Because of its failure to win the war in Indochina, stabilise its military presence on the mainland of South-East Asia and establish a cordon sanitaire around China, the United States has been trying for some time to reshape its Asia policy. But it has set about the job in a manner that makes it certain that the new policy will turn out to be as frustrating for it and as disastrous for others as the one it has had to abandon under duress.
Once President Nixon and his top foreign policy advisers had realised that it was not possible to win the war in Viet Nam and not necessary to try to contain China by military means, the logical course for them would have been to draw up a timetable for the withdrawal of their troops, leaving it to the peoples of Indochina to work out a new pattern of relationship among themselves, and to begin mending their fences with Peking in a quiet way.
Instead they chose the opposite course in both cases. They extended the war to Cambodia after having secured the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk, rejected Hanoi’s repeated pleas for fixing a time-table for the withdrawal of their forces and stepped up the so-called Vietnamisation programme in the south. Similarly, instead of pursuing a quiet diplomacy with China, they chose high drama – a James Bond style visit by Mr. Kissinger to Peking leading to an invitation for President Nixon – to announce it to the world that they had revised their policy.
Absurd
There are not many people even in the United States who are prepared to endorse President Nixon’s Viet Nam policy. But they are still prepared to buy the officially inspired suggestions that during his forthcoming visit to Peking next month President Nixon will be able to persuade the Chinese leaders to exert pressure on Hanoi to compel it to adopt a more “reasonable” stance, whatever that might mean, at the Paris peace talks.
This proposition is so patently absurd that it is difficult to see how any sober person can swallow it. The Chinese may have some leverage in Hanoi because it depends on them for its food supplies. But they cannot ask it to be more “accommodating” towards US “imperialism” without exposing themselves to ridicule all over the third world. Hanoi is not likely to oblige them even if they do.
Since the North Viet Namese have proved again and again in the past decade that they decide their own policies it is incredible that anyone in the United States should delude himself into believing that the Chinese can force them to act against their will and best interests, particularly when almost all their military hardware comes from the Soviet Union and not China.
If President Nixon’s new approach towards China is popular in the United States and elsewhere it is largely because it is believed to mark a radical departure from the sterile policy of the past. Many people assume all too easily that it will make a valuable contribution to peace and stability in the region.
On a superficial view, President Nixon can surely be said to have made a break with the past. But a closer scrutiny shows that he is as obsessed as his mentor, Mr John Foster Dulles, with the supposed Soviet threat. His new China policy is in fact wholly consistent with the cold war psychology.
This will not, of course, constitute a serious criticism of the new policy from the US point of view if there was a reasonable chance of Washington securing Chinese cooperation in its efforts to contain the Soviet Union’s undoubtedly growing power and influence and if Peking was in a position to make a worthwhile contribution to the success of the US enterprise. But there is little evidence to sustain either of these beliefs.
No Secret
It is clear to all except those who take Peking propaganda at its face value that China is still militarily weak and economically backward and that it will be decades before it is in a position to project its power much beyond its frontiers. What is even more significant, it lacks a stable institutional and ideological framework and this makes for erratic changes in its policies.
It is no secret that before the cultural revolution many of Chairman Mao’s colleagues in the Politburo did not share his hostility towards the Soviet Union and advocated closer cooperation with it in the interest of the common struggle against US “imperialism.” In fact some of even those handpicked by him to constitute the new leadership after the cultural revolution were also so thoroughly opposed to his decision to invite President Nixon to Peking that they have had to be eliminated.
Chairman Mao is the chief architect – he may have been assisted in this by Mr. Chou En-lai – of China’s present policy of hostility towards the Soviet Union and of improving relations with the United States, and he has been able to push it through by adopting devious means and forging temporary alliances on altogether different issues. The US administration is wrong in assuming that the present policy will survive the ageing leader.
Chairman Mao has survived various challenges to his authority solely on the strength of his personal popularity and capacity to outmanoeuvre other Chinese leaders. He has not been able to create an institutional framework which can ensure that his policies will remain in force after he is gone or incapacitated. It will not be surprising indeed if after his departure the Chinese once again revert to the policy of friendly relations with the Soviet Union, specially because they have not been able to evolve a workable Chinese model of socialism and they may find it necessary to fall back on the Soviet model.
However, even if it is assumed for the sake of argument that China will somehow maintain its present anti-Soviet posture, it does not follow that Washington can cooperate with Peking on any significant scale unless it subordinates its interests to those of the latter as it did in the case of the recent Indo-Pakistani conflict. Whatever else the United States may achieve by doing so, it cannot counter Soviet power and influence.
The crux of the matter is that while America is a status quo power by virtue of its high stakes in peace and stability, China cannot afford to give up its revolutionary stance, however ineffectual it may be in practice, for the simple reason that it has little else to offer in the competition with the Soviet Union. In this context it may be useful to recall that having fathered the concept of peaceful co-existence between States irrespective of ideological differences in the ‘fifties, the Chinese opposed Soviet assistance to “bourgeois” governments at least partly because they found that it undercut their own position in the countries concerned.
The West Asian conflict illustrates the incompatibility between the US and Chinese policies and interests. Both want to undermine Soviet influence in the region. But while Washington wishes to do so by arranging an interim settlement between Tel Aviv and Cairo on the one hand and by strengthening the monarchist regimes on the other, Peking has raised the question of the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in Israel not because it regards that as a practical proposition but because it feels that this is the best way to block any settlement and thus keep the region in turmoil. China will not work for peace and stability in the region because it cannot then compete with the other powers for influence.
Temptation
The American people, as Mr. Nixon himself said recently, love the spectacular. Some have even compared his going to China to landing on the moon. Even the more sophisticated among them cannot resist the temptation to simplify complex issues. They have neither got over the cold war psychosis nor fully grasped the fact that the world has ceased to be bipolar, if it ever was one, and become multipolar.
It is therefore more than likely that the US will not discard the present policy for some time even if Mr. Nixon loses at the polls next November. To be realistic American policy-makers will have to think in terms of not one overall power balance but of different power balances – between Russia and China in Central Asia, between China and Japan in the Far East, between China and India in South Asia and so on. The present policy has already led them into a grotesque hostility towards India. They will get into worse mess if they persist in it. The obsession with China cannot produce a sane policy whether the intention is to befriend it or “contain” it.
The Times of India 12 January 1972