Déjà Vu All Over Again - 13 April 2001

There's an old, retired baseball player - a small, bow-legged, cheerful droll - who's become a beloved American folk figure, if not hero, not for his prowess as a player, not for being in the baseball hall of fame - which he is.

He was the Yankees' catcher in their glory days and come to think of it I can't think of another athletic hero whose habitual stance is squatting on his heels with two gloved hands pushed up in front of his chest. Somehow an heroic wicket keeper doesn't seem right either.

But this bent-over and, when not bent-over, waddling figure is nationally loved because of his way with the language and his coining of some of the most ludicrous, true simplicities that - one time or another - are on every tongue.

His name is Yogi Berra and though he's long retired and is 75 he's not forgotten. Because every now and then there's a new Yogi-ism.

His autobiography carries the title of one of his earliest wise sayings: "It ain't over till it's over". A later variation was: "It ain't over till the fat lady sings."

About a restaurant which was a favourite of baseball players he said: "The place is packed. Nobody goes there any more."

I suppose the one that every schoolchild knows is the one that contains just about the only French phrase that every schoolchild knows - déjà vu - meaning I've seen it before. About the reoccurrence of some familiar plot or happening Yogi said: "It's déjà vu all over again."

And that's what I groaned to myself a day or two after the American spy plane crash landed on that Chinese island.

What made me say: "Oh dear it's déjà vu all over again" was the recollection of the times the United States has had to respond to a similar Soviet incident, indeed not even to an incident.

All through the five years or so when I daily covered the United Nations it didn't take an accident or the suspicion of a spy plane for the tireless and wearisome chief Soviet delegate - one Mr Gromyko - to declare that the United States, alone, was wholly in the wrong and that he would walk out of the Security Council, which he did, and not return until the United States had made a formal apology.

There was never any need for one because the United Nations laid it down in its charter that to take any military action against an aggressor all five of the big nations in the Security Council must agree. And from the start the chances of the United States, the United Kingdom, China and France agreeing with the Soviet Union on anything like defining an aggressor or acting against one were remote.

And since the bold Article 43 of the UN Charter asking every member nation to offer "armed forces on demand", since that article was never ratified, never obeyed, in other words there was never a United Nations army that could overpower any aggressor.

Well let's say simply that since 1945 there have been 240 wars to mock the sentence which gave the reason for the founding of the United Nations: In order to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.

So, through the decades of the Cold War, from the day that the Soviet Union had the bomb, and the world had only two superpowers, the constant problem of American foreign policy has been how to contain the power of the Soviet Union and its ambitions - first to get to the Persian Gulf and dominate the oil fields on which Europe and the United States depended, to help the Germans prevent their domination by the Soviet Union and all the time to match or surpass the Soviets' nuclear power.

There never will be any agreement among Americans or I suppose among her European allies about which kind of diplomacy has been most successful if any. The approach of Mr John Foster Dulles (for Eisenhower) - which was rigid opposition to all Soviet moves and an accompanying lamentation for their godless ways.

Or Kennedy's highly idealistic, rhetorical challenges to Soviet power at a time when he knew that America had the nuclear edge.

Or Henry Kissinger's pragmatic conservative approach based on staying ever wary about Soviet moves but acting in the belief that in spite of the unending public battle between Communism and the democratic world we had to live with the other superpower.

Now, in 1960 President Eisenhower was faced by the Soviets with exactly the nasty problem with which the Chinese confronted President Bush.

Mr Khrushchev - the most belligerent of modern Soviet leaders - was about to meet President Eisenhower at a summit conference in Paris. All the preliminaries had been taken care of - the two delegations at the ready, 600 media people gathering - when an American spy plane was brought down in Russia by a Soviet ground to air missile.

Mr Khrushchev stormed before the world press and accused President Eisenhower of using electronic spying over the Soviet Union.

The President said: "Rubbish, we never send reconnaissance planes over Russian territory."

He thought they'd never be spotted at 60,000 feet. And the US held to this line until it was plain that the Soviets had got the plane and thoroughly examined its electronic spying equipment. They also had the pilot and kept him for two years.

So finally President Eisenhower stuttered: "Well, you do it too." Which was true but was no way to placate the Russians or improve relations.

Mr Khrushchev promptly cancelled the summit meeting and the president went home an angry and a baffled leader - and a humiliated one. That is what a Communist leader requires of an adversary.

The Chinese Communists however go further. They treat the adversary the way Russia used to treat dissidents before the Second World War, which was to bring the chosen villain or villains to trial - the famous journalist, the unfrocked politician, whoever - bring him to a public trial where it was not enough for him to say he'd done wrong, even when he was guiltless, he must make an elaborate confession of treacherous acts - most of them invented and dictated to the defendants.

During the years of those Russian show trials Moscow was host to several young Asian radicals who'd come to learn the technique and the disciplines of Communist leadership.

Name the first Communist leaders of China, North Korea, Vietnam and you have the names of those young visiting pupils who were taught that the debasing, the public humiliation of an adversary, was essential to the stability of the regime because it renewed or fortified the belief of ordinary people in Communism itself.

The Communists from Lenin to Castro call this training re-education or thought reform. Little Elian Gonzalez - remember the Florida waif - is being re-educated in Havana at this moment.

We call it brain washing. We're probably both taking liberties with the language.

But with the Chinese there is another deeper element, native to them alone. It is one tradition preached by Confucius, which is that the ruler of the nation is declared and known to be morally superior to any adversary and in any contest - of war or peace - the essential thing to do is to establish before the people that an adversary is morally inferior.

The traditional way of doing this is to ask him to "confess" in Russian, but in Chinese the word is "apologise" and it has all the force for shame and humiliation of a true confession of wickedness.

To the Bush administration the big stumbling block was this word, which of course has a much, much weaker meaning in English. It took more than a week for these elementary facts of Chinese behaviour and their normal diplomatic language, first to get through to the Bush administration and then to be reported to the American people. And for us to learn the Chinese basic truth - to be a good Confucian - is at all times to conform to the views of the patriarchal father and then to the emperor.

Add to this deep-seated religious belief the evergreen memory of the shameless way the Western nations in the 19th, 20th Century ravaged a weak China, simply occupied Hong Kong and set up treaty ports and used the vast country as a quasi colony. It will go far to explain the sort of seems-to-be habitual paranoia of the Chinese.

Well this time the sticking point was reached when the administration decided that in our language, even our comparatively genteel meaning of apologising was too far to go. It would imply that the spying mission - the whole practice - was wrong, illegal and would not be repeated, which would have been a terrible precedent to set.

Like every other country except China the United States maintained there was nothing to apologise for, that it was working in international waters. The Chinese don't recognise the 12-mile limit.

As for apologising, in the Chinese sense of admitting that the Chinese leaders are morally the superiors of President Bush and his men, Washington's problem was to find a formula of regret that the United States could decently express and yet one that satisfied the Chinese people in believing that the United States had indeed, as Confucius requires, been made to bow low.

And apparently the phrase "very, very sorry" was enough. Once for the loss of the Chinese pilot, once for the crashing crew, not to have asked for landing permission. The word came, by the way, you notice, not from the president but from the American ambassador.

What caused the greatly influential Chinese army leaders to back off into such a genteel compromise we may never know but I think there can be little doubt that their president must have warned the belligerents that three issues remain and matter more than the spy plane hassle:

- The need to be accepted in the World Trade Organisation

- the desire to get the 2008 Olympic Games

- most of all somehow to stop or hinder the American sale of those top sophisticated weapons to Taiwan.

"Don't think," said a Chinese foreign office official, "this is the end of the affair."

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