An open letter to Fred Hiatt

Dear Mr. Hiatt (and Mr. Pexton),

Sorry to be writing to you in such a public format.  I’m also sorry to bring up the rather touchy subject of your attempts to find a competent and authentically conservative blogger for the Post.  But can we talk about Jennifer Rubin for a second? 

As I blogged yesterday, Rubin demonstrated incompetence, laziness and/or mendacity in her "hackstabbing" of Robert Zoellick.  In particular, she seemed unable to understand the meaning of the "responsible stakeholder" language that Zoellick started using in 2005, and her weblink to that language wasn’t even close to accurate. 

Today I wake up to see that she has offered a follow-up post on Zoellick and an update to the controversial post from yesterday.  Let me just reprint that update in full. 

UPDATE: To clarify, Zoellick in 2005 delivered a speech in which he encouraged China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs. From 2005 to the present in speeches, articles and interviews (asked in 2009 in Financial Times interview about China’s “scorecard” on acting as a responsible stakeholder he said “I think China has come a long way”), Zoellick repeatedly praised China’s conduct, despite ample signs China was anything but “responsible” and widespread criticism of the policy Zoellick had championed. Given Mitt Romney’s “take China to the WTO” stance and his unsparing criticism of China’s human rights abuses Romney could not be more different in his view of China.

Now this is a bit of an improvement.  Rubin has accurately described what Zoellick was saying in 2005 (as opposed to how it still appears in  her original post).  She also suggests that that Zoellick rubs some neoconservatives/China hardliners the wrong way on positions like human rights abuses.  That’s a genuine policy disagreement. 

Still, there are some issues.  One problem is that even in the update, she’s still screwing up her evidence.   Her quote from the FT interview of Zoellick is a somewhat out of context — it seems more like Zoellick was talking about China’s economic development in that particular phrase:

Zoellick:  I think China has come a very long long way. I have a special perspective because I was living in Hong Kong in 1980. I went to Guangdong province right after Deng Xiaoping started the reform process. All you have to do is compare the China of that era and the China of today. It’s so startling. 

As for her embedded links:  Rubin’s URLs for the "widespread criticism" portion go to two different articles.  The first one is accurate, but, alas, Rubin only bats .500.  The "criticism" link goes to a paper by Jonathan Czin entitled "Dragon Slayer or Panda Hugger?  Chinese Perspectives on ‘Responsible Stakeholder’ Diplomacy."   Here’s Czin’s conclusion: 

Zoellick attempted to move U.S. thinking beyond the wholly inadequate dichotomous roles of friend and enemy to define the grey conceptual space that China occupies. To say that China is neither a friend nor an enemy of the United States is not only a truism; it has also become a cliché.  Neither China nor the United States wants to see China become part of a “hub and spokes” alliance system in East Asia. Yet the claim put forth by strategic thinkers such as John Mearsheimer that the changing material balance of power will inexorably and inevitably lead to Sino-American conflict is over-deterministic and threatens to engender a self-fulfilling prophecy. Moreover, it runs counter to the premise of U.S. China policy since Kissinger. Strategically, Zoellick’s “Third Way” offers the most reasonable and palatable option.

I do not think they anyone would characterize this as "criticism" of Zoellick’s policy formulation.  I read through the whole article, and couldn’t really find any criticism of the policy.  Between you, me and the lamppost, I suspect Rubin saw the "panda-hugger" headline and just put it in.  But I concede that’s pure speculation on my part. 

Look, this is tedious stuff, and I don’t like descending into the weeds all that much.  Still, if Rubin can’t correct her earlier screw-up without making yet another screw-up, doesn’t that suggest that something is seriously wrong here?  And don’t you, as her publishers, bear just a wee bit of responsibility for this kind of mendacity and laziness? 

Sincerely,

Daniel W. Drezner