What Deng was proposing was an essentially preemptive policy; it was an aspect of China’s offensive deterrence doctrine. The Soviet Union was to be pressured along its entire periphery and especially in regions to which it had extended its presence only recently, notably in Southeast Asia and even in Africa. If necessary, China would be prepared to initiate military action to thwart Soviet designs—especially in Southeast Asia.

  The Soviet Union would never be bound by agreements, Deng warned; it understood only the language of countervailing force. The Roman statesman Cato the Elder is reputed to have ended all his speeches with the clarion call “Carthago delenda est” (“Carthage must be destroyed”). Deng had his own trademark exhortation: that the Soviet Union must be resisted. He included in all his presentations some variation on the admonition that Moscow’s unchanging nature was to “squeeze in wherever there is an opening,”38 and that, as Deng told President Carter, “[w]herever the Soviet Union sticks its fingers, there we must chop them off.”39

  Deng’s analysis of the strategic situation included a notification to the White House that China intended to go to war with Vietnam because it had concluded that Vietnam would not stop at Cambodia. “[T]he so-called Indochinese Federation is to include more than three states,” Deng warned. “Ho Chi Minh cherished this idea. The three states is only the first step. Then Thailand is to be included.”40 China had an obligation to act, Deng declared. It could not await developments; once they had occurred, it would be too late.

  Deng told Carter that he had considered the “worst possibility”—massive Soviet intervention, as the new Moscow-Hanoi defense treaty seemingly required. Indeed, reports indicated that Beijing had evacuated up to 300,000 civilians from its northern border territories and put its forces along the Sino-Soviet border on maximum alert.41 But, Deng told Carter, Beijing judged that a brief, limited war would not give Moscow time for “a large reaction” and that winter conditions would make a full-scale Soviet attack on northern China difficult. China was “not afraid,” Deng stated, but it needed Washington’s “moral support,”42 by which he meant sufficient ambiguity about American designs to give the Soviets pause.

  A month after the war, Hua Guofeng explained to me the careful strategic analysis that had preceded it:

  We also considered this possibility of a Soviet reaction. The first possibility was a major attack on us. That we considered a low possibility. A million troops are along the border, but for a major attack on China, that is not enough. If they took back some of the troops from Europe, it would take time and they would worry about Europe. They know a battle with China would be a major matter and could not be concluded in a short period of time.

  Deng confronted Carter with a challenge to both principle and public attitude. In principle, Carter did not approve preemptive strategies, especially since they involved military movements across sovereign borders. At the same time, he took seriously, even when he did not fully share, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s view of the strategic implications of the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, which was parallel to Deng’s. Carter resolved his dilemma by invoking principle but leaving scope for adjustment to circumstance. Mild disapproval shaded into vague, tacit endorsement. He called attention to the favorable moral position that Beijing would forfeit by attacking Vietnam. China, now widely considered a peaceful country, would run the risk of being accused of aggression:

  This is a serious issue. Not only do you face a military threat from the North, but also a change in international attitude. China is now seen as a peaceful country that is against aggression. The ASEAN countries, as well as the UN, have condemned the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Cuba. I do not need to know the punitive action being contemplated, but it could result in escalation of violence and a change in the world posture from being against Vietnam to partial support for Vietnam.

  It would be difficult for us to encourage violence. We can give you intelligence briefings. We know of no recent movements of Soviet troops towards your borders.

  I have no other answer for you. We have joined in the condemnation of Vietnam, but invasion of Vietnam would be [a] very serious destabilizing action.43

  To refuse to endorse violence but to offer intelligence about Soviet troop movements was to give a new dimension to ambivalence. It might mean that Carter did not share Deng’s view of an underlying Soviet threat. Or, by reducing Chinese fears of a possible Soviet reaction, it might be construed as an encouragement to invasion.

  The next day, Carter and Deng met alone, and Carter handed Deng a note (as yet unpublished) summarizing the American position. According to Brzezinski: “The President himself drafted by hand a letter to Deng, moderate in tone and sober in content, stressing the importance of restraint and summarizing the likely adverse international consequences. I felt that this was the right approach, for we could not collude formally with the Chinese in sponsoring what was tantamount to overt military aggression.”44 Informal collusion was another matter.

  According to a memorandum recounting the private conversation (at which only an interpreter was present), Deng insisted that strategic analysis overrode Carter’s invocation of world opinion. Above all, China must not be thought of as pliable: “China must still teach Vietnam a lesson. The Soviet Union can use Cuba, Vietnam, and then Afghanistan will evolve into a proxy [for the Soviet Union]. The PRC is approaching this issue from a position of strength. The action will be very limited. If Vietnam thought the PRC soft, the situation will get worse.”45

  Deng left the United States on February 4, 1979. On his return trip from the United States, he completed placing the last wei qi piece on the board. He stopped off in Tokyo for the second time in six months, to assure himself of Japanese support for the imminent military action and to isolate the Soviet Union further. To Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira, Deng reiterated China’s position that Vietnam had to be “punished” for its invasion of Cambodia, and he pledged: “To uphold the long-term prospects of international peace and stability . . . [the Chinese people] will firmly fulfill our internationalist duties, and will not hesitate to even bear the necessary sacrifices.”46

  After having visited Burma, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan twice, and the United States, Deng had accomplished his objective of drawing China into the world and isolating Hanoi. He never left China again, adopting in his last years the remoteness and inaccessibility of traditional Chinese rulers.

  The Third Vietnam War

  On February 17, China mounted a multipronged invasion of northern Vietnam from southern China’s Guangxi and Yunnan provinces. The size of the Chinese force reflected the importance China attached to the operation; it has been estimated to have numbered more than 200,000 and perhaps as many as 400,000 PLA soldiers.47 One historian has concluded that the invasion force, which included “regular ground forces, militia, and naval and air force units . . . was similar in scale to the assault with which China made such an impact on its entry into the Korean War in November 1950.” 48 The official Chinese press accounts called it the “Self-Defensive Counterattack Against Vietnam” or the “Counterattack in Self-Defense on the Sino-Vietnamese Border.” It represented the Chinese version of deterrence, an invasion advertised in advance to forestall the next Vietnamese move.

  The target of China’s military was a fellow Communist country, recent ally, and longtime beneficiary of Chinese economic and military support. The goal was to preserve the strategic equilibrium in Asia, as China saw it. Further, China undertook the campaign with the moral support, diplomatic backing, and intelligence cooperation of the United States—the same “imperialist power” that Beijing had helped eject from Indochina five years earlier.

  The stated Chinese war aim was to “put a restraint on the wild ambitions of the Vietnamese and to give them an appropriate limited lesson.”49 “Appropriate” meant to inflict sufficient damage to affect Vietnamese options and calculations for the future; “limited” implied that it would be ended before outside intervention or other factors drove it out of control. It was also a direct challenge to the Soviet Union.

  Deng’s prediction that the Soviet Union would not attack China was borne out. The day after China launched its invasion, the Soviet government released a lukewarm statement that, while condemning China’s “criminal” attack, emphasized that “the heroic Vietnamese people . . . is capable of standing up for itself this time again[.]”50 The Soviet military response was limited to sending a naval task force to the South China Sea, undertaking a limited arms airlift to Hanoi, and stepping up air patrols along the Sino-Soviet border. The airlift was constrained by geography but also by internal hesitations. In the end, the Soviet Union gave as much support in 1979 to its new ally, Vietnam, as it had extended twenty years earlier to its then ally, China, in the Taiwan Strait Crises. In neither case would the Soviet Union run any risks of a wider war.

  Shortly after the war, Hua Guofeng summed up the outcome in a pithy phrase contemptuous of Soviet leaders: “As for threatening us, they did that by maneuvers near the border, sending ships to the South China Sea. But they did not dare to move. So after all we could still touch the buttocks of the tiger.”

  Deng sarcastically rejected American advice to be careful. During a late February 1979 visit of Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal to Beijing, Blumenthal called for Chinese troops to withdraw from Vietnam “as quickly as possible” because Beijing “ran risks that were unwarranted.” 51 Deng demurred. Speaking to American reporters just before his meeting with Blumenthal, Deng displayed his disdain for equivocation, mocking “some people” who were “afraid of offending” the “Cuba of the Orient.”52

  As in the Sino-Indian War, China executed a limited “punitive” strike followed immediately by a retreat. It was over in twenty-nine days. Shortly after the PLA captured (and reportedly laid waste to) the capitals of the three Vietnamese provinces along the border, Beijing announced that Chinese forces would withdraw from Vietnam, save for several disputed pieces of territory. Beijing made no attempt to overthrow the Hanoi government or to enter Cambodia in any overt capacity.

  A month after the Chinese troops had withdrawn, Deng explained the Chinese strategy to me on a visit to Beijing:

  DENG: After I came back [from the United States], we immediately fought a war. But we asked you for your opinion beforehand. I talked it over with President Carter and then he replied in a very formal and solemn way. He read a written text to me. I said to him: China will handle this question independently and if there is any risk, China will take on the risk alone. In retrospect, we think if we had driven deeper into Vietnam in our punitive action, it would have been even better.

  KISSINGER: It could be.

  DENG: Because our forces were sufficient to drive all the way to Hanoi. But it wouldn’t be advisable to go that far.

  KISSINGER: No, it would probably have gone beyond the limits of calculation.

  DENG: Yes, you’re right. But we could have driven 30 kilometers deeper into Vietnam. We occupied all the defensive areas of fortification. There wasn’t a defense line left all the way to Hanoi.

  The conventional wisdom among historians is that the war was a costly Chinese failure.53 The effects of the PLA’s politicization during the Cultural Revolution became apparent during the campaign: hampered by outdated equipment, logistical problems, personnel shortages, and inflexible tactics, Chinese forces advanced slowly and at great cost. By some analysts’ estimates, the PLA suffered as many killed in action in one month of fighting the Third Vietnam War as the United States suffered in the most costly years of the second one.54

  Conventional wisdom is based, however, on a misapprehension of the Chinese strategy. Whatever the shortcomings of its execution, the Chinese campaign reflected a serious long-term strategic analysis. In the Chinese leadership’s explanations to their American counterparts, they described the consolidation of Soviet-backed Vietnamese power in Indochina as a crucial step in the Soviet Union’s worldwide “strategic deployment.” The Soviet Union had already concentrated troops in Eastern Europe and along China’s northern border. Now, the Chinese leaders warned, Moscow was “beginning to get bases” in Indochina, Africa, and the Middle East.55 If it consolidated its position in these areas, it would control vital energy resources and be able to block key sea lanes—most notably the Malacca Strait connecting the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. This would give Moscow the strategic initiative in any future conflict. In a broader sense, the war resulted from Beijing’s analysis of Sun Tzu’s concept of shi—the trend and “potential energy” of the strategic landscape. Deng aimed to arrest and, if possible, reverse what he saw as an unacceptable momentum of Soviet strategy.

  China achieved this objective in part by its military daring, in part by drawing the United States into unprecedentedly close cooperation. China’s leaders had navigated the Third Vietnam War by meticulous analysis of their strategic choices, daring execution, and skillful diplomacy. With all these qualities, they would not have been able to “touch the buttocks of the tiger” but for the cooperation of the United States.

  The Third Vietnam War ushered in the closest collaboration between China and the United States for the period of the Cold War. Two trips to China by American emissaries established an extraordinary degree of joint action. Vice President Walter “Fritz” Mondale visited China in August 1979 to devise a diplomacy for the aftermath of the Deng visit, especially with respect to Indochina. It was a complex problem in which strategic and moral considerations were in severe conflict. The United States and China agreed that it was in each country’s national interest to prevent the emergence of an Indochinese Federation under Hanoi’s control. But the only part of Indochina that was still contested was Cambodia, which had been governed by the execrable Pol Pot, who had murdered millions of his compatriots. The Khmer Rouge constituted the best organized element of Cambodia’s anti-Vietnam resistance.

  Carter and Mondale took a long and dedicated record of devotion to human rights into government; indeed they had, in their presidential campaign, attacked Ford on the ground of insufficient attention to the issue of human rights.

  Deng had first raised the issue of aid to the Cambodian guerrilla resistance against the Vietnamese invaders during the private conversation with Carter about the invasion of Vietnam. According to the official report: “The President asked if the Thais could accept and relay it to the Cambodians. Deng said yes and that he has in mind light weapons. The Thais are now sending a senior officer to the Thai-Cambodian border to keep communications more secure.”56 The de facto cooperation between Washington and Beijing on aid to Cambodia through Thailand had the practical effect of indirectly assisting the remnants of the Khmer Rouge. American officials were careful to stress to Beijing that the United States “cannot support Pol Pot” and welcomed China’s assurances that Pol Pot no longer exercised full control over the Khmer Rouge. This sop to conscience did not change the reality that Washington provided material and diplomatic support to the “Cambodian resistance” in a manner that the administration must have known would benefit the Khmer Rouge. Carter’s successors in Ronald Reagan’s administration followed the same strategy. America’s leaders undoubtedly expected that if the Cambodian resistance prevailed, they or their successors would oppose the Khmer Rouge element of it in the aftermath—which is what in effect happened after the Vietnamese withdrawal over a decade later.

  American ideals had encountered the imperatives of geopolitical reality. It was not cynicism, even less hypocrisy, that forged this attitude: the Carter administration had to choose between strategic necessities and moral conviction. They decided that for their moral convictions to be implemented ultimately they needed first to prevail in the geopolitical struggle. The American leaders faced the dilemma of statesmanship. Leaders cannot choose the options history affords them, even less that they be unambiguous.

  The visit of Secretary of Defense Harold Brown marked a further step toward Sino-American cooperation unimaginable only a few years earlier. Deng welcomed him: “Your coming here itself is of major significance,” he noted to Brown, “because you are the Secretary of Defense.” 57 A few veterans of the Ford administration understood this hint about the invitation to Secretary Schlesinger, aborted when Ford dismissed him.

  The main agenda was to define the United States’ military relationship with China. The Carter administration had come to the conclusion that an increase in China’s technological and military capacity was important for global equilibrium and American national security. Washington had “drawn a distinction between the Soviet Union and China,” Secretary Brown explained, and was willing to transfer some military technology to China that it would not make available to the Soviets.58 Further, the United States was willing to sell “military equipment” to China (such as surveillance equipment and vehicles), though not “arms.” It would not, moreover, interfere in decisions by NATO allies to sell arms to China. As President Carter explained in his instructions to Brzezinski:

  [T]he United States does not object to the more forthcoming attitude which our allies are adopting in regard to trade with China in technology-sensitive areas. We have an interest in a strong and secure China—and we recognize and respect this interest.59

  In the end, China was not able to rescue the Khmer Rouge or force Hanoi to withdraw its troops from Cambodia for another decade; perhaps recognizing this, Beijing framed its war aims in much more limited terms. However, Beijing did impose heavy costs on Vietnam. Chinese diplomacy in Southeast Asia before, during, and after the war worked with great determination and skill to isolate Hanoi. China maintained a heavy military presence along the border, retained several disputed pieces of territory, and continued to hold out the threat of a “second lesson” to Hanoi. For years afterward, Vietnam was forced to support considerable forces on its northern border to defend against another possible Chinese attack.60 As Deng had told Mondale in August 1979: