While it is neither possible nor desirable to try to predict the outcome of Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s visit to China next week, it is reasonable to take the view that this may be a little more propitious time for him to open a dialogue with Chinese leaders than last October when he was originally scheduled to go there.
On the face of it, this is an untenable proposition. For, it can be argued that having established full diplomatic relations with the United States and launched the modernisation programme of unprecedented proportions with the assurance of Western and Japanese support, the Chinese leadership is much too self-assured to wish to and much too busy to be able to pay much attention to India.
There is considerable merit in this view. Indeed, at no time since the establishment of the present communist regime in Peking in 1949 has India figured particularly high in China’s list of diplomatic priorities. Not even in the early ‘fifties. The Chinese leaders have mostly thought of the world in bipolar terms, attached the utmost importance to their relations with the two super-powers and shaped their ties with other countries by and large on that basis.
Propaganda
In the early ‘fifties, for example, they responded to Mr Nehru’s overtures of friendship because they felt that this would help them cope to some extent with US hostility. Similarly, they began to be distrustful of this country in the latter half of the ‘fifties at least partly because Mr Khrushchev sought to win over Mr Nehru and the then Indian prime minister responded fairly enthusiastically to the Soviet leader. They have, in sheer propaganda terms, talked a great deal of the third world and their own membership of it. But in reality they have never worked out and pursued a reasonably consistent policy towards other developing countries which mostly happen to be non-communist. If they have, indeed, thought of themselves as leaders of the third world, it is truly extraordinary. For they have done precious little to justify their title to it.
The issue right now, however, is not India’s ranking in Chinese calculations if only because nothing has changed in that regard. The ranking has been low and remains low. The issue is whether or not Mr Vajpayee will find it a little easier to talk to Chinese leaders in Peking next week than he might have three months ago. My view is that he would and it is based on the larger assessment that with the establishment of full diplomatic relations with Washington, Peking has, as it were, played its trump card and might even be beginning to be aware that its leverage in international relations is rather limited.
This, too, would appear to be a rather odd assessment in view of the enthusiastic reception Mr Deng Xiaoping (Teng Hsiao-ping under the previous system of spelling) has been receiving in the United States. But Mr Deng himself is too shrewd a leader to miss the fact that US policy and opinion makers have been anxious to see to it that their welcome to him does not annoy the men in the Kremlin to the point where the latter retreat into their shell and withhold cooperation, especially in respect of the proposed agreement on limiting the development and deployment of new strategic weapons – SALT II.
It is not for us to say whether Mr Deng has in recent weeks been proposing a virtual military alliance with the United States and Japan because he is serious or whether he has been doing it because he calculates that this kind of talk is ideally suited to win him the West’s financial backing for the modernisation programme which, it is estimated, will involve an expenditure of between $ 350 billion and $ 800 billion, one-hall of it in foreign exchange, by the turn of the century. But we can say with a measure of confidence that the US policy makers have studied the proposal and come to the conclusion that they just cannot accept it without seriously jeopardising their country’s interests and aggravating tensions in various trouble spots in the world, which is what they do not wish to do and cannot afford to do.
This is not to suggest that the policy differences between the pragmatic US secretary of state, Mr Cyrus Vance, and more ideologically inclined national security adviser. Mr Zbigniew Brzezinski, have suddenly disappeared. That does not seem likely. But the differences have turned out to be more of emphasis than of approach. Perhaps this has always been the case. Perhaps the US media exaggerated the differences as is their wont. But whatever the truth in the past, in the present case it is reasonably clear that the adoption of a slightly tougher stance by the Kremlin in regard to the finalisation of the SALT IT agreement has sufficed to underscore the message for all top U.S. policy-makers, including Mr Brzezinski, that they cannot afford to ignore Soviet susceptibility. And implicit in it, it should hardly be necessary to point out, is the recognition that China’s virtual membership of NATO cannot compensate for the loss resulting from undue Soviet annoyance.
Realities
It is difficult to say whether or not some of the leading lights of the Carter administration, especially Mr Brzezinski and others of his persuasion, ever toyed with the idea of entering into a de facto anti-Soviet alliance with China. But it is self-evident that they could not have favoured such a course if they had pondered, as they must have, on the realities of the international situation.
It is often not realised that the cold war was the result at least as much of the then existing power balance as of East-West ideological competition. At the end of World War II, it may be recalled, the United States held the monopoly of the atomic bomb. With around six per cent of the world’s population it produced over 45 per cent of the world’s industrial goods. The dollar was all-powerful. The recovery of war-ravaged Western Europe and Japan was critically dependent on America’s bounty. While the Soviet Union could impose its will on Eastern and Central Europe in view of the presence of the Red Army in those countries, it did not have the capacity to project its power outside the framework of the communist movement which in turn had fallen foul with the nationalist sentiment in most countries.
In plain terms, it was not particularly difficult for the United States to “contain” the Soviet Union in the ‘fifties. Stalin himself had drawn the line and he was not willing to take any serious risk in an attempt to extend Soviet power beyond that line. But even then the United States could not implement Mr Dulles’s concept of rolling back the Soviet power. This was evident in 1956 when Mr Khrushchev sent tanks into Budapest and the West was content with feeble verbal protests.
Pertinent
More pertinently, as the Soviet Union first acquired the nuclear deterrent (in the ‘fifties) and then expanded its naval fleet (in the ‘sixties), the United States could not possibly think in the old cold war terms of containment. It had to come to terms, though doubtless in the context of continuing competition, with the fact of Soviet power. The Soviet Union, too, faced the obligation to deal with the US on practical basis as it emerged from Stalin’s policy of near isolation. This is what the policy of detente has been about for both of them.
If the cold war was a facet of Pax Americana – was not just an aspiration, it was a reality in view of the sweep of US power, economic. political and military -, it must inevitably follow that having lost the kind of overwhelming power it possessed in the ‘fifties and the early ‘sixties, it cannot revive the cold war, however much it might resent certain Soviet policies and successes, as currently in Africa.
It will be rash to conclude that the Chinese leadership is about to begin reconciling itself to the fact that the United States is not going to engage in a crusade against the Soviet Union. At the moment the chances appear to be that it will continue to do all in its power to whip up anti-Soviet feelings wherever it can. Though no one need be surprised if it turns out that there exists in the Chinese leadership a pro-Soviet faction which is biding its time, it cannot reveal its hand in the near future in view of the grave complications that have arisen in Peking’s relations with Hanoi over Kampuchea (Cambodia), Vietnam’s adherence to the Comecon and treaty of friendship with Moscow. China is, therefore, landed with an anti-Soviet stance for quite some time.
But when Mr Vajpayee meets the Chinese leaders in Peking next week, he need not be haunted by the fear that the United States and its West European and Japanese allies are likely to endorse Mr Deng Xiaoping’s repeated call for an anti-Soviet alliance. Indeed if he does not look for quick results and remains firm in his insistence that India does not and will not seek friendly ties with one country at the cost of those with another, he can he assured of a positive response from the Chinese in none too distant a future. They have no choice unless they wish to freeze relations with India at their present unsatisfactory level to no obvious advantage to themselves.
The Times of India 7 February 1979