AMAC Exclusive – By David Lewis Schaefer
On Monday, the Department of Energy released a new classified report to the White House and key members of Congress which concluded that the COVID-19 virus probably leaked from a Chinese laboratory, rather than from an infected animal in a “wet market” near the lab, as had previously been asserted by top national security officials and government health specialists. Given the long history of cover-ups by communist governments, why should anyone have been surprised?
Back in the 1950s, conservative Republicans in and out of Congress had a saying: “You can’t trust the communists.” This maxim was borne of long experience with the behavior of the Soviet government. The Soviets had, for instance, joined in an aggressive alliance with Hitler’s Germany before suddenly turning into America’s ally when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union (before Stalin had the chance to turn on Hitler). They infiltrated the American government with spies, sometimes at the highest levels of our foreign policy establishment such as Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, in the midst of our wartime alliance. They also imposed puppet dictatorships in all the European countries the USSR had liberated from the Nazis and stole the secrets of America’s nuclear weapons programs.
But the memories of mainstream American policymakers throughout the postwar period – not only professed liberals, but mainstream centrists and some ostensible conservatives like Richard Nixon – were short, particularly when it came to understanding that the aims and practices of totalitarian dictatorships are guided far more by expansionist aspirations, or at least the determination to keep their subjects safe from any awareness of the possibility of freedom, than by any fear of aggression from liberal, inherently pacifist, democracies.
The natural liberal tendency (using “liberal” in the broadest sense) is to think the best of potential aggressors and to believe that international hostilities arise out of a failure of understanding, or irrational fears, which can be remedied through diplomacy, cultural exchanges, increased trade, and treaties. For example, until the publication of German historian FritzFischer’s book Germany’s Aims in the First World War in 1961, scholars typically explained the origins of World War I as the product of accidents or misunderstandings, rather than of the German government’s imperialist aims.
Liberal historians also long blamed World War II on the American government’s failure to join the League of Nations, which supposedly would have prevented the conflict through international cooperation. In the 1920s, under Republican administrations, the U.S. signed a naval treaty designed to limit the expansion of forces by leading powers, including Japan, and then ostensibly “solved” the problem of international conflict by signing the Briand-Kellogg pact, which made war “illegal.” Franklin Roosevelt, early in his administration, gave diplomatic recognition to the Soviet regime, despite its murderousness toward its own people and proclaimed aspirations of engendering world revolution. Four decades later, Nixon, a onetime determined foe of the Chinese Communist government, made his famed “opening” to China, supposedly for reasons of Realpolitik, even at the cost of withdrawing formal recognition of a longtime U.S. ally in Taiwan and encouraging doubts elsewhere about America’s reliability.
The Nixon administration also signed a treaty with the Soviet Union banning the development of chemical and biological weapons in 1972, continuing this pattern of wishful thinking. Yet no sooner was the treaty signed than the Soviets ramped up their production of bioweapons. Two decades later, the Russian government signed the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, yet continued to hold a large stock of such weapons. Though the Russian government claimed to have destroyed them by 2017, the poisoning of several exiled dissidents demonstrated otherwise.
Also in 1972 (a banner year for naiveté) the Nixon government signed an agreement with the Soviets, first proposed by Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, banning the development of anti-ballistic missiles designed to defend a country against nuclear attack. McNamara’s professed fear was that, by reducing the risk that a pre-emptive Soviet nuclear attack would succeed, the U.S. would encourage the continuation of the “arms race” between the two countries.
Common sense, by contrast, would suggest that the best means of preventing a nuclear attack on the U.S. would have been to enhance our defenses against it – a program that Ronald Reagan finally attempted to initiate, only to have it rejected by Congress, with Democrats ridiculing the idea under the name of “Star Wars.” Today, the U.S. is still deterred from providing sufficient weaponry to Ukraine to enable it to defeat Russian aggression out of the fear that excessive “escalation” of Ukraine’s military capacity would provoke Vladimir Putin to launch a nuclear attack.
Although the George W. Bush administration announced this country’s withdrawal from the ABM treaty in 2002, citing the risk of a potential nuclear attack from Iran, which was not a signatory to the treaty, little evidence exists that the U.S. has subsequently invested the substantial sums that would be needed to build a workable missile-defense system even against Iran. Instead, the Obama administration signed a “deal” with the Iranian government by means of an executive agreement – hence not a treaty subject to Senate ratification – that would have mandated only a postponement in Iran’s development of nuclear weapons in return for the lifting of sanctions and the release of hundreds of millions of dollars that the mullahs’ regime could use to enhance the financing of its terrorism programs. The Biden administration has not given up hopes of restoring the agreement, despite Iran’s denial of the right of U.N. inspectors to check on its nuclear development.
Most recently, Putin announced his country’s withdrawal from the New Start nuclear arms limitation treaty, following repeated American accusations that he violated the treaty by refusing to allow the inspections that it authorized.
As a final instance of American leaders’ historical naiveté regarding the trustworthiness of communist regimes, let us recall Jimmy Carter’s initial speech on foreign policy, delivered at Notre Dame University shortly after he took office, scolding Americans for what he called their “inordinate fear of communism.” Two and a half years later, Carter publicly confessed that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan taught him more about the nature of communism than he had ever known before. Rather expensive on-the-job training, one might observe.
But how could an educated politician, an ex-nuclear engineer on American submarines, have had to wait so long to learn his lesson? Carter’s fault wasn’t stupidity, but the characteristic American tendency of “mirror-imaging,” or imagining that the motivation of communist leaders must be more or less like our own. As the great Sovietologist Robert Conquest once observed, Western leaders and diplomats typically failed to understand the communist regime because they lacked personal experience in dealing with the sort of people who advance under communism: the sort who are commonly found in the West only in violent criminal organizations like the Mafia.
Carter, it must be noted, was a slow study when it came to communism, never completing his education. Long after departing the White House, he became, effectively, an apologist for North Korea’s Marxist despotism in the name of promoting negotiations to halt the growth of the dictatorship’s growing nuclear arsenal. On one self-appointed peace mission, he naively described how a “department store” he visited in Pyongyang resembled one in in Atlanta – not realizing it was really a phony, Potemkin-village construction set up just to deceive him in a nation filled with starving people. Later, in 2011, Carter downplayed North Korea’s belligerence by characterizing the government’s shelling of a South Korean island and disclosure of a uranium enrichment facility – in violation of U.N. resolutions – as merely “designed to remind the world that the country’s rulers deserve respect in negotiations that will shape their future.”
Although today’s aggressive Russian dictatorship no longer professes communism, it practices the same sorts of violence and treachery as its Soviet predecessor. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping’s regime in China still openly describes itself as communist – even though it has sought to keep its populace contented by allowing far greater scope for private enterprise than Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao would ever have authorized, on the condition that the people seek no political rights. And Xi has been more open than either Mao or the Soviet leaders about his ambition to achieve world dominance. His expansion of his military forces, even as American military spending (taking account of inflation, and as a percentage of GNP) has receded, has put them roughly on a par with America’s forces, while his threatening actions in the Pacific make an attack on Taiwan more and more likely. (China is expected to achieve the capability for parity with the U.S. in its nuclear arsenal as early as 2030.)
Under these circumstances, why woulda Chinese government laboratory focused on “gain-of-function” research nothave been aiming to enhance their country’s military arsenal, just as Soviet scientists had long been employed to do? And yet, until quite recently, anyone who proposed such a hypothesis was ridiculed as a “racist” or “conspiracy theorist.” Senator Tom Cotton’s mere suggestion of the lab-leak theory was met with severe derision from both the leading British medical publication The Lancet and The Washington Post in early 2020.
President Biden, who accused Donald Trump of promoting anti-Chinese racism for his criticism of China’s policies and reportedly shut down the State Department’s investigation of the possible lab origins of the virus, was later accused of falling victim to such racism himself when he revived the investigation. (These details are summarized in law professor Jonathan Turley’s revealing February 27 column in the New York Post, “Blowing Lid off Shaming Censors.”)
Amazingly, America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) had contributed more than $600,000 to help fund the Wuhan lab’s supposedly benign research. And despite public denials by Dr. Anthony Fauci as recently as April of 2021 that the NIH under his direction had ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, damning emails obtained by the watchdog White Coat Waste Project show his concern as far back as 2016 that the lab was engaged in such research, despite a ban by the Obama administration. Interim NIH Director Lawrence Tabak admitted in a letter to Congress late in 2021 that the experiments conducted at Wuhan in 2018-19 were gain-of-function.
The American intelligence community has not announced a final determination of how the COVID flu originated. But leaving aside the tens of millions of people worldwide who have died from it, over the longer run the greater threat to our (and the world’s) freedom and security may be, as Turley argues, the censorship scandal that our response to it embodied. The outrage previously expressed by U.S. government officials, academia, and media to the mere questioning of the “official” explanation of COVID’s origin was apparently motivated by the desire to avoid offending Chinese sensibilities at all cost. Once again, it seems, our government and academic institutions failed to grasp the fundamental nature of communism and the fact that communist regimes cannot and should never be trusted.
David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.