The Kissinger Vision: Russia No, China Yes

...But it seems that an American containment policy would have "no Asian taker except perhaps Vietnam...

...This is puzzling...

...The list of catastrophic results arising from any attempt to contain China seems to be endless...

...His "triangular diplomacy" aimed chiefly at unsettling Soviet leaders and inducing them to accept d?tente and greater cooperation with the United States, especially in Vietnam...

...Clear-thinking defenders of American interests were right to reject Kissinger's policies in the 1970s...

...But how convincing is Kissinger's strategic judgment about China...

...Many conservatives, to be sure, shared a healthy skepticism of Gorbachev's intentions in the 1980s, but it was surprising to find the man who had once believed that Leonid Brezhnev was a leader with whom the United States could do business asserting that Ronald Reagan was being duped by the dangerous Gorbachev...

...America's "basically sound" nonproliferation policy, for instance, which has unsuccessfully aimed at halting Chinese weapons sales to Pakistan and Iran, has been "marred by insensitive implementation...

...Here is the thread that ties together Kissinger's seemingly inconsistent and often incomprehensible foreign policies during and after the Cold War- toward China, toward Brezhnev's Soviet Union, and toward Yeltsin's Russia...

...Even the cautious Bush administration rejected Kissinger's advice...

...These profound strategic transformations have been accompanied by an unprecedented political and ideological revolution within the former Soviet Union, where seven decades of communist dictatorship and centuries of Czarist dictatorship have been giving way to a struggling democracy...

...Kissinger, however, was still ready to make deals with the allegedly dangerous Soviet leader...

...Within the year the Berlin Wall fell, and Moscow was forced to let its empire go without any compensations from America...

...He vigorously denied that good relations with China "lost their significance" when the Soviet empire collapsed, arguing instead that "the opposite is true...

...interests from a rejuvenated, authoritarian China...

...They would be wise to reject his recommendations again in the 1990s...

...No, he recalls, "I was on the side of the Realpolitikers...

...Twenty-five years ago, Kissinger's case for playing the "China card" was based on the need to find some way to influence the behavior of the Soviet Union...

...Kissinger predicted his plan would secure peace in Europe by ensuring that "neither side could launch an attack . . . without months of preparation" and would provide "ample warning" to the potential victim of aggression...

...It is reckless," he says, "to play chicken with the fate of nations...

...His greatest fear is not that China's growing power may make it more ambitious, but that worsening U.S.-Chinese relations, for which he holds Washington largely responsible, may lead some Americans to favor a policy of "containment" against China...

...Two decades later he was far less concerned about the reduced needs of a much less threatening Russia...

...In another context, Kissinger portrays a China surrounded by powerful and assertive neighbors like Russia, India, and Japan...

...Never mind that the coup had failed and led to the independence of Ukraine, the Baltic republics, and the 10 other states on what had been Soviet territory...

...In refuting the case for containment, Kissinger's soothing picture of a benign, defensive China changes and becomes more ominous...

...When the revolution in the communist world turned this logic on its head after 1989, however, Kissinger changed his mind about the meaning of the U.S.-China relationship...

...Whatever the explanation for Kissinger's misallied policies toward Russia and China, those who now increasingly look to this elder statesman for wisdom on America's foreign policy should examine his past advice closely...

...Any attempt to contain China would succeed only in isolating the United States...

...But during the Cold War there was at least some logic in Kissinger's strategy of aligning with the weaker against the stronger and exploiting the schism between the world's two communist giants...

...The democratically elected Boris Yeltsin took charge of Russia and began the process of dismantling communist structures and instituting both political and economic reforms...

...Kissinger's idea that the end of communism might unleash a more virulent form of Russian expansionism was novel...

...The Realpolitiker who sees the danger of "relentless expansionism" in a prostrate Russia finds little threat to U.S...

...With the Soviet collapse fresh in their minds, Chinese leaders have sought to avoid the liberal path of perestroika ever since the crackdown in Tiananmen Square...

...It was no longer possible to imagine that a Russian perestroika would soon fuel a new burst of expansionism in foreign policy...

...Few contemporary statesmen could be more aware of the need to adapt to such change...

...China's growing power will not lead it to undertake a more "assertive" foreign policy, like, say, India, but only to a policy of "balancing" other aggressive nations...

...These in turn have fueled growing Chinese ambitions...

...China looks to the United States for help in balancing its relationships with its "powerful neighbors-Japan, Russia, and India-at least until it is strong enough to do so on its own...

...Perestroika, he predicted, might only mean "additional resources for expansionism and ideological challenges...

...Today, the danger is that in advocating an American strategy aimed only at aggressive containment of a badly weakened Russian Republic, Kissinger may leave us unready to cope with the emergence of a powerful and possibly more dangerous China...

...Russian nationalism might remain a potent force, and a more democratic government in Russia did not guarantee a peaceful foreign policy, but the prospects for a restrained Russia were likelier than ever...

...Kissinger took no comfort in the fall of the Berlin Wall...

...By 1993 the key issue was whether NATO should be expanded to include nations in Eastern Europe...

...If Americans cannot be persuaded to preserve close relations with China by any other arguments, Kissinger hopes they can be convinced by the simplest argument of all: fear...

...A burgeoning economy has brought China international influence and has paid for increases in military power...

...To make his case, Kissinger depicts China as almost entirely defensive and pacific in its policies, while all the countries around China are at least assertive and potentially aggressive...

...Kissinger has opposed efforts to impose sanctions against Beijing, "even on issues where I have agreed with the objectives," because "understanding" and "dialogue" are so "extraordinarily important" when dealing with the Chinese...

...After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, Kissinger declared such a system dangerously inadequate...

...In Kissinger's view, therefore, any notion of containing China is a "pipe dream" or, more accurately, a nightmare: Unaccountably, "America's ability to influence Japan would dramatically decline...

...A Russia driven out of Europe, Kissinger fears, "may resume a historic activism in Asia" of the kind that led to war with Japan in Manchuria in 1904...

...Russian leaders might try to cling to some vestiges of control in the territories of the former Soviet Union, through such devices as the Commonwealth of Independent States, but most observers agreed that the leaders of Russia's struggling democracy were far more likely to seek peaceful integration in a democratic West than had been Soviet communist leaders or Imperial Russian czars...

...George Kennan had pointed out in the late 1940s that in the "guise of international Marxism" Soviet foreign policy had become "more dangerous and insidious than ever before...

...Even as Gorbachev sued for peace, Kissinger sounded the alarm against what he warned could be a "projection of Soviet power" in a new drive for "hegemony" in both Europe and Asia...

...Close cooperation with Beijing was more necessary than ever...

...The Soviet empire in Eastern Europe has disappeared...

...Since the end of the Cold War, however, Kissinger's famed strategic flexibility has turned into strategic rigidity...

...It seems that China is really too dangerous, after all, and American power too limited for a strategy of containment to succeed...

...After all, "having the longest uninterrupted history in the world, the Chinese have been obliged to deal with many [foreign] idiosyncrasies...

...India, too, is emerging as a "great power," and Kissinger foresees that its foreign policy will, therefore, become "increasingly assertive" and may produce "potential conflicts with China in Tibet and Burma...

...The idea, Kissinger said, was to "align oneself with the weaker of two antagonistic partners, because this acted as a restraint on the stronger...

...Republicans once excoriated Kissinger for leading the country into a policy of d?tente, which it took more than a decade, hundreds of billions of dollars, and Ronald Reagan to undo...

...In September 1991 he insisted that "creating obstacles" to Russia's "relentless expansionism" was the key to world peace, and in the following year he warned that an insufficiently firm American policy could "rekindle the Russian Republic's historic tendencies toward domination...

...And, of course, there's Moscow...

...Japanese foreign policy will inevitably take "a more national turn," threatening to renew the struggles with China on the Asian mainland that plagued this century and the last...

...Americans are equally foolish to believe that U.S...

...Kissinger's suspicious view of Russia contrasts sharply with his approach to the world's last remaining communist giant...

...By 1992, the power wielded by Moscow was a small fraction of what it had been just three years earlier...

...What he had once considered a stabilizing "neutral belt" between the powerful Soviet Union and Western Europe Kissinger now portrayed as a "dangerous vacuum" which threatened to destroy "not only NATO cohesion but the very existence of NATO as a meaningful institution...

...Kissinger has consistently and incongruously argued in essays and op-ed pieces over the past eight years that Americans must beware of Russia's "relentless expansionism...

...that was the basis of Kissinger's own foreign policy in the Nixon and Ford years...

...Even before the Soviet Union's collapse he had argued that the end of communism could "increase . . . the threat of historic Russian expansionism...

...Perhaps if addressed in the proper tone, he suggests, the Chinese "can understand, even if they don't agree, that we should have certain moral preferences which need to be taken into account...

...Any such rejuvenation lay at least two decades in the future...

...He rejected the argument of the State Department's "Sinophiles" that good relations with China were an end in themselves...

...During the years of d?tente with Brezhnev's Soviet Union, Kissinger had always been acutely aware of the Soviet leadership's need for respect as a superpower, and he had granted that respect as part of his strategy for achieving coexistence...

...In retrospect, such a plan would also have relieved pressure on the Soviet Union at the moment of its greatest weakness...

...Kissinger points out, for instance, that the Chinese are sensitive about Taiwan because "the alienation of Taiwan was the first stage in the process by which Imperial Japan sought to dominate China...

...While the leadership in Moscow passively watched its control over the "power centers" in Central Europe unravel, Kissinger looked for signs of aggressive intent...

...In 1990, Kissinger had been prepared to see Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary as part of a "neutral belt," which he had insisted would provide adequate security against aggression by either the Soviet Union or Germany...

...Collapsing confidence in American leadership" would produce "the erosion of restraints," and "nations with hegemonial aspirations [like Russia, or India, or Japan?] . . . would sense new opportunities...

...And while Kissinger had many times over the years been prepared to make a deal with the Soviet Union on European security, he now warned that any such role for a much weaker Russia would grant it the "right to create a vacuum around its borders, preserving the option of historic Russian expansionism...

...He proposed the creation of a "neutral belt" of countries across Central Europe consisting of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia...

...But Kissinger, who had declared Gorbachev's Soviet Union more dangerous to American interests than Brezhnev's, was prepared to declare Yeltsin's Russia more dangerous still...

...On either side of this neutral zone, in the newly unified Germany and in the Soviet Union, Kissinger proposed strict limitations on armaments and troop levels...

...The failed coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 brought down the Communist party and set off the chain of events that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the 15 new independent states on its territory...

...What was once only a tactical alliance with China has become, in his eyes, a seemingly unchangeable pillar of American policy...

...He helped reverse two decades of intense ideological hostility between the United States and China as a way of strengthening America's hand in Cold War bargaining with the Soviet Union...

...But it goes without saying that America's "idiosyncratic" distaste for totalitarianism holds a low place in Kissinger's priorities in the case of China, just as it did in the case of Brezhnev's Soviet Union...

...He speculated that some "high-level Soviet officials" might hope that "discarding a failed ideology" would allow them to carry out "the historic Russian policy of crushing any power center within Moscow's reach...

...Korea would turn into a tinderbox...

...It is ironic that the man who had made d?tente the centerpiece of his foreign policy in the 1970s, who had decried as "myth" the idea of "an inexorable Soviet advance," and who had sought only "coexistence" with the Soviet Union at the height of its power, chose to inaugurate a harder line toward Moscow just as the Soviets, under Mikhail Gorbachev, began on their path of retreat and eventual surrender in the Cold War...

...the Soviet Union itself has broken into 15 newly independent republics...

...The Kissinger Vision: Russia No, China Yes By Robert Kagan Out of power for almost 20 years, Henry Kissinger still exercises considerable influence on American foreign policy, his opinions expressed privately in countless conversations with heads of state and foreign ministers and publicly in the monthly column he writes for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate...

...And while Kissinger's answer to Russia's wounded pride has been a more rigid policy of containment, he demands that special care be taken with Chinese sensitivities...

...Kissinger even claims that the United States and China have "parallel interests" because both oppose "the domination of Asia by a single hegemonic power...

...power and international influence can be used effectively against Beijing...

...He now moved into the camp of the Sinophiles himself and sought new reasons for Chinese-American friendship...

...The one Asian nation whose growing power does not worry Kissinger is China...

...As he tells the tale, China has few ambitions but many fears and insecurities that must be understood and addressed...

...The coup attempt against Gorbachev in 1991, he argued, had "revived the nightmare of resurgent Russian imperialism...

...and Russia's European border has shifted hundreds of miles eastward, farther from the heart of Europe than it has been for centuries...

...As for America's increasingly feeble requests that Chinese leaders relax their domestic repression since Tiananmen Square, Kissinger warns that such demands evoke "memories of a century of Western colonialism...

...While Russia suffers the travails of a transition to democracy, China moves from communist totalitarianism only to some other form of authoritarian dictatorship...

...Kissinger reminds his readers that China's "neuralgic" responses to "any perceived slight to its dignity" have often taken the form of armed attack- in the Korean war, for instance, or against Vietnam in the late 1970s...

...Even as the power and influence wielded by Moscow have plummeted since 1989, those wielded by Beijing have increased...

...Perhaps Kissinger's strategic design, in the 1970s as in the 1990s, has simply been a matter of appeasing the stronger and finding fine-sounding arguments to conceal the fact...

...China, he explains, "tends to react with neuralgia to any perceived slight to its dignity...

...And as Russia retreated further and further east, putting up no struggle against the unprecedented contraction of its national power, Kissinger continued to warn of "relentless Russian expansionism...

...He also inaugurated an era of d?tente with a powerful and aggressive Kremlin leadership...

...In exchange for allowing liberalization in Warsaw Pact regimes, Kissinger proposed that the United States grant the Soviet Union "security guarantees (widely defined)" in Eastern Europe...

...When the Russians objected to NATO's expansion, it seemed to Kissinger that their complaints indicated "a dogged insistence on Russia's own distinctive great power status...

...He denied that a post-communist Russia would conduct a less aggressive foreign policy...

...Even Republicans who shunned Kissinger in the late 1970s today look to him for guidance in a time of radical change...

...Were the United States to press ahead with warmer relations with Taiwan, to take one area of Chinese neuralgia, Kissinger declares that Beijing would "almost certainly prefer" to resist such a policy "by force than to be seen as acquiescing...

...As the Soviet empire has fallen and Russia become more democratic, and as China has grown stronger and more tyrannical, Henry Kissinger's approach to these two nations has been the reverse of what might be expected from a realist informed by Lord Palmerston's wisdom that a nation has no permanent allies or enemies, only permanent interests...

...Meanwhile, he urged the United States to accept the Soviet Union's "national frontiers" and avoid any appearance of exploiting tensions between Moscow and the republics...

...Their goal has been to make their country stronger, but, even more, to ensure that they will be the ones wielding its expanding power...

...Historians of Russian foreign policy never doubted that communist ideology, with its prophecy of global revolution, had intensified and broadened Moscow's aims in a way that far exceeded the earlier thrusts of "pan-Slavism" or the aspirations to build a "Third Rome...

...At the beginning of 1989, when keen observers could already see that the Soviet grip on the Eastern European satellites was slipping, Kissinger recommended an arrangement which would have reduced Soviet problems and fears, a plan some critics derided as "Yalta II...

...There is reason to question the success of triangular diplomacy and the benefits of d?tente in imposing "restraint" on the Soviets, since Soviet gains in the mid-to-late 1970s appeared to tilt the international balance against the United States, regardless of the China card...

...The new weakness of Russia and the restraint it imposed seemed to escape Kissinger's notice...

...Perhaps this can explain why he sought d?tente and accommodation with a strong Soviet Union but raised dire warnings about a vastly weakened Russia, or why he played the China card only as a tool when China was the "weaker of two antagonists" but sought greater accommodation of China's interests when its wealth and power grew...

...He apparently cannot imagine that a powerful China might itself aspire to "hegemony" in Asia...

...The Russian economy, moreover, plummeted in 1991 and continued to fall thereafter...

...State Department officials rightly asked why America should buy what history was giving us for free...

...And as communist China has become a permanent friend, the weakened Russian Republic has become a permanent enemy-more so than the far more powerful Soviet Union...

...Kissinger insisted that the "fate of the democracies of Eastern Europe" had to be "linked rapidly to that of the West" to protect them against Russian designs...

...Undaunted, Kissinger had another idea for preserving European security in cooperation with a Moscow he still considered powerful...

...He warns that it is most dangerous to believe that China's constant threats of armed action are mere bluff...

...Still not Russia's equal in overall military strength, China is clearly a nation on the rise just as Russia is a nation in retreat...