Despite repeated intelligence warnings that an invasion was imminent, the White House was caught flat footed when the Soviets intervened. Ironically, Johnson had planned to announce on August 21 a September trip to Moscow to begin a round of arms limitation talks. While that announcement was postponed, the question of what to do about the Czechs was deferred to, of all places, the United Nations, where it would be guaranteed to die.

Compared with the cynicism evident in the White House, Congress, the press, and the public were outraged by the Soviet action. Johnson was undeterred. He continued to hope that a summit in Moscow might be possible. The denouement in Prague had shattered those plans, though, and the path to detente was one that would be laid by the Nixon administration.

Nearly a hundred Czechs died resisting the Soviet invasion and hundreds more were injured. It would be another 20 years before Soviet oppression of Eastern Europe came to an end.

President Trump’s posture toward Hong Kong is eerily similar to Johnson’s attitude toward the Czechs. He is treating the city’s uprising as an inconvenient obstacle to his vision of 21st century commercial detente with Beijing — with any irreconcilable differences between the two nations to be reconciled by personal diplomacy.

A vain hope, LBJ might tell him were he alive today. Once the tanks rolled into Prague, Johnson saw his hopes for a last ditch rapprochement with Moscow shattered. If he continues to waffle on Hong Kong, Mr. Trump might find himself fostering a Chinese intervention that could well upend the very plans he nurses for a new economic and strategic landscape in East Asia.

________

Mr. Atkinson, a contributing editor of the Sun, covers the 20th century. Image: Prague Spring, 1968, United States CIA via Wikipedia.