Upsetting the Balance of Terror
HUDSON, G. F.
THE GLOBAL TRIANGLE-1 Upsetting the Balance of Terror BY G. F. HUDSON WHEN in the summer of 1954 a British Labor party delegation headed by Clement Attlee paid a visit to Peking with a stopover in...
...What this means is that China no longer has a potential war front in the south...
...Yet even if the United States does not abandon Taiwan, the withdrawal from Vietnam has in itself eased the tension between America and Communist China, and must continue to do so as more and more troops are pulled out...
...The third is to wage a preventive war against China while Russia still has what is almost certainly a decisive, if steadily diminishing, margin of military superiority over China...
...With the U.S...
...The doves apparently have set their hopes on Chou En-lai as the man of reason who will take control when Mao dies or becomes senile, and who will discard Maoist truculence to seek a reconciliation with Russia...
...For years Chinese propaganda has been stressing the threats of U.S...
...It is open to question, moreover, whether even a Chou En-lai could reverse China's course to the extent of agreeing to what the Russians would want most in any settlement—the restriction of China's nuclear program...
...THE GLOBAL TRIANGLE-1 Upsetting the Balance of Terror BY G. F. HUDSON WHEN in the summer of 1954 a British Labor party delegation headed by Clement Attlee paid a visit to Peking with a stopover in Moscow, its members were surprised by a request from their Kremlin hosts that they not do anything in China which might harm Russo-Chinese relations...
...We are seeking good relations with the Soviet Union...
...This unexpected disclosure of Russian anxiety about China was made at a time when the Moscow-Peking alliance remained outwardly unimpaired...
...In short, the expectations of the doves may well be disappointed or too long delayed to provide a solution to a situation that is likely to deteriorate further if it is not remedied soon...
...the withdrawal of the pledged U.S...
...a more normal relationship with the People's Republic of China...
...The basic difference between America and Russia in relation to China is that America is able to disengage from Asia (or at least from continental Asia) while Russia cannot do so...
...As the prospect of a conventional war with the United States recedes, those forces can increasingly be transferred to the north...
...the incursion into Laos by purely South Vietnamese forces gave no cause for anxiety...
...To any observer of Chinese affairs, it must surely seem that President Nixon was being excessively optimistic when he told his press conference that the United States was "seeking . . . while maintaining our treaty commitments to Taiwan, in the UN unless Taiwan is ejected, and will refuse to enter into full diplomatic relations with the United States unless the defense treaty with Taiwan is abrogated...
...In any case...
...In other words, China is now able to move toward a one-front strategic position...
...As a continental military power in Europe, Russia has to maintain its main strength on its western front as backing for its diplomacy and to meet any contingencies that may arise (with an eye on the Middle East, too...
...It has been suspected by some observers that the war scares were designed more to rally the people behind the regime in a mood of patriotic fervor than to prepare for hostilities genuinely anticipated by the leadership, but the enormous diversion of scarce raw materials into the construction of air-raid shelters and underground installations indicated a state of mind going beyond mere make-believe...
...The move was highly successful, focusing the fullest possible publicity on the team's reception by "warm, gracious, friendly people...
...Although reports of policy dissensions in the Kremlin are always to be regarded with great caution, there is reason to believe that for some time—at least since the Damansky Island fighting of 1969—hawks and doves in Moscow have been arguing about China policy...
...Yet since the beginning of the political conflict with China and the development of the Chinese nuclear capability, Russia has had to divide her forces more and more between Europe and Asia...
...forces entered Cambodia last year), but of an invitation to an American table tennis team to come to Peking for red-carpet treatment...
...Equally, the continuing deadlock between Mao's China and America, with American protection of Taiwan and exclusion of Peking from the United Nations, has provided an assurance to the rulers of the Soviet Union that the U.S...
...But Russia is not...
...This is a strategic situation that must lead to a great decline in the Soviet Union's relative power as China becomes militarily stronger—fairly rapidly in nuclear capability and more gradually in conventional armaments...
...President Nixon is certainly aware of the unhappiness the signs of a Sino-American detente are likely to produce in Moscow, and of the undesirable consequences this could have...
...Today, with hindsight of more than a decade of open conflict between the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic, it can hardly be doubted that the recent welcome accorded by Chou En-lai in Peking to the American table tennis team was as disturbing to Moscow as the similar reception of guests from the Western world by the same Chou En-lai 16 years ago...
...imperialism and Soviet social imperialism to the People's Republic, and Peking seems to have taken each seriously...
...Consequently, somewhere along the line the American government will have to make a choice between THAT Chou En-lai is more interested in influencing American public opinion than in dealing with the U.S...
...The pressure to take the latter course will be very great because the Chinese People's Republic can exploit the prevalent pacifist-isolationist mood of American public opinion and work in the UN to build up a majority for Taiwan's expulsion, a development the United States would probably be unable to prevent...
...protection is essential to this end...
...That, of course, assumes the new turn in Peking-Washington relations will really lead to a detente, raising first of all the question of whether it will in fact do so...
...and China could not get together internationally no matter how bitter the Sino-Soviet quarrel might become...
...President Nixon would be under strong pressure in his reelection year to present the American people with a superficially successful solution of the problem of China at almost any price...
...The second is to persist in approximately the present policy of rivalry and opposition to China, both in international diplomacy and in the world Communist movement...
...ON THE MORROW of Peking's new initiative in relations with the United States, Russia has three options open to its policy makers...
...Given this prospect, there is a continuing possibility that Russia will engage China in the next two or three years in a game more serious than Ping-Pong...
...At an April 29 press conference, he declared, "There has been speculation to the effect that the purpose of our...
...As long as Peking has only a token nuclear capability Russia need not worry about China's strength in conventional forces, for in an armed conflict they could be blasted by a nuclear weaponry to which China would have no answer...
...The first is to seek a reconciliation with Peking even at a high price, outbidding the U.S...
...The probability is that Peking will refuse to take a seat maintaining its treaty commitments to Taiwan at the cost of further unpleasantness with Peking and appeasing Peking at the expense of Taiwan's independence...
...Indeed, passing through Ulan Bator, capital of the Mongol People's Republic, on the way from the one great center of world Communism to the other, the delegates were officially received in "a room dominated by colossal pictures of Stalin and Mao Tse-tung...
...There is no point at which the armed forces of the two countries are within sight of each other—in contrast to the Chinese confrontations with Soviet and Mongolian forces along 5,000 miles of land frontier...
...But by the start of this year Peking could not doubt that the Americans really were pulling out of Vietnam...
...government was indicated by his response to Nixon's tentative relaxations of American policy toward the People's Republic...
...The rift between Moscow and Peking has over the years dispelled U.S...
...With the beginning of the new "Ping-Pong diplomacy," though, Russia can have no such assurance...
...The American strategy of trying to fight a war in South Vietnam while accepting North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as privileged sanctuaries must have seemed too good to be true, and when last year Nixon at last did the obvious thing and ordered American troops into Cambodia, there appears to have been a moment of real alarm in Peking, because it was possible that these forces might move on northward through Laos, where they would directly threaten China itself...
...The ultimate aim of Peking's policy is to isolate Taiwan so that it can either be subdued by an armed invasion or forced into submission by the mere threat of overwhelming force...
...fear of a unified expanding world Communism and contributed to the diminution of cold-war politics between Moscow and Washington...
...It did not take the form of a resumption of conversations at the diplomatic level in Warsaw (suspended after U.S...
...There is very little ground for vague hopes that Peking will accept a Two Chinas formula, or that the governments in Peking and Taipei will somehow reach an agreement between themselves in free and voluntary negotiation...
...disengagement from Asia, the "low profile" and "hull down" policy of the Nixon Administration, there is less and less strategic strain between Communist China and America...
...But should China attain an effective nuclear striking power, then Russia will lose its strategic advantage...
...China has been making preparations for the contingency of war against either the United States or the Soviet Union or both together, and its forces have been deployed north and south...
...Following all that, the slow process of diplomatic bargaining could only be an anticlimax, and in the new climate of opinion a reminder of treaty obligations to Taiwan (or to South Korea) could only be like bringing in a sick man to a party where all the rest of the company are enjoying themselves...
...Paradoxically, the state of enmity between the Chinese People's Republic on the one hand and both America and Russia on the other has been conducive to world peace because neither America nor Russia have had to fear an alliance, or even an entente, between an isolated China and the other superpower...
...Since the "liberation" of Taiwan, that is to say, its incorporation in the People's Republic both de jure and de facto, is certainly the top priority for Peking's foreign (or, in Peking's own view, domestic) policy, it is difficult to see how there can be "normal" relations between Washington and Peking if American treaty commitments to Taiwan are maintained...
...One must ask, therefore, how the Kremlin is likely to react to a development in world affairs which would be, as Time has put it, "A Whole New Game...
...They may be right, but Mao may survive in possession of his mental faculties for several years yet, and the succession of Deputy Chairman Lin Piao to his authority has been written into the revised Constitution of the Chinese Communist party...
...Ever since massive ground forces were committed to Vietnam by President Johnson in 1965, Peking has had to take account of the possibility of an escalation that would bring the war to the southern frontier of China, as the war in Korea brought an American army to the Yalu in 1950...
...It will take more than words, however, to cancel the perception in Moscow that global power relations are bound to be affected in proportion to real progress in relaxation of tensions between "mainland" China and the United States...
...in concessions and favors...
...attempting to normalize our relations with mainland China is to some way irritate the Soviet Union...
...China's manpower, corresponding to a population more than three times that of the Soviet Union, must make its conventional forces ever more formidable as a growing industry equips them with heavier armaments than they now have...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 11
