Fade from red and white

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Mary Fan

One could almost expect that this generation's twenty-somethings, raised on the post-Cold War brand of hope and rhetoric, might forge forward, secure in the idea that America's big stick of the supreme dollar was better than any nuke ceremoniously aimed at New York's general vicinity.

This vision was threatened last month when the Cox report on Chinese nuclear espionage was released with Republicans hovering about thick as buzzards on the carcass that is the scandal-riddled Clinton administration. Subsequent reversion back to the old vocabulary of strategic arms, passé after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was as sudden and sharp as the shock.

Arizona's own, ex-Vice President and present presidential hopeful Dan Quayle, voiced the tenor of the change, proposing the U.S. build a missile defense system to shield the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

"If Bill Clinton would announce tomorrow that we are serious about a missile defense system that will do more [than any other step] to get the message to Beijing that we're going to stay in the Pacific ... and that we will protect our friends and allies," Quayle told MSNBC. Not quite containment, but certainly a move away from the hopeful disarmament strategies pioneered by the U.S. in the last decade.

In the post-Cold War dream of a more peaceful global order and the halting of nuclear proliferation, the U.S. forged agreements like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and the START II arms-reduction pact.

These agreements, gently prodded forward by America's big economic stick, were a few beads in the penance for such Cold War-blinded bludgeoning as the arms and cash supplying of an El Salvadoran government that raped and murdered its own people. That, incidentally, was the wages of Republican visions for a strong defense.

Fortunately for the fledgling world order, the buzz seems to be contained within the circle of political opportunists hoping to cash in on embarrassment as polls are wont to do, and citizens still relieving old antagonisms and mentalities. A Pew Research Center survey of 1,786 Americans in the latter half of March, when news of espionage had broken, found that less than half could pick China as the offending nation.

Tiananmen still trips off American tongues more or as easily than that nation who graduated from pirating Mickey Mouse to nuclear technology. President Clinton is still putting China up for Most Favored Nation trading status, showing that the economic big stick will be favored over the nuclear one into the next millennium.

And that bodes well. As much as some might fall back into old habits of thought where defense analysts took center stage and nations and socioeconomic systems were abstracted into good and evil for easier swallowing when security-justified measures came, that age is not and should not be our age.

A people moved by images with faces, like Tiananmen, or even pictures of General Motors factories on a former Chinese swamp instead of dour defense analyst guesses at this many missiles aimed here and that many in store there is the biggest promise of global security. Twenty years or ten to nuclear parity, if the world still exists for people to live then people will be living with people, not redundant nuclear arsenals.

Here's hoping, in the spirit of Tiananmen, that those people will be seen and treated as humans by home governments and foreign, regardless of socioeconomic system or strata.