with China -- at the cost of weakening U.S. relations with Japan.

One China policy

The administration has taken a further step toward dissociating the United States from Taiwan, announcing a "One China policy" that seems to endorse China's claim to Taiwan on Beijing terms.

Previous U.S. policy was to "acknowledge" that Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait saw Taiwan as part of China, while opposing the use of military force against Taiwan.

All of this follows from the conviction, held in all three administrations, that China will soon become the most important economic and political power in Asia.

Those who believe this hold that it is in the interest of the United States to defend good relations with China, even against bad behavior by the Chinese.

They will not admit thatChina in the future might continue to be economically dependent and politically weak, or that Japan will continue to be the great power of East Asia.

Pretense ended

The Nixon trip in 1972 abandoned Washington's ultimately unsustainable commitment to the pretense that the Chinese Nationalists in Taiwan were China's government. As it turned out, the Nationalists themselves were better off by being released from that claim.

They turned to modernizing Taiwan's society and economy, so that Taiwan today is not only a democracy, but an economic and trading power of greater international importance than mainland China itself.

However, that was the serendipitous result of U.S. policy that then, as today, holds to the illusion about China that says size plus population equals power.