With Friends Like These.

During the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shanghai, Bush adminstration officials worked to reassure our newfound allies, Russia and Communist China, of our good intentions. "Not only is the cold war over," said Secretary of State Colin Powell, "the postcold war period is over.... Nobody's calling us unilateral any more. We're so multilateral it keeps me up 24 hours a day checking on everybody."

According to an October 19th New York Times article, "Washington and Moscow now regard the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States as a watershed event in international relations that has offered opportunities for Mr. Putin and Mr. Bush to battle a common enemy." Secretary Powell is now indicating that Washington is considering cuts in America's nuclear arsenal to allay Russian concerns over the proposed U.S. missile defense system. Russia continues to insist that America abide by the terms of the 1972 ABM treaty -- despite the fact that the co-signatory of that treaty, the Soviet Union, no longer exists.

Meanwhile, the Communist Chinese are moving aggressively to appease the Bush administration after the rift created by the Chinese capture of an American surveillance plane earlier this year. The United States and China share an interest in "working together with the rest of the international community to combat terrorism," said Chinese dictator Jiang Zemin at Shanghai. Cohn Powell, apparently forgetting the EP-3 incident, claimed that "before the 11th of September, the relationship the United States enjoyed with the People's Republic of China was very good, and I think that since the 11th of September we have been encouraged by the response that we have had from China on support of the campaign against terrorism."

In reality, China has been the world's number-one proliferator of missile and nuclear technology for years, having made many deals with countries on the U.S. government's official list of regimes supporting terrorism. Not only that, but China was until recently the largest foreign investor in Afghanistan, according to Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "On Sept. 11," Senator Helms wrote in a recent Washington Times article, "Pakistan's Frontier Post reported that the Chinese and Afghani governments had signed a new economic and technical cooperation agreement. A defense cooperation agreement was signed in 1998 after Taliban officials allowed Chinese scientists to inspect unexploded cruise missiles that had been fired on Afghanistan in retaliation for Osama bin Laden's attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa."

With friends like Russia and China, who needs enemies?