The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (80 page)

This was hardly to say that Mao’s China had emerged as a full-fledged third superpower. Economically, it had enormous problems—which were exacerbated by its leader’s decision to initiate the “Cultural Revolution,” with all its accompanying discontinuities and uncertainties. And while it might boast the largest army in the world, its people’s militias were not likely to be a match for Soviet motor rifle divisions. China’s navy was negligible compared with the expanding Russian fleet; its air force, though large, chiefly consisted of older planes; and its nuclear-delivery system was but in its infancy. Nonetheless, unless the USSR was prepared to run the risk of provoking the Americans and offending world opinion by launching a massive nuclear attack upon China, any fighting
at a lesser level
could quickly produce enormous casualties—which the Chinese seemed willing to accept, but Russian politicians in the Brezhnev era were less keen about. It was therefore not surprising that as Russo-Chinese relations worsened, Moscow should not only have shown interest in nuclear-arms-limitation talks with the West but also have quickened the pace of improving relations with countries like the Federal Republic of Germany, which under Willy Brandt seemed much more willing to foster
detente
than in Adenauer’s days.

In the political and diplomatic arena, the Sino-Soviet split was even more embarrassing to the Kremlin. Although Khrushchev himself had been willing to tolerate “separate roads to socialism” (always provided those routes were not too divergent!), it was quite another thing for the USSR to be openly accused of having abandoned true Marxist principles; for its satellites and clients to be encouraged to throw off the Russian “yoke”; and for its diplomatic efforts in the Third World to be complicated by Peking’s rival aid and propaganda—the more especially since Mao’s brand of peasant-based Communism appeared often more appropriate than the Russian emphasis upon an industrial proletariat.
This did not mean that the Soviet Empire in eastern Europe was in any real danger of following the Chinese lead—only the eccentric regime in Albania did so.
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But it remained embarrassing to Moscow to be denounced by Peking for suppressing the Czech liberalization reforms in 1968, and again for its actions against Afghanistan in 1979. In the Third World, moreover, China was somewhat better placed to block Russian influence: it competed hard in North Yemen; it made much of its railway construction scheme in Tanzania; it criticized Moscow for failing to give sufficient support to the Vietminh and the Vietcong against the United States; and as it renewed relations with Japan, it warned Tokyo about a too-heavy economic collaboration with the Russians in Siberia. Once again, this was rarely an equal struggle—Russia could usually offer much more to Third World states in terms of credits and advanced arms, and could also project its influence by using Cuban and Libyan surrogates. But simply having to compete with a fellow Marxist state as well as with the United States was altogether more upsetting than the predictable, bipolar rivalries of two decades earlier.

In all sorts of ways, then, China’s assertive and independent line made diplomatic relationships more complicated and baroque, especially in Asia. The Chinese had been stung by Moscow’s wooing of India and even more by its dispatch of military supplies to New Delhi following Sino-Indian border clashes; not surprisingly, therefore, Peking gave support to Pakistan in its own clashes with India, and was strongly resentful of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. China was further alienated by Moscow’s support for North Vietnam’s expansion in the late 1970s, by the latter’s entry into Comecon, and by the increasing Russian naval presence in Vietnamese ports. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978, China engaged itself in bloody and not very successful border clashes with its southern neighbor, which was in turn being heavily supplied with Russian weapons. By this stage, Moscow was even looking more favorably toward the Taiwan regime, and Peking was urging the United States to increase its naval forces in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific, to counter the Russian squadrons. A mere twenty years after China was criticizing the USSR for being too soft toward the West, it was pressing NATO to increase its defenses and warning both Japan and the Common Market against strengthening economic ties with Russia!
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By comparison, the dislocations which occurred in the western camp from the early 1960s onward, caused chiefly by de Gaulle’s campaign against American hegemony, were nowhere near as serious in the long term—although they certainly added to the impression that the two blocs were breaking up. With strong memories of the Second World War still in mind, de Gaulle seethed at the fact that he was treated as less than equal by the United States; he resented American
policy during the Suez crisis in 1956, not to mention Dulles’s habit of threatening a nuclear conflagration over issues like Quemoy. Although de Gaulle had more than enough to keep him busy for several years after 1958 as he sought to extricate France from Algeria, even at that time he criticized western Europe’s subservience (as he saw it) to American interests. Like the British a decade earlier, he saw in nuclear weapons a chance to preserve Great Power status; when news of the first French atomic test of 1960 arrived, the general called out, “Hooray for France—since this morning she is stronger and prouder.”
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Determined to have France’s nuclear deterrent totally independent, he angrily rejected Washington’s offer of a Polaris missile system similar to Britain’s because of the conditions the Kennedy administration attached to it. While this meant that France’s own nuclear-weapons program would consume a far greater proportion of the total defense budget (perhaps as much as 30 percent) than it did elsewhere, de Gaulle and his successors felt the price was worth paying. At the same time, he began to pull France out of the NATO military structure, expelling that organization’s HQ from Paris in 1966 and closing down all American bases on French soil. In parallel with this, he sought to improve France’s relations with Moscow—where his actions were warmly applauded—and he ceaselessly proclaimed the need for Europe to stand on its own feet.
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De Gaulle’s spectacular actions did not rest merely on Gallic rhetoric and cultural pride. Boosted by Marshall Plan aid and other American grants, and benefiting from Europe’s general economic recovery after the late 1940s, the French economy had grown swiftly for almost two decades.
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The colonial wars in Indochina (1950–1954) and Algeria (1956–1962) diverted French resources for a while, but not irremediably. Having negotiated very favorable terms for its national interests at the time of the formation of the European Economic Community in 1957, France was able to benefit from this larger market while restructuring its own agriculture and modernizing its industry. Although critical of Washington and firmly preventing British entry into the EEC, de Gaulle effected a dramatic reconciliation with Adenauer’s Germany in 1963. And all the time he spoke of a need for Europe to stand on its own feet, to be free of superpower domination, to remember its glorious past and to cooperate—with France naturally showing the lead—in the pursuit of equally glorious destiny.
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These were heady words, but they evoked a response on
both
sides of the Iron Curtain, and appealed to many who disliked both the Russian and American political cultures, not to mention their respective foreign policies.

By 1968, however, de Gaulle’s own political career had been undermined by the students’ and workers’ revolt. The strains caused by modernization and the still relatively modest size of the French economy
(3.5 percent of world manufacturing production in 1963)
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meant that the country simply was not strong enough to play the influential role that the general had envisaged; and whatever the special agreements he proffered to the West Germans, the latter dared not abandon their tight links with the United States, upon which, in the final resort, Bonn politicians knew they heavily depended. Moreover, Russia’s ruthless crushing of the Czech reforms in 1968 showed that the eastern superpower had no intention of letting the countries in its sphere evolve their own policies, let alone become part of a French-led, European-wide confederation.

Nonetheless, for all his hubris, de Gaulle had symbolized and accelerated trends which could not be stopped. Despite their military weaknesses compared with the United States and the USSR, the armed forces of the western European states were much larger and stronger, relatively speaking, than they had been in the post-1945 years; two of them had nuclear weapons and were developing delivery systems. Economically, as will be discussed in more detail below, the “recovery of Europe” had succeeded splendidly. What was more, despite Russia’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the era of the Cold War division of Europe into hermetically sealed blocs was being weakened. Willy Brandt’s spectacular policy of reconciliation with Russia, with Poland and Czechoslovakia, and especially with the (at first very reluctant) East German regime between 1969 and 1973, chiefly on the basis of accepting the 1945 boundaries as permanent, inaugurated a period of blossoming East-West contacts. Western investments and technology flowed across the Iron Curtain, and this “economic
détente”
spilled over into cultural exchanges, the Helsinki Accords (of 1975) on human rights, and efforts to avert future military misunderstandings and to achieve mutual force reductions. To all this the superpowers, for their own good reasons, and with some inevitable reservations (especially on the Soviet side), gave their blessing. But perhaps the most significant fact had been the persistent pressures by the Europeans themselves to effect the
rapprochement;
even when relations cooled between Moscow and Washington, therefore, it was going to be extremely difficult in the future for either the USSR or the United States to halt this process.
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Of the two, the Americans were in a much better position than the Russians to adjust to the new, pluralistic international environment. Whatever de Gaulle’s anti-American gestures, they were nowhere near the seriousness of Sino-Soviet border clashes, elimination of bilateral trade, ideological invective, and diplomatic jostling across the globe which, by 1969, were causing some observers to argue that a Russo-Chinese war was inevitable.
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However much American administrations resented France’s actions, they hardly needed to redeploy their armed forces because of such quarrels. In any case, NATO was still
permitted to retain overflight rights and the fuel-oil pipeline which ran across France, and Paris kept up its special defense arrangements with West Germany—so that its troops, too, would be available if the Warsaw Pact forces struck westward. Finally, of course, it had been a fundamental axiom of American policy after 1945 that a strong and independent Europe (that is, independent from Russian domination) was in the United States’ long-term interests and would help to reduce its defense burdens—even while admitting that such a Europe might also be an economic and perhaps a diplomatic competitor. It was for that reason that Washington had encouraged all moves toward European integration, and was urging Britain to join the EEC. By contrast, Russia might begin not only to feel insecure militarily if a powerful European confederation emerged in the West, but also to worry about the magnetic pull which such a body would exercise upon the Rumanians, Poles, and other satellite peoples. A policy of selective
détente
and economic cooperation with western Europe by Moscow was one thing, partly because it could bring technological and trading benefits, partly because it might draw the Europeans further away from the Americans, and partly because of the China challenge on Russia’s Asian front. In the longer term, however, a prosperous, resurgent Europe which would overshadow the USSR in all respects except the military (and perhaps become strong in that area, too) could hardly be in Russia’s best interests.
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Yet if, in retrospect, the United States was better placed to adjust to the changing patterns of world power, that was not obvious for many years after 1960. In the first place, there was a chronic dislike of “Asian Communism,” with Mao’s China replacing Khrushchev’s Russia as the fomenter of world revolution in the eyes of many Americans. China’s border war of 1962 with India, a country which Washington (like Moscow) wished to woo, confirmed the earlier aggressive image emanating from the clashes over Quemoy and Matsu; and
détente
between the United States and China was hardly conceivable in the early 1960s, when Mao’s propaganda machine was denouncing the Russians for backing down over Cuba and for signing the limited nuclear-test-ban treaty with the West. Finally, between 1965 and 1968 China was in the convulsions of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which made the country appear chronically unstable as well as even more ideologically abhorrent to administrations in Washington. None of this pointed to “a situation in which much progress towards better relations with the United States was likely.”
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Above all, of course, the United States in these years was itself increasingly convulsed by the problems emerging from the war in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese, and the Vietcong in the South, appeared to most Americans as but new manifestations of the creeping Asian Communism which had to be forcibly contained before it did
even further damage; and since those revolutionary forces were being encouraged and supplied by China and Russia, both of the latter Powers (but perhaps especially the bitterly critical regime in Peking) could only be seen as part of a hostile Marxist coalition lined up against the “free world.” Indeed, as the Johnson administration escalated its own buildup in Vietnam, decision-makers in Washington frequently worried about how far they could go
without
provoking the sort of Chinese intervention which had occurred in the Korean War.
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From the Chinese government’s standpoint, it must have been a matter of earnest debate throughout the 1960s about whether the growing clash with the Soviets to the north was as ominous as the ever-escalating American military and aerial operations to the south. Yet while in fact its own relationship with the ethnically different Vietnamese had traditionally been one of rivalry, and it was deeply suspicious of the amount of military hardware which Russia was giving to Hanoi, these tensions were invisible to most western eyes throughout the period of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.