During my secret trip to Beijing in 1971, Zhou explained China’s objectives in Indochina as being neither strategic nor ideological. According to Zhou, Chinese policy in Indochina was based entirely on a historical debt incurred by ancient dynasties. China’s leaders probably assumed that America could not be defeated and that the north of a divided Vietnam would come to depend on Chinese support much as North Korea did after the end of the Korean War.

  As the war evolved, there were several signs that China was preparing itself—albeit reluctantly—for Hanoi’s victory. Intelligence noticed Chinese road building in northern Laos that had no relevance to the ongoing conflict with the United States but would be useful for postwar strategy to balance Hanoi or even a possible conflict over Laos. In 1973, after the Paris Agreement to end the Vietnam War, Zhou and I were negotiating a postwar settlement for Cambodia based on a coalition among Norodom Sihanouk (the exiled former ruler of Cambodia residing in Beijing), the existing Phnom Penh government, and the Khmer Rouge. Its main purpose was to create an obstacle to a takeover of Indochina by Hanoi. The agreement ultimately aborted when the U.S. Congress in effect prohibited any further military role for America in the region, making the American role irrelevant.5

  Hanoi’s latent hostility to its then ally was brought home to me on a visit to Hanoi in February 1973 designed to work out the implementation of the Paris Agreement, which had been initialed two weeks earlier. Le Duc Tho took me on a visit to Hanoi’s national museum primarily to show me the sections devoted to Vietnam’s historic struggles against China—still formally an ally of Vietnam.

  With the fall of Saigon in 1975, the inherent and historic rivalries burst into the open, leading to a victory of geopolitics over ideology. It proved that the United States was not alone in wrongly assessing the significance of the Vietnam War. When the United States had first intervened, China viewed it as a kind of last gasp of imperialism. It had—almost routinely—cast its lot with Hanoi. It interpreted the American intervention as another step toward the encirclement of China—much as it had viewed the U.S. intervention in Korea a decade earlier.

  Ironically, from a geopolitical point of view, Beijing’s and Washington’s long-term interests should have been parallel. Both should have preferred the status quo, which was an Indochina divided among four states. Washington resisted Hanoi’s domination of Indochina because of the Wilsonian idea of global order—the right of self-determination of existing states—and the notion of a global Communist conspiracy. Beijing had the same general objective, but from the geopolitical point of view, because it wanted to avoid the emergence of a Southeast Asia bloc on its southern border.

  For a while, Beijing seemed to believe that Communist ideology would trump a thousand-year history of Vietnamese opposition to Chinese predominance. Or else it did not think it possible that the United States could be brought to total defeat. In the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, Beijing was obliged to face the implications of its own policy. And it recoiled before them. The outcome in Indochina merged with the permanent Chinese fear of encirclement. Preventing an Indochina bloc linked to the Soviet Union became the dominant preoccupation of Chinese foreign policy under Deng and a link to increased cooperation with the United States. Hanoi, Beijing, Moscow, and Washington were playing a quadripartite game of wei qi. Events in Cambodia and in Vietnam would determine who would wind up surrounded and neutralized: Beijing or Hanoi.

  Beijing’s nightmare of encirclement by a hostile power appeared to be coming true. Vietnam alone was formidable enough. But if it realized its aim of an Indochinese Federation, it would approach a bloc of 100 million in population and be in a position to bring significant pressure on Thailand and other Southeast Asian states. In this context, the independence of Cambodia as a counterweight to Hanoi became a principal Chinese objective. As early as August 1975—three months after the fall of Saigon—Deng Xiaoping told the visiting Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan: “[W]hen one superpower [the United States] was compelled to withdraw its forces from Indochina, the other superpower [the Soviet Union] seized the opportunity . . . to extend its evil tentacles to Southeast Asia . . . in an attempt to carry out expansion there.”6 Cambodia and China, Deng said, “both . . . face the task of combating imperialism and hegemonies. . . . We firmly believe that . . . our two peoples will unite even more closely and march together towards new victories in the common struggle.”7 During a March 1976 visit of Lao Prime Minister Kaysone Phomvihane to Beijing, Hua Guofeng, then Premier, warned of the Soviet Union to the effect that: “In particular, the superpower that hawks ‘détente’ while extending its grabbing claws everywhere is stepping up its armed expansion and war preparations and attempting to bring more countries into its sphere of influence and play the hegemonic overlord.”8

  Freed from the necessity of feigning Communist solidarity in the face of the American “imperialist” threat, the adversaries moved into open opposition to each other soon after the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Within six months of the fall of all of Indochina, 150,000 Vietnamese were forced to leave Cambodia. A comparable number of ethnically Chinese Vietnamese citizens were obliged to flee Vietnam. By February 1976, China ended its aid program to Vietnam, and a year later, it cut off any deliveries based on existing programs. Concurrently, Hanoi moved toward the Soviet Union. At a meeting of the Vietnamese Politburo in June 1978, China was identified as Vietnam’s “principal enemy.” The same month, Vietnam joined Comecon, the Soviet-led trade bloc. In November 1978, the Soviet Union and Vietnam signed the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, which contained military clauses. In December 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge and installing a pro-Vietnamese government.

  Ideology had disappeared from the conflict. The Communist power centers were conducting a balance-of-power contest based not on ideology but on national interest.

  Viewed from Beijing, a strategic nightmare was evolving along China’s borders. In the north, the Soviet buildup continued unabated: Moscow still maintained nearly fifty divisions along the border. To China’s west, Afghanistan had undergone a Marxist coup and was subjected to increasingly overt Soviet influence.9 Beijing also saw Moscow’s hand in the Iranian revolution, which culminated with the flight of the Shah on January 16, 1979. Moscow continued to push an Asian collective security system with no other plausible purpose than to contain China. Meanwhile, Moscow was negotiating the SALT II treaty with Washington. In Beijing’s perception, such agreements served to “push the ill waters of the Soviet Union eastward” toward China. China seemed to be in an exceptionally vulnerable position. Now Vietnam had joined the Soviet camp. The “unforeseeable outcomes” predicted by Pham Van Dong to Zhou in 1968 appeared to include Soviet encirclement of China. An additional complication was that all these challenges occurred while Deng was still consolidating his position in his second return to power—a process not completed until 1980.

  A principal difference between Chinese and Western diplomatic strategy is the reaction to perceived vulnerability. American and Western diplomats conclude that they should move carefully to avoid provocation; Chinese response is more likely to magnify defiance. Western diplomats tend to conclude from an unfavorable balance of forces an imperative for a diplomatic solution; they urge diplomatic initiatives to place the other side in the “wrong” to isolate it morally but to desist from the use of force—this was essentially the American advice to Deng after Vietnam invaded Cambodia and occupied it. Chinese strategists are more likely to increase their commitment to substitute courage and psychological pressure against the material advantage of the adversary. They believe in deterrence in the form of preemption. When Chinese planners conclude that their opponent is gaining unacceptable advantage and that the strategic trend is turning against them, they respond by seeking to undermine the enemy’s confidence and allow China to reclaim the psychological, if not material, upper hand.

  Faced with a threat on all fronts, Deng decided to go on the diplomatic and strategic offensive. Though not yet in complete control in Beijing, he moved daringly on several levels abroad. He changed the Chinese position toward the Soviet Union from containment to explicit strategic hostility and, in effect, to roll-back. China would no longer confine itself to advising the United States on how to contain the Soviet Union; it would now play an active role in constructing an anti-Soviet and anti-Vietnam coalition, especially in Asia. It would put the pieces in place for a possible showdown with Hanoi.

  Deng’s Foreign Policy—Dialogue with America and Normalization

  When Deng returned from his second exile in 1977, he reversed Mao’s domestic policy but left Mao’s foreign policy largely in place. This was because both shared strong national feelings and had parallel views of the Chinese national interest. It was also because foreign policy had set more absolute limits to Mao’s revolutionary impulses than domestic policy.

  There was, however, a significant difference in style between Mao’s criticism and Deng’s. Mao had questioned the strategic intentions of America’s Soviet policy. Deng assumed an identity of strategic interests and concentrated on achieving a parallel implementation. Mao dealt with the Soviet Union as a kind of abstract strategic threat whose menace was no more applicable to China than to the rest of the world. Deng recognized the special danger to China, especially an immediate threat at China’s southern border compounding a latent threat in the north. Dialogue therefore took on a more operational character. Mao acted like a frustrated teacher, Deng as a demanding partner.

  In the face of actual peril, Deng ended the ambivalence about the American relationship of Mao’s last year. There was no longer any Chinese nostalgia for opportunities on behalf of world revolution. Deng, in all conversations after his return, argued that, in resisting the thrust of Soviet policy toward Europe, China and Japan needed to be brought into a global design.

  However close the consultation had become between China and the United States, the anomaly continued that America still formally recognized Taiwan as the legitimate government of China and Taipei as the capital of China. China’s adversaries along its northern and southern borders might misconstrue the absence of recognition as an opportunity.

  Normalization of relations moved to the top of the Sino-American agenda as Jimmy Carter took office. The first visit to Beijing of the new Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, in August 1977 did not turn out well. “I left Washington,” he wrote in his memoirs,

  believing it would be unwise to take on an issue as politically controversial as normalization with China until the Panama issue [referring to the ratification of the Panama Canal treaty turning over operation of the canal] was out of the way, unless—and I did not expect it to happen—the Chinese were to accept our proposal across the board. For political reasons, I intended to represent a maximum position to the Chinese on the Taiwan issue. . . . Accordingly, I did not expect the Chinese to accept our proposal, but I felt it wise to make it, even though we might eventually have to abandon it.10

  The American proposal on Taiwan contained a series of ideas involving retention of some limited American diplomatic presence on Taiwan that had been put forward and rejected during the Ford administration. The proposals were rejected again by Deng, who called them a step backward. A year later, the internal American debate ended when President Carter decided to assign high priority to the relationship with China. Soviet pressures in Africa and the Middle East convinced the new President to opt for rapid normalization with China, by what amounted to the quest for a de facto strategic alliance with China. On May 17, 1978, Carter sent his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Beijing with these instructions:

  You should stress that I see the Soviet Union as essentially in a competitive relationship with the United States, though there are also some cooperative aspects. . . .

  To state it most succinctly, my concern is that the combination of increasing Soviet military power and political shortsightedness, fed by big-power ambitions, might tempt the Soviet Union both to exploit local turbulence (especially in the Third World) and to intimidate our friends in order to seek political advantage and eventually even political preponderance. 11

  Brzezinski was also authorized to reaffirm the five principles enunciated by Nixon to Zhou in 1972.12 Long a strong advocate of strategic cooperation with China, Brzezinski carried out his instructions with enthusiasm and skill. When he visited Beijing in May 1978 in pursuit of normalizing relations, Brzezinski found a receptive audience. Deng was eager to proceed with normalization to enlist Washington more firmly in a coalition to oppose, by means of what he called “real, solid, down-to-earth work,”13 Soviet advances in every corner of the globe.

  The Chinese leaders were deeply aware of the strategic dangers surrounding them; but they presented their analysis less as a national concern than as a broader view of global conditions. “Turmoil under heaven,” the “horizontal line,” the “Three Worlds”: all represented general theories of international relations, not distinct national perceptions.

  Foreign Minister Huang Hua’s analysis of the international situation displayed a remarkable self-confidence. Rather than appearing as a supplicant in what was, after all, a very difficult situation for China, Huang struck the attitude of a Confucian teacher, lecturing on how to conduct a comprehensive foreign policy. He opened with a general assessment of the “contradictions” between the two superpowers, the futility of negotiations with the Soviet Union, and the inevitability of a world war:

  [T]he Soviet Union is the most dangerous source of war. Your excellency has mentioned that the Soviet Union is confronted with many difficulties. That is true. To strive for world hegemony is the fixed strategic goal of Soviet socialist imperialism. Although it may suffer a lot of setbacks, it will never give up its ambition.14

  Huang raised concerns that also bothered American students of strategy—especially those which tried to relate nuclear weapons to traditional ways of thinking about strategy. Reliance on nuclear weapons would open up a gap between deterrent threats and the willingness to implement them: “As for the argument that the Soviet Union would not dare to use conventional arms for fear of nuclear attack from the West, this is only wishful thinking. To base a strategic stance on this thinking is not only dangerous but also unreliable.”15

  In the Middle East—“the flank of Europe” and a “source of energy in a future war”—the United States had failed to check Soviet advances. It had issued a joint statement on the Middle East with the Soviet Union (inviting regional states to a conference to explore the prospect of a comprehensive Palestinian settlement), “thus opening the door wide for the Soviet Union to further infiltrate the Middle East.” Washington had left President Anwar Sadat of Egypt—whose “bold action” had “created a situation unfavorable to the Soviet Union”—in a dangerous position and allowed the Soviet Union to “seize the chance to raise serious division among the Arab countries.”16

  Huang summed up the situation by invoking an old Chinese proverb: “appeasement” of Moscow, he said, was “like giving wings to a tiger to strengthen it.” But a policy of coordinated pressure would prevail, since the Soviet Union was “only outwardly strong but inwardly weak. It bullies the weak and fears the strong.”17

  All this was to supply the context for Indochina. Huang addressed “the problem of regional hegemony.” America, of course, had trod this path a good ten years earlier. Vietnam aimed to dominate Cambodia and Laos and establish an Indochinese Federation—and “behind that there lies the Soviet Union.” Hanoi had already achieved a dominant position in Laos, stationing troops there and maintaining “advisors in every department and in every level in Laos.” But Hanoi had encountered resistance in Cambodia, which opposed Vietnamese regional ambitions. Vietnamese-Cambodian tension represented “not merely some sporadic skirmishes along the borders” but a major conflict which “may last for a long time.” Unless Hanoi gave up its goal of dominating Indochina, “the problem will not be solved in a short period.”18

  Deng followed up the Huang Hua critique later that day. Concessions and agreements had never produced Soviet restraint, he warned Brzezinski. Fifteen years of arms control agreements had allowed the Soviet Union to achieve strategic parity with the United States. Trade with the Soviet Union meant that “the U.S. is helping the Soviet Union overcome its weaknesses.” Deng offered a mocking assessment of American responses to Soviet adventurism in the Third World and chided Washington for trying to “please” Moscow:

  Your spokesmen have constantly justified and apologized for Soviet actions. Sometimes they say there are no signs to prove that there is the meddling of the Soviet Union and Cuba in the case of Zaire or Angola. It is of no use for you to say so. To be candid with you, whenever you are about to conclude an agreement with the Soviet Union it is the product of [a] concession on the U.S. side to please the Soviet side.19

  It was an extraordinary performance. The country which was the principal target of the Soviet Union was proposing joint action as a conceptual obligation, not a bargain between nations, much less as a request. At a moment of great national danger—which its own analysis demonstrated—China nevertheless acted as an instructor on strategy, not as a passive consumer of American prescriptions, as America’s European allies frequently did.

  The staples of much of the American debate—international law, multilateral solutions, popular consensus—were absent from the Chinese analysis except as practical tools to an agreed objective. And that objective, as Deng pointed out to Brzezinski, was “coping with the polar bear and that’s that.”20

  But for Americans there is a limit to the so-called realist approach in the fundamental values of American society. And the murderous Khmer Rouge governing Cambodia represented such a limit. No American President could treat the Khmer Rouge as another stone in the wei qi strategy. Its genocidal conduct—driving the population of Phnom Penh into the jungle, mass killings of designated categories of civilians—could not simply be ignored (though as we shall see necessity did on occasion abort principle).