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MICHAEL GOVE

The mockers who called the President a dumbo discover he is no joke

Those whom the Left wish to destroy, they first call dumb. They tried it with Margaret Thatcher, originally caricatured as a housewife out of her depth, and they refined the charge against Ronald Reagan, allegedly a lightweight hick whose American Gothic simplicities would pitchfork us into war.

And now the old smear has found a new target — George W. Bush. You’ve seen dumb, the Left argue, now here’s dumber. And more dangerous. Just look at what that dumb cluck is doing in China and the Middle East, never mind ripping up all those old missile treaties and ripping down all those old forests. It’s Homer Simpson in the White House with Monty Burns at the Environmental Protection Agency.

To which one can say only, you should be so lucky, comrades. Life would certainly be easier for leftwingers if the Bush Administration were nothing more than an alliance of country club oilmen and redneck roustabouts. But the truth is both more sophisticated, and for those of us not ideologically committed to the Left, much more reassuring. The Bush presidency gives the West what it has sorely lacked for the past 11 years — intelligent, adult, conservative leadership.

The people calling George W. dumb haven’t unearthed any evidence of administrative incompetence, let alone educational under-achievement. Because there isn’t any. No one called Al Gore dumb, but Bush has beaten Gore in every department, from college scores to campaign coherence to wisdom in choice of advisers.

When my colleague Anatole Kaletsky accuses Bush of being the worst President since Hoover that is not a detached assessment of ability, but a personal judgment on values. His real beef is that the President is operating according to a set of principles with which he disagrees on an ideological basis. But that doesn’t make George W. dumb. It makes him different.

He’s different from those conservatives such as Chris Patten, Ted Heath, Iain Gilmour, Senator John McCain and even his own father who won plaudits for “sophistication” from the Left by virtue of posing no threat to its advance. It’s easy for any conservative to win a reputation for wisdom from The Guardian — just by agreeing how dreadful your own side is. What takes courage, and intelligence, is to do as Thatcher, Reagan, Hague, and now Bush have done and show that a conservative isn’t just a leftwinger with better table manners but an honest defender of superior principles.

Nowhere is that better demonstrated than in the stand-off with China over the EP3 spy plane stranded on Hainan island. Bush is accused by the Left of destabilising good relations with China for old “Cold War” reasons. In making precisely that accusation, however, they show that they are the ones mired in the past, unwilling or incapable of learning its lessons. It is because the Cold War is over, because we no longer live in a bi-polar world, that fresh thinking on foreign policy is required and a robust approach to China is merited.

There was a case, when Soviet communism was determined on an expansionist foreign policy in the Seventies and Eighties, and China was concentrating on internal economic reforms, for keeping onside with Beijing the better to deal with Moscow. But the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the repressive horrors of Tiananmen, and China’s renewed determination to exercise a hegemonic role in Asia, changes the game.

The task now, in the interests of both the Russian and Chinese peoples and wider world security, is to encourage democratic forces within both nations. And that is very different from meekly rolling over at the behest of Moscow and Beijing. Had Bush appeased, and apologised over the spy plane, he would not have been contributing to a more peaceful world. He would have been paying danegeld to the most reactionary and anti-democratic forces in Beijing. He would have repeated the mistake of the Clinton Administration, when it caved into Beijing’s hardliners in 1994 by executing a U-turn on its policy of linking trade concessions with progress on human rights. Clinton’s weakness was democracy’s loss, for it strengthened the hand of the hardliners.

The hardliners may have forsaken Marxism but they haven’t forgotten Lenin’s maxim: negotiate with the West using a bayonet and “when you encounter mush, push on, when you encounter steel, withdraw”. Encountering Clintonite mush, they rounded up dissidents from whom they had hitherto stayed their hand. And they were still using the bayonet this year — pointing it across the Strait of Taiwan, using it against the peaceful protesters of the Falun Gong — until they came up against Bush’s steel.

Bush is serving notice on China that its hegemonic ambitions, its desire to place itself above the normal rules by which democracies play, will not be tolerated. Beijing is determined to crush democratic forces within its own country and to bring all Asia under its dragon’s wing. It is already pressurising Thailand and South Korea to weaken military and political ties with America, because it cannot tolerate a rival for its affections.

Bush’s refusal to appease Beijing shows he’s smart enough to learn the lessons of history. If you let the Rhineland be annexed without demur, or give the impression that you don’t care about Kuwait, then you’ll find yourself in the dumbest position of all — having to use military strength to repair diplomatic weakness. After eight years of adolescent self-indulgence, the White House is once again occupied by a grown-up. What a pity that President Bush’s critics haven’t learnt to leave the playground, and its insults, behind.

michael.gove@thetimes.co.uk

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2001

Answers

WHO is "dumb"??

don't sell yourself short, cpr...

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2001

People who misuse the word "dumb" are ignorant or stupid.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2001