Accommodating China hasn’t helped the U.S. Meeting the Dalai Lama is a chance to start over.
The Wall Street Journal
February 16, 2010
By KELLEY CURRIE
This week’s meeting between President Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama is generating an unusually vocal uproar from Beijing. That uproar, for those who listen carefully, is a sign that Mr. Obama’s policies on Tibet and China are not working. The question is whether Mr. Obama will realize in time to fix it.
Once the timing of Mr. Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama became public, Chinese officials threatened to “take corresponding action to make relevant countries see their mistakes.” The Obama White House has responded with a confused mixed message: confirming the meeting while trying to reassure Beijing with talk about the larger context of the “mature” U.S.-China relationship.
This contretemps is largely Mr. Obama’s own fault. By the time he took office, presidential meetings with the Dalai Lama had become routine to the point where Chinese diplomats seemed to be phoning in their demarches. Mr. Obama could have continued that pattern had he chosen to. Instead, he has turned what would have been a one-day, back-of-the-newspaper blurb about a routine meeting with the Dalai Lama into a major diplomatic and domestic headache.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Mr. Obama’s decision not to meet with the Tibetan leader before traveling to Beijing last November was intended to smooth the path toward Chinese cooperation on several issues dear to the President at home: climate change negotiations, yuan revaluation, and trade measures to placate key labor union constituencies. The domestic political connection was clear from the fact that once Mr. Obama decided not to meet the Dalai Lama, he dispatched long-time political aide Valerie Jarrett, not known as a foreign-policy expert, to India to deliver the bad news. more …
