LOS ANGELES — An effective foreign policy requires proportionate thinking. Hysteria and demagoguery can win a few elections, but they can lose wars and economic battles of enormous consequence. In the United States, foreign policy is particularly complex: Even if the president and the executive branch get things right, the effort will be eviscerated if overly ambitious politicians in the legislative branch make a brutal hash of coherent policy.
Such is beginning to happen with the Sino-U.S. relationship. The "Made in China" safety scare is being fanned into a slash-and-burn conflagration by American politicians who either are happy to destroy what the Bush and Clinton administrations have managed to achieve in relations with Beijing or have no idea of what they are doing.
Some of the posturing in Washington could be viewed as comic if the stakes were not so serious. Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and others are actually calling for a ban on all toys exported from China to the U.S. "We have to do something in Washington to give confidence to consumers across America that when they go into the toy store, they aren't going to play Chinese roulette trying to figure out which toy they can safely buy for their child," Durbin said.