First Steps—Clashes at the Ussuri River
Though reconciliation was the eventual result, it was not easy for the United States and China to find their way to a strategic dialogue. Nixon’s article in
Foreign Affairs
and the study by the four marshals for Mao had produced parallel conclusions, but the actual movement of the two sides was inhibited by domestic complexities, historical experience, and cultural perceptions. The publics on both sides had been exposed to two decades of hostility and suspicion; they had to be prepared for a diplomatic revolution.
Nixon’s tactical problem was more complicated than Mao’s. Once Mao had made a decision, he was in a position to implement it ruthlessly. And opponents would remember the fate of Mao’s previous critics. But Nixon had to overcome a legacy of twenty years of American foreign policy based on the assumption that China would use every opportunity to weaken the United States and to expel it from Asia. By the time he entered the White House, this view had congealed into established doctrine.
Nixon therefore had to tread carefully lest China’s diplomatic overtures turn out to be propaganda with no serious change of approach in Beijing. That was a distinct possibility given that the only point of contact Americans had had with the Chinese in twenty years had been the ambassadorial talks in Warsaw, whose 136 meetings were distinctive only for their monotonously sterile rhythm. Two dozen members of Congress had to be briefed on every step, and new approaches were bound to be lost in the conflicting pressures of briefings of some fifteen countries, which were being kept informed about the Warsaw talks and included Taiwan—still recognized by most of them, and especially the United States, as the legitimate government of China.
Nixon’s general design was turned into an opportunity as a result of a clash between Soviet and Chinese forces on Zhenbao (or Damansky) Island in the Ussuri River, where Siberia abuts the Chinese frontier. The clash might not have attracted the White House’s attention so quickly had the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, not come to my office repeatedly to brief me on the Soviet version of what had happened. It was unheard of in that cold period of the Cold War for the Soviet Union to brief us on an event so remote from our usual dialogue—or on any event for that matter. We drew the conclusion that the Soviet Union was the probable aggressor and that the briefing, less than a year after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, hid a larger design. This suspicion was confirmed by a study on the border clashes by Allen Whiting of the RAND Corporation. Whiting concluded that because the incidents took place close to Soviet supply bases and far from Chinese ones, the Soviets were the probable aggressors, and that the next step might well be an attack on China’s nuclear facilities. If a Sino-Soviet war was imminent, some American governmental position needed to be developed. In my capacity as National Security Advisor, I ordered an interdepartmental review.
As it turned out, the analysis of the immediate causes of the clashes was mistaken, at least regarding the Zhenbao incident. It was a case of mistaken analysis leading to a correct judgment. Recent historical studies have revealed that the Zhenbao incident had in fact been initiated by the Chinese as Dobrynin claimed; they had laid a trap in which a Soviet border patrol suffered heavy casualties.
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But the Chinese purpose was defensive, in keeping with the Chinese concept of deterrence described in the previous chapter. The Chinese planned the particular incident to shock the Soviet leadership into putting an end to a series of clashes along the border, probably initiated by the Soviets, and which in Beijing were treated as Soviet harassment. The offensive deterrence concept involves the use of a preemptive strategy not so much to defeat the adversary militarily as to deal him a psychological blow to cause him to desist.
The Chinese action in fact had the opposite effect. The Soviets stepped up harassment all along the frontier, resulting in the wiping out of a Chinese battalion at the Xinjiang border. In this atmosphere, beginning in the summer of 1969, the United States and China began to exchange deniable signals. The United States eased some minor trade restrictions with China. Zhou Enlai released two American yachtsmen who had been detained since straying into Chinese waters.
During the summer of 1969, the signals of a possible war between China and the Soviet Union multiplied. Soviet troops along the Chinese border grew to some forty-two divisions—over a million men. Middle-level Soviet officials began to inquire of acquaintances at comparable levels around the world how their governments would react to a Soviet preemptive attack on Chinese nuclear installations.
These developments caused the United States government to speed up its consideration of a potential large-scale Soviet attack on China. The very query ran counter to the experience of those who had conducted Cold War foreign policy. For a generation, China had been viewed as the more bellicose of the two Communist giants. That the United States might take sides in a war between them had never been considered; the fact that Chinese policymakers compulsively studied America’s likely attitudes demonstrated the extent to which long isolation had dulled their understanding of the American decision-making process.
But Nixon was determined to define policy by geopolitical considerations, and in these terms, any fundamental change in the balance of power had to evoke at least an American attitude, and, if significant, a policy. Even if we decided to stay aloof, it should be by conscious decision, not by default. At a National Security Council meeting in August 1969, Nixon chose an attitude, if not yet a policy. He put forward the then shocking thesis that, in the existing circumstances, the Soviet Union was the more dangerous party and that it would be against American interests if China were “smashed” in a China-Soviet war.
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What this meant practically was not discussed then. What it should have implied for anyone familiar with Nixon’s thinking was that, on the issue of China, geopolitics trumped other considerations. In pursuit of this policy, I issued a directive that in case of conflict between the Soviet Union and China the United States would adopt a posture of neutrality but within that framework tilt to the greatest extent possible toward China.
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It was a revolutionary moment in U.S. foreign policy: an American President declared that we had a strategic interest in the survival of a major Communist country with which we had had no meaningful contact for twenty years and against which we had fought a war and engaged in two military confrontations. How to communicate this decision? The Warsaw ambassadorial talks had not been convened for months and would have been too low-level to present a view of such magnitude. The administration therefore decided to go to the other extreme and go public with the American decision to view a conflict between the two Communist giants as a matter affecting the American national interest.
Amidst a drumbeat of bellicose Soviet statements in various forums threatening war, American officials were instructed to convey that the United States was not indifferent and would not be passive. Central Intelligence Agency Director Richard Helms was asked to give a background briefing in which he disclosed that Soviet officials seemed to be sounding out other Communist leaders about their attitude toward a preemptive attack on Chinese nuclear installations. On September 5, 1969, Undersecretary of State Elliot Richardson became explicit in a speech to the American Political Science Association: “Ideological differences between the two Communist giants are not our affair. We could not fail to be deeply concerned, however, with an escalation of this quarrel into a massive breach of international peace and security.”
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In the code of the Cold War, Richardson’s statement warned that, whatever course the United States adopted, it would not be indifference; that it would act according to its strategic interests.
When these measures were being designed, the principal goal was to create a psychological framework for an opening to China. Having since seen many documents published by the main parties, I now lean toward the view that the Soviet Union was much closer to a preemptive attack than we realized and that uncertainty about American reactions proved to be a principal reason for postponing that project. It is now clear for example that in October 1969 Mao thought an attack so imminent that he ordered all leaders (except Zhou, needed to run the government) to disperse across the country and to alert China’s nuclear forces, tiny as they were then.
Whether as a result of American warnings or of the Communist world’s own inner dynamics, the tensions between the two Communist giants eased over the course of the year, and the immediate threat of war diminished. Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin, who had flown to Hanoi for Ho Chi Minh’s funeral in September via India rather than China—a much longer route—suddenly altered his return trip while en route and turned his plane toward Beijing, the kind of dramatic action countries take when they want either to issue an ultimatum or to usher in a new phase. Neither happened or, depending on one’s perspective, both did. Kosygin and Zhou met for three hours at the Beijing airport—hardly a warm welcome for the prime minister of a country that was still technically an ally. Zhou Enlai produced a draft understanding providing for mutual withdrawals at contested positions on the northern frontier and other measures to ease tensions. The document was supposed to be co-signed on Kosygin’s return to Moscow. It did not happen. Tensions reached a high point in October when Mao ordered China’s top leadership to evacuate Beijing and Defense Minister Lin Biao placed the military on “first-degree combat readiness” alert.
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Space was thereby created for the unfolding of Sino-American contacts. Each side leaned over backward to avoid being perceived as having made the first public move—the United States because it had no forum to translate the presidential strategy into a formal position, China because it did not want to show weakness in the face of threats. The result was a minuet so intricate that both sides could always claim that they were not in contact, so stylized that neither country needed to bear the onus of an initiative that might be rejected, and so elliptical that existing political relations could be continued without the need for consultation on a script that had yet to be written. Between November 1969 and February 1970, there were at least ten occasions when American and Chinese diplomats in various capitals around the world had exchanged words—an event remarkable primarily because, before then, the diplomats had always avoided each other. The deadlock was broken when we ordered Walter Stoessel, the U.S. ambassador in Warsaw, to approach Chinese diplomats at the next social function and express the desire for a dialogue.
The setting for this encounter was a Yugoslav fashion show in the Polish capital. The Chinese diplomats in attendance, who were without instructions, fled the scene. The Chinese attaché’s account of the incident shows how constrained relations had become. Interviewed years later, he recalled seeing two Americans talking and pointing at the Chinese contingent from across the room; this prompted the Chinese to stand up and leave, lest they be drawn into conversation. The Americans, determined to carry out their instructions, followed the Chinese. When the desperate Chinese diplomats speeded up, the Americans started running after them, shouting in Polish (the only mutually intelligible language available), “We are from American embassy. We want to meet your ambassador . . . President Nixon said he wanted to resume his talk with Chinese.”
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Two weeks later, the Chinese ambassador in Warsaw invited Stoessel to a meeting at the Chinese Embassy, to prepare for a resumption of the Warsaw talks. Reopening the forum inevitably raised the fundamental issues. What were the two sides going to talk about? And to what end?
This brought into the open the differences in negotiating tactics and style between the Chinese and American leadership—at least with the American diplomatic establishment that had supervised the Warsaw talks through over a hundred abortive meetings. The differences had been obscured so long as both sides believed deadlock served their purposes: the Chinese would demand the return of Taiwan to Chinese sovereignty; the Americans would propose a renunciation of force over what was presented as a dispute between two Chinese parties.
Now that both sides sought progress, the difference in negotiating style became important. Chinese negotiators use diplomacy to weave together political, military, and psychological elements into an overall strategic design. Diplomacy to them is the elaboration of a strategic principle. They ascribe no particular significance to the process of negotiation as such; nor do they consider the opening of a particular negotiation a transformational event. They do not think that personal relations can affect their judgments, though they may invoke personal ties to facilitate their own efforts. They have no emotional difficulty with deadlocks; they consider them the inevitable mechanism of diplomacy. They prize gestures of goodwill only if they serve a definable objective or tactic. And they patiently take the long view against impatient interlocutors, making time their ally.
The attitude of the American diplomat varies substantially. The prevalent view within the American body politic sees military force and diplomacy as distinct, in essence separate, phases of action. Military action is viewed as occasionally creating the conditions for negotiations, but once negotiations begin, they are seen as being propelled by their own internal logic. This is why, at the start of negotiations, the United States reduced military operations in Korea and agreed to a bombing halt in Vietnam, in each case substituting reassurance for pressure and reducing material incentives on behalf of intangible ones. American diplomacy generally prefers the specific over the general, the practical over the abstract. It is urged to be “flexible”; it feels an obligation to break deadlocks with new proposals—unintentionally inviting new deadlocks to elicit new proposals. These tactics often can be used by determined adversaries in the service of a strategy of procrastination.