Or Else What, Bill?

President Clinton retreats from yet another ultimatum

An ultimatum, as the word's etymology suggests, denotes a last chance. "Go to your room or else," is a common maternal ultimatum. "Get out of Kuwait before January 15th or get bombed back to the bronze age" is another ultimatum which fulfilled the dictionary definition quite nicely.

But in the Clintonic mood, words lose meaning. Every ultimatum is really a penultimatum; ever penultimatum an antepenultimatum, and very indication that everything is negotiable up to and past the stand deadline.

So it should come as little surprise that Clinton is trying to wigglehis way out of following through on his ultimatum to China. Clinton made a specific campaign point of his own firmness about cutting off trade benefits to China if its leaders did not improve their human rights record. George Bush, according to the paragon of Arkansanian virtue, was a Sinophile prone to coddling his old friends in the PRC gerontocracy.

The annual June 3 deadline is once again approaching, and predictably, the ultimatum is becoming less ultimate. Not that China has taken any steps to remedy its dismal record of engaging slave labor and persecuting dissidence; in fact, in the last few months, Jiang Zemin's regime has bullied prominent dissidents with a particularly gleeful abandon. At his Seattle summit with Secretary of State Warren "the Romulan" Christopher, Jiang struck a strident tone, warning the hapless Secretary to lay off China's internal affairs.

If Chinese leaders were worried about Mr. Clinton's stentorian threats, they sure didn't show it. As it turns out, the Chinese had a better understanding of the grammar of the Clintonic mood than most American voters.

With the deadline fast approaching, Clinton has started rooting around for a way to avert meting out substantive punishment to China without blatantly ignoring his firmly sated threat. In conjunction with an equally feckless bunch of Congressional co-conspirators, Clinton has seized on the idea of "restricted sanctions" as a sufficiently deceptive device for accomplishing his duplicitous goals. China will not lose MFN status outright; nor will Clinton admit that the calculus of his government places trade relationships over human rights.

Instead Clinton will muddle through and in the process further muddy the meaning of a Presidential ultimatum. In theory, certain specific classes of products will be subject to a duty, although there is no indication that such selective sanction are administratively feasible. Practical concerns of execution are irrelevant, since the application of this ballyhooed wrist-slapping is aimed only at impressing the voting public, not depressing the Chinese economy.

While such self-serving equivocation may raise Clinton's political stock, if only discounts the credibility of the United States' words.

The Boston Serbs have not failed to comprehend this lesson. Month after month of "final deadline" came and went, culminating in nothing more than an aptly-named "pinprick bombing". General Cedras, the Haitian strongman, also knows that there's no reason to quake before the Clintonic ultimatum.

And in Korea, Kim II Sung may play the maniac with regard to most of his problems, but there is nothing irrational about the way he casually disregards our deadlines.

Clinton may have been the best political poker-player in Little Rock, but in the international arena there are plenty ready to call his increasingly tattered bluff.

Benjamin J. Heller's column appears on alternate Saturdays.