Sebastian Mallaby joined the Washington Post editorial page in 1999 after 13 years with The Economist magazine, and is the author of The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (Penguin Press 2004).
In this fine piece regarding the China National Offshore Oil Corp.’s hostile takeover bid for Unocal (previous posts here and here), Mr. Mallaby points out that it’s usually a bad idea to prevent a foreign company from overpaying for an American company:

Does it matter if China owns U.S. companies? Japan went on a corporate spending spree in the 1980s, and the chief victims were not Americans, as the protectionists predicted, but the Japanese themselves. The Japanese paid inflated prices for Hollywood studios and landmark New York buildings. The exiting American owners made off with a nice profit. The Japanese got burned.
The Unocal bid has triggered the same muddled complaining that attended those Japanese takeovers. The protectionists say the Chinese want to pay for Unocal with cheap loans from their taxpayers, just as Japanese corporations were once denounced for accessing cheap capital from servile banks. But this means that China’s taxpayers are offering sure profits to Unocal’s shareholders. Admittedly, it also means that Chevron’s shareholders stand to forgo a business opportunity, but then that opportunity may not have paid off. From the view of U.S. economic interests, this is a net plus.

Read the entire piece, and also contemplate Exxon CEO Lee Raymond’s thoughts on Chevron’s earlier bid for Unocal:

Q: What do you think of ChevronTexaco’s decision to acquire Unocal?
Mr. Raymond: I can never remember an industry consolidating at high prices. But I can remember an industry consolidating at low prices.
Q: Some people think prices will keep going up.
Mr. Raymond: Maybe. I’ll bet they’ll be lower at some point.

Finally, in pointing out that trade restrictions against China make little sense, Lawrence Kudlow notes in this Washington Times op-ed:

If a store is selling quality products at low prices, why would anyone want to shut it down?

By the way, courtesy of John Wagner, Mark Palmer — who was Enron’s head public relations spokesperson as the company slid toward bankruptcy — is CNOOC’s public relations point person in its bid for Unocal.