PEDERSEN: How worried are you about China’s reaction to NATO’s bombing of its embassy in Belgrade? CARTER: I’m quite concerned. I think [the U.S.] relationship with China has been improving–obviously initiated in 1972 by President Nixon’s visit. Then there was a dormant period under President Ford. When I came in we were determined to normalize relations with the People’s Republic of China. President Bush did a good job. He was familiar with China and pursued that sensitive interrelationship with sound judgment. Now it’s hard to understand what our policy is toward China.
Hard for whom? It’s hard for the Chinese to understand, hard for Americans and for Congress to understand. What the Chinese want most is consistency. They don’t mind a hard and tough policy toward human rights or trade. But they need to have a comprehension that American policy is consistent and predictable.
Do you fault President Clinton? I don’t think there’s any consistency now. [Our policy] has been up and down. It’s been equivocal. The Chinese have made clear their opposition to the Kosovo bombing. They’ve shown extreme sensitivity about that issue–primarily because they feel left out of the decision-making process in the U.N. Security Council, but also because they see NATO interfering in the internal affairs of Yugoslavia, defending the human rights of the Kosovars. And I think the Chinese feel this might be extrapolated some time in the future to what they consider to be interference in their internal affairs–the human rights of Tibetans or Taiwanese. So for us to bomb the Chinese Embassy was a terribly tragic mistake.
Could a more skillful China policy have prevented the fallout the bombing triggered? I don’t know how to answer that question. Much of the anger was genuine because the embassy was bombed, and much of the student demonstration was self-initiated. But there’s also no doubt that the Chinese government did not want to discourage this chance to demonstrate their condemnation of NATO bombing Kosovo. What it has done is to inject China into the peacemaking process. The Chinese have made clear–and [Russian Special Envoy Viktor] Chernomyrdin has agreed–that an end to bombing is a prerequisite to the U.N. Security Council discussing a Kosovo peace agreement.
You’ve called the Indonesian elections the most important vote in the world this year. Why? It’s the fourth largest nation in the world in population. Indonesia has suffered a horrific economic setback. There are deep internal divisions in the population. Some regions want independence. There’s a Muslim-Christian divide. The status of the military, which has always been the dominant political factor, is now quite in doubt. But I think all these factions–and I haven’t named them all–are convinced a successful election can alleviate these problems and a failed one will exacerbate them. [Nothing good] is going to happen if the election is a failure.
You’ve argued that the growing disparity between rich and poor is the ultimate challenge of the 21st century. How can the gap be closed? There’s an insensitivity, even an unawareness, in the rich, developed world about the plight of people in the poverty-stricken undeveloped world. It’s a chasm that’s growing, and I don’t see encouraging movements in the U.S. or Europe or Japan or other rich countries to address it.
Won’t globalization and technology do the job? The average person in Liberia or Sierra Leone or both Congos or Rwanda or Burundi or Ethiopia or Mali or Haiti is totally untouched by what we refer to glibly as globalization. I don’t have any doubt that elite people in some of those countries will have their lives profoundly changed. But more than half the world now lives on less than a dollar a day per capita income.
You’re saying trickle-down doesn’t work? It doesn’t work. And foreign aid is almost an epithet. Can you imagine anyone running for the U.S. Congress who advocates increasing foreign aid? It would be politically suicidal. A few countries make an exception to this–Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark. They’re very rare. The Carter Center has programs in 35 African nations. And there’s often a sense of despair there. There are 30,000 troops in Bosnia, 7,000 of them Americans. And now we’re spending billions bombing Kosovo. Whether you approve or disapprove of that is beside the point. There’s a divide. There’s a total belt of horrendous warfare–in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Burundi, Rwanda, both Congos, Angola, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Sudan. Where is the impetus, or even the casual display of concern in Washington or the European capitals, to deal with these problems? The devastation there is much worse than what we see in Europe.
