Carter and Taiwan

I wouldn't take anybody's bet on what I'm going to talk about. The obvious topic is about as inevitable as John Glenn was the week that he circled the globe.

I've been meaning, in a gingerly way, to talk about China for some time, since about a year ago the chic tourist trade began to go there and well-heeled Americans of all political stripes – with the possible exception of Goldwater conservatives – came back far more delirious in their tributes than the first generation of Intourist visitors to Russia half a century ago who returned from the Soviet Union and proudly chanted Lincoln Steffen's famous line, 'I have seen the future and it works'. 

If Franklin Roosevelt had been president today, you may be sure that the republic would now be resounding with another of his ringing, homely phrases like, 'We must become the arsenal of democracy' or 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' But Mr Carter, who with one person opposite in a room can be as relaxed and perceptive, as direct, simple and engaging as any president in our time, unfortunately is a vastly different person when he stands up before Congress or sits in the White House to perform his version of Roosevelt's fireside talk. To put it most charitably, and perhaps even truthfully, President Carter suffers from speechwriters of really staggering mediocrity. If they were German sociologists who'd been in this country less than a year, they couldn't contrive such an elephantine procession of unspeakable sentences. They have one knack which cannot be denied them, which is the knack of starting every sentence with an abstract noun, which is a fatal thing to do in English since no verb is going to hit anything, nothing's going to happen for quite a while, and what you do is build up a whole series of cumulus clouds of more abstractions. If this were not the season of goodwill, I'd say about them what Winston Churchill said about Ramsay MacDonald, 'He has more than any other man the gift of compressing the largest possible amount of words into the smallest possible amount of thought.' 

So, as it was, the president's suddenly called talk to the nation made words like 'normalisation' and 'unification' thud through the airwaves, after the president had quietly put the Middle East to simmer on the backburner. But in spite of the dense layers of cotton wool in which this Christmas present was buried, the thing itself, complete recognition of mainland China after 30 years, was dazzling enough to impress almost everybody, except some senators and congressmen who began to ask by what constitutional right can a president cancel a treaty with a foreign power, that power – or now rather powerless little nation – being, of course, Taiwan. The United States has had for 23 years a defence treaty with Taiwan but the president said it will lapse after a year, American troops will be pulled out in a couple of weeks and the United States will cease to recognise Taiwan as a separate Chinese republic. 

Now you know that the president is forbidden by the constitution to declare war or to sign a treaty with a foreign power except with the advice and consent of the Senate, but after the Second World War, in the general fear of communism that spread around the country, a new willingness to leave the war-waging power to the president first showed itself, I believe, in 1948, when the Russian coup, or takeover, in Czechoslovakia – one of America's favourite republics – shocked American opinion across the whole spectrum of political belief like nothing since the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. And, after that, the fear of communist eruptions, even in the Mediterranean, even in this hemisphere, stopped anybody's asking about the consent of the Senate when President Eisenhower went into the Lebanon and President Kennedy into Cuba. But whenever the president or the Congress takes on more power than the constitution permits either of them, sooner or later there's a reaction. 

Now the big, the historic, reaction against excessive presidential power came, of course, with Vietnam. Once that was over, after a wry New England senator had said, 'Let's call the boys home and say we won', Congress began to look back in anger and frustration at the freewheeling powers every president since Kennedy had assumed. One of the acts passed by the last Congress, one we've heard very little about, was something called the International Security Assistance Act passed this year. This act was meant to make sure that from now on, the president – any president – will not assume war-making powers, will sign no treaty and will not abrogate or cancel any treaty without, at the very least, consulting, seeking the advice, of Congress, not just the Senate. President Carter was reminded of this obscure little act in the telegram he got the other day from the Republican leader in the Senate, Senator Baker of Tennessee. The telegram, in fact, scolded the president for not remembering the provisions of that act. 

Now Senator Baker is not a man whom the president can quietly brush off. In all arguments over foreign policy, the opposition leader in the Senate is a dangerous man to have against you and a splendid man to have on your side. It's doubtful that the United Nations' Charter would have been so effortlessly ratified by the Senate if President Roosevelt, for a couple of years before the birth of the United Nations in San Francisco, had not made a mission out of wooing and winning a Republican senator, Vandenberg, who'd been the most formidable isolationist in the Senate. President Carter learned a little late in his new job the importance of not slighting the leader of the opposition and he has a lot to thank Senator Baker for. It was Baker who swung the doubtful Senate votes on lifting the embargo on sales of arms to Turkey and, even more crucial, on getting the Panama Canal treaties passed. 

So if, in the universal shout of joy that has gone up over recognising China, I seem to be listening to a puppy barking at a battleship, I think I ought to say that when Congress comes back on 15 January, you're going to hear a good deal more about Taiwan than we're hearing now. Maybe a month from now even, the conservatives will be pacified by dramatic evidence that Taiwan will prosper, become a sort of American Hong Kong and that may dampen the fire of the opposition whose most lurid sparks are being thrown up just now by old Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona who says there has been no such appalling example of appeasement since Mr Chamberlain went to Munich. 

Senator Goldwater threatens to take the president to court. This, most knowledgeable people in Washington believe, is unlikely even if the lower federal courts order a stay in ending the Taiwan treaty, it's improbable in the extreme that the Supreme Court would agree to consider the case. The Supreme Court stays out of politics, which may sound like an alarming remark when you consider the long roster of its judgements that have then fired the most tremendous political battles, but the Supreme Court intervenes always and only in what might be the denial of constitutional rights to an individual. Foreign policy could only come into a Supreme Court case about Taiwan, I imagine, in some wild, comic opera fantasy of, say, a young American citizen claiming he had a right to fight for Taiwan but was prevented from doing so because the President of the United States would not exercise his constitutional power to declare war on Communist China with the advice and consent of the Senate. 

What I am saying is that the opposition on constitutional grounds to President Carter's summary ending of the Taiwan defence treaty is much larger than it sounds in the thunder of the general approval. An informal count of the House of Representatives last week showed two congressmen in three against it and, buried away in eight lines in the New York Times one day this week was the report or admission by the White House that the White House mail was running 4-1 against deserting Taiwan. 

Well, I just about have time for a complete somersault which will land us in a supermarket in uptown New York. My wife went off the other day to the butcher to buy some beef kidney suet. I should tell you at once that suet is something most Americans have never heard of and would not recognise if it were thrown at them. She tried three butchers and two supermarkets and at last she went into a supermarket, asked to see the butcher and was shown to a large, jolly man in a white apron. 

At the mention of the word 'suet' the man went into stupor, she might have been talking Sanskrit. 'Me,' said the man in a rolling guttural, 'Me new man, me a little butcher, me Russian, short in this country by 16 months, you want big butcher!'' He led her to the boss man, the big butcher who was a beanpole about five feet high. 'What is it lady?' he said. She told him. He was unfazed. 'So,' he said, 'you're going to make a plum pudding?' 'That's right!' she said. The Russian was even more baffled but smiling and gesturing away like Mr Fezziwig. 

'You English?' said the big – the little – butcher. 'No,' said my wife, 'but my husband is.' 'You want,' said the butcher with absolute authority, 'you want beef kidney suet, right?' 'Right!' she said. 'I know all about this,' he said, 'I was in England during the war.' He brought in a side of beef, plonked it down on the counter, removed its plastic wrapping and carved off a great, glistening hunk of suet. 'How's that?' he said. 'That's fine!' she said. 

The Russian, meanwhile, making incomprehensible noises about 'twenty years ago men laying down all over.' 'What's that?' she asked. 'You, twenty years ago, very beautiful I think. Men laying down all over.' 'I was in Manchester during the war,' said the butcher. 'That,' said my wife, 'is where my husband was born.' 'In that case,' said the big – little – butcher, 'it's yours. No sale.' He banged up 'no sale' on the cash register, handed it over to her and she went out chattering thanks and good wishes. The Russian saw her to the door and flung it open. 'Twenty years ago, men I think laying down all over. Merry Christmas!' 

'Merry Christmas to you!' she said. And the same to you.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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