Dražen Pehar
TRIANGULAR DIPLOMACY RECONSIDERED
(MDip Research Paper, 1997, MEDAC, Malta; supervision by Dr. Stephen Calleya)
1 CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 4
PART ONE – HISTORICAL ACCOUNT 9
1. 1 The year 1969, US-China 12 1.2 The year 1970, US-China 15 1.3 The year 1971, US-China 17 1.4. The year 1972, US-China 20 1.5 The year 1969, US-USSR 22 1.6 The year 1970, US-USSR 24 1.7 The year 1971, US-USSR 24 1.8 The year 1972, US-USSR 26 1.9 The year 1973, US-USSR 29 1.10 The year 1974, US-USSR 32
PART TWO – REALIST INTERPRETATION OF TRIANGULAR DIPLOMACY 34
2.1 The principles of realism 34 2.2 A realist interpretation of triangular diplomacy 36 2.3 Insufficiencies of the realist interpretation 40
PART THREE – LIBERALIST INTERPRETATION OF TRIANGULAR DIPLOMACY 45
3.1 The principles of liberalism 45 3.2 A liberalist interpretation of triangular diplomacy 47
2 PART FOUR – THE ‘CONFLICT RESOLUTION’ APPROACH TO TRIANGULAR DIPLOMACY 57
4.1 Conflict and communication 58 4.2 Tacit communication - a way out of conflictual communication? 61 4.3. How the tacit signalling within the strategic triangle reduced and transformed the potential for conflict 63
PART FIVE – THE “CREATIVITY” NARRATIVE OF TRIANGULAR DIPLOMACY 69
5.1 Diplomacy and creativity 70 5.2 Creative individual in triangular diplomacy 74
CONCLUSION 87
BIBLIOGRAPHY 90
ABSTRACT 94
3 Introduction
The diplomatic process which is the subject of this research was probably one of the most famous, most dramatic and most complicated diplomatic maneuvers of the 20th century. Within the period of no more than 2 years Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger regenerated the diplomatic channels between the United States and the People Republic of China (PRC), transforming by the bold move the bipolar structure of the Cold War world into a tripolar, tridimensional universe marked no longer by the logic of confrontation and zero-sum games but by a logic of nuances of competitive cooperation and tactful anti-hegemonism. The things looked so well at that time that even an opponent of Kissingerian way of foreign policy making, Stanley Hoffman, wrote that the Cold War world is no more.1 The period in which the diplomatic process was on move was marked by several breakthroughs and radical changes with no precedent in the period from 1945 till 1969. The Middle East peace process gained its momentum as at least a side-effect of triangular diplomacy. The creation of an overarching multilateral European regime, Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe, falls within the same period. Numerous nuclear arms-control agreements between the United States and Soviet Union were signed after Nixon and Kissinger brought the PRC back into the family of nations. Trade-, and cultural and scientific cooperation - agreements between major powers were mushrooming in the period of triangularism. And subsequent modernization and economic opening of China from late 1970s onwards was probably a direct internal effect of the external triangularism of the early 1970s. However, despite the fact that the period between 1970 and 1974, i.e. the period of triangular diplomacy, coincided with a large number of creative and positive diplomatic initiatives and changes in international politics, there is today no universally
1 See Hoffmann, Stanley (1973), Will the Balance Balance at Home, in: Tucker, Robert, and Watts, William (eds.), Beyond Containment - U.S. Foreign Policy in Transition, pp. 107-129, Potomac Associates, Washington., p. 107. Another analyst from that period agreed with Hoffmann's assessment; see Roskin, Michael (1974), An American Metternich: Henry A. Kissinger and the Global Balance of Power, in: Merli, Frank J., and Wilson, Theodore A. (eds.) Makers of American Diplomacy - From Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Kissinger, pp. 373-396, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.
4 agreed assessment of the "Nixinger's" triangularism.2 There are two crucial factors that can help one understand why this is so. First, no more than 27 years have passed since the first initiatives to open to China were taken by Nixon and Kissinger. And a period of 27 years is, from the angle of an impartial researcher of diplomatic history, too short to allow for an emotional detachment and opening of classified files which is a prerequisite for transparent and objective analysis of historical data. We are not provided yet with necessary materials which could give us hints on what were, for instance, true motives of the PRC for responding in a positive manner to the friendly signals of R.Nixon. In other words, non-transparency of files causes a mushrooming of various myths and factoids. Second, whatever we know about the diplomatic process is based on writings of the people who were too directly involved, who actually initiated and led the process. In this case the history was written by its immediate creators who, by the way, used every opportunity to confirm their commitment to methods of secretive and deceptive diplomacy, a factor which presents a major obstacle to the impartial and bold researchers interested only in facts. An unbiased and impartial researcher therefore cannot hope to obtain every piece of information he would like to possess for the reason that a) his source of information does not hide that secrecy and deception was a rule of the game, and b) the writers of historical sources one has to rely on, the writers who were at the same time creators of the history in this case, share a general human weakness and inclination to present themselves in the best possible light and to bury whatever could contradict the image of an ideal diplomat. One should not, however, forget that political opponents of our 'sources' for triangular diplomacy have criticized the policies of detente more out of the needs of political campaigning and less out of the cognitive need to clarify eventual inconsistencies and shortcomings of the theoretical tenets of triangularism. I will try to pass unaffected through the above mentioned methodological queries, and, throughout my research, I will do my best to resist the temptation to pass a final judgment on the triangular grand design. Instead of passing judgments on efficiency, or quality, of the design and attempting to demonstrate that the design was, or was not, successfully and fully implemented, I will offer four ideal types of narrating the chunk of diplomatic history in order to draw some morals and lessons for both
2 As a good illustration of the lack of unanimity in the assessment, see SAIS Review (1988), Vol. 8, no.2, Symposium: Old Adversaries, New Ground, Simon Serfaty, editor, pp. 1- 45.
5 present and future diplomats. I will thus treat the diplomatic process as a tool for education of diplomats and not as a specific policy recommendation to be tested against the forces of history. The morals and narratives can briefly be described in the following way: Humans rarely, if ever, can allow themselves a luxury of pursuing only one cluster of goals, one cluster of values. One can first and foremost bet that humans will strive for physical safety, for security. They will do everything to meet their need for predictable, manageable and safe environment. This applies to the field of international politics as well. People are grouped into the nations and states which create a sort of mechanisms that serve the need for physical safety of their members pretty well for most of the time. Nations have their interests, based on specifics of their geographical location and historical experience. They have their fears which national security system must somehow address in order to satisfy the need of a nation's members for security, stability, order and manageability. Power is of course an indispensable ingredient in this. That is why one can claim that power, military and economical, will always be one of the ultimate values for a society's strivings. The power is there to promote a national interest which can best be explained in terms of a nation's members' needs for security and protection from historical enemies and geographical, and other, challenges. But, security is only one among several clusters of values that humans pursue. Humans have an innate need for justice, for dignified treatment, and for communication. Sometimes they engage themselves in cooperation with other humans not out of their ego- centered need for profit, for more power, but out of their need for cooperation for the cooperation's sake. Cooperation is thus sometimes treated by humans as a value in itself. And the same goes for justice. Nobody would be in position to explain why small nations sometimes behave as if justice is all and survival is nothing, why the nations seem to be ready to raise the maximum stakes in order to reclaim their rights, although their physical power would by that diminish in return, without admitting that justice has its own logic and that humans sometimes value justice as a goal in itself. So, we have another cluster of values that humans will typically pursue, and sometimes trade it off with the first, aforementioned "security"-cluster of values. Once we apply this small piece of wisdom to international politics, the result would be as it follows. Realism is a school of thought which lays too much emphasis on the first cluster of values. For a realist everything would be explainable in terms of power, national interests and
6 security. That is why realism basically holds that the "security" cluster of values is the only one which humans pursue. Nothing is farther from the truth. And liberalism, which typically holds that humans pursue only the second, the "justice and cooperation" cluster of values, is fundamentally flawed as well. Humans care for both their security and their dignity, for both their power and their morality, for both their flesh and their spirit, and neither the security considerations nor the dignity considerations can claim absolute priority. And neither of them can be kept suppressed over a considerable period of time. 3 In order to explain my points I will first offer two ideal readings of triangular diplomacy, one from a realist perspective and another one from a liberalist perspective. I will, by offering the two ideal "narratives" and comparing them with the real, brute facts of triangular diplomacy, thus draw some morals for the people who in a way or another deal with diplomatic practice. The core of the morals, as implied by the above reflections on values, will be that a diplomat should always strive for more than one cluster of values and should learn to use both languages, the language of national interest, on one hand, with its typical realistic vocabulary emphasizing typical realistic values, and the language of liberalism, on the other hand, with its typical vocabulary emphasizing typical liberal values. A diplomat must also sincerely trust the value of both vocabularies and use neither of them for the purpose of deceiving his public. In the case he does otherwise, he will, sooner or later, fail. After completing the first two readings of the triangular diplomacy, I am going to provide two additional narratives because I believe that the sole realist and liberalist types of narratives would leave important dimensions of the triangular diplomatic process unaddressed, while certain values which, in addition to justice and security,
3 Concerning this hypothesis, I have both some psychologists and some theorists of the international relations on my side. William Allport, a psychologist, advanced the ideas on autonomous motivation, while E. Carr tried to reconcile the considerations of power and morality in the field of the international relations studies. See Carr, Edward H. (1995), The Twenty Years Crisis 1919-1939, Papermac, London, 1st edition 1939, p. 92. Kissinger himself, though considered to hold the position of realism, tried to take a more balanced and conciliatory approach to realistic and liberalistic interpretations of the international relations. In his acceptance message to the Nobel Committee, for instance, he said: "To the realist, peace represents a stable arrangement of power; to the idealist, a goal so preeminent that it conceals the difficulty of finding the means to its achievement. But in this age of thermonuclear technology, neither view can assure man's preservation. Instead, peace, the ideal, must be practised. A sense of responsibility and accomodation must guide the behavior of all nations. Some common notion of justice can and must be found, for failure to do so will bring only more 'just' wars". See Reynolds, Ruth C. (1986), Henry Kissinger, in: Pauling, Linus (honorary editor- in-chief), World Encyclopedia of Peace, Vol. 3, pp. 332-334, Pergamon Press, Oxford, p.333.
7 also played an important role in triangular diplomacy, unattended. Values like "prevention of war" and "resolution of conflict" can sometimes provide one with a motivational basis which is independent from the considerations of power, security, justice and cooperation. I also strongly believe that a diplomat must place another value, which the realist and liberalist narratives left out of our focus, among his top priorities. This is the value of creativity. No individual who were not ready to evince willingness and capacity to take individual risks and initiatives, to improvise, to recognize opportunities, to tolerate ambiguities, in one word to take a burden of creativity on his shoulders, should choose diplomacy as his occupation. Henry Kissinger was an individual who displayed immense creative capabilities and a story on triangular diplomacy which would not give a serious consideration to that fact would not be complete. That is why I feel committed to shed some light on the values of conflict resolution and creativity, and to provide a reader with the two additional narratives describing two additional dimensions of the topic of my research, and simultaneously pointing to two additional clusters of norms that diplomats should consider worthy of approximating. Prior to giving the four interpretations of the triangular diplomacy and drawing the aforementioned lessons wherever appropriate, I will give a brief historical account of the diplomatic process which will mainly cover the time-span of approximately 5 years, from 1969 till 1974. In the course of presenting the account I will for obvious reasons try to avoid giving any theoretical explanations and evaluations of the diplomatic process.
8 PART ONE Historical Account
Our journey through the triangular diplomacy will begin in 1969. However, one should get at least a vague idea on what was in the background of the triangular diplomatic process and what preceded the Sino-American rapprochement. That is why I will first spend few words on accounting the period from 1945 till 1969. Well, in 1945 Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai wanted to travel to the United States to brief the then American President Roosevelt on the situation in China and to establish the links of co-operation, both economic and military. The situation, having been messy world-wide as well as in the United States in the aftermath of the World War II, prevented materialization of Mao's and Zhou's ideas.4 We will have to wait for another 25 years to see an envoy of an American president traveling to China. In the period between 1949 and 1956, the United States thus had to confront both the U.S.S.R. and the People's Republic of China, as two chief leaders of more or less monolithic communist block, and the Korean war and the Taiwan issue exacerbated the U.S.' relations with the PRC in particular. For instance, in 1958 the situation in the Straits of Taiwan became extremely tense and Washington has even elaborated military plans for a soon-coming war against China. In the autumn of 1958 130 warships were dispatched to the Taiwan Straits by the United States Naval Force. The tensions however lessened and a serious military clash in this area between the United States and the PRC luckily never occurred. 5 Year 1956, however, was one of the most crucial for my account. In 1956 a serious rift between the Soviet Union and the PRC started widening. The rift was mainly prompted by the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), but its historical explanation should go as far back as 1945 when Soviet troops, while withdrawing from China, robbed its many industrial assets. The historical explanation should also include the territorial disputes between the Soviet Union and the PRC that remained unresolved after the 2nd World War. The 20th Congress of the
4 The most inspiring article I read on this subject was written by Tuchman, B.W. See Tuchman, Barbara W. (1972), If Mao Had Come to Washington: An Essay in Alternatives, in: Foreign Affairs, vol. 51, no.1, pp. 44-64. 5 See Medvedev, Roy (1986), China and the Superpowers, Basil Blackwell, New York. pp. 85-87.
9 CPSU, the turning point for Sino-Soviet relations, voiced a number of propositions and criticisms, especially against the cult of personality from the era of Stalin's rule, which were simply unacceptable for Mao Zedong. In the late 1950s new points of disagreement between the PRC and the Soviet Union, such as the Soviet Union's refusal to deliver a military assistance to the PRC, added new strains to Sino-Soviet relations. After 1956, relations between the PRC and the Soviet Union were thus becoming increasingly worse. 6 As far back as January 1962 the American State Department toyed with the idea of using the Sino-Soviet split to the advantage of American national interests. The history however at that point did not permit actualisation of the idea. In 1962 the war between PRC and India broke out, which the United States treated as another confirmation of the Chinese inherent militarism and aggressiveness. And in the following years the United States got involved in Vietnam which was also treated by the then American Administration as a domino-effect produced by a joint Sino-Soviet conspiracy.7 Nevertheless some important changes in internal American perceptions of the PRC began emerging, the changes which were initiated by various influential American business circles, not by politicians. At the beginning of the 1960s China's trade with Japan and the countries of Western Europe gradually increased, while the United States, still cultivating adversarial relations with the PRC and boycotting trade with it, excluded itself from the potentially vast Chinese market to its own economical disadvantage. It is interesting to note that three weeks after the assassination of John Kennedy, the Assistant Secretary of State, R. Hillsman, issued a public statement calling for normalization of the Sino-American relations, which received a very loud response in the press. In 1964 some influential American newspapers invited the American government to exploit the Sino-Soviet rivalry to the American benefit. In 1966 this interest of some influential American circles in normal relations with China became even more acute. National Committee for American-Chinese Relations was founded, on an unofficial basis, in July 1966, to lobby all over the United States for its opening to the PRC. The Committee, in which influential politicians, prominent businessmen and well-known scholars were on an irregular basis engaged, received
6 See Medvedev R. (1986), op.cit., pp. 29-40 7 See Bartlett, C.J. (1984), The Global Conflict, Longman, London and New York., p. 355.
10 donations from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and was supported by General Motors as well.8 In October 1967 Richard M. Nixon, who was to be elected the President of the United States in 1968, published an article in Foreign Affairs with the title "Asia after Viet Nam". In this article Nixon of course touched upon the issue of the Sino- American relations. However, there was not a word in the article which would point to the idea of exploiting the Sino-Soviet split to the United States' benefit. Nixon expressed very clearly that the PRC should not be kept in isolation, but his main idea was to create a sort of regional Asian regime of military and economic cooperation, which would include Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and South Viet Nam, and which could contain eventual Chinese threat. He also compared the PRC with more explosive ghetto elements in the United States itself, and was very ambiguous about a need to start a dialogue with the PRC' representatives. His key phrase, comprising his foreign policy recommendation vis-a-vis China, was "containment without isolation". What R. Nixon meant by this will remain unclear until the summer of 1969.9 It is interesting that Henry A. Kissinger, who assisted Nelson Rockefeller in his bid for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, but was, upon a recommendation of Rockefeller himself, appointed the National Security Adviser of the President Nixon in 1969, drafted a foreign policy statement for Rockefeller, in which he, i.e. Rockefeller, explicitly stated that, "...I would begin a dialogue with communist China. In a subtle triangle of relations between Washington, Peking, and Moscow, we improve the possibilities of accommodations with each as we increase our options toward both".10 And in September 1968, after he received the presidential nomination, Nixon once again stressed that "We must not forget China. We must always seek opportunities to talk with her, as with the USSR...We must not only watch for changes. We must seek to make changes". A few months later it would become clearer what Nixon precisely had in mind.11 Our journey through the delicate space of triangular diplomacy can now start.
8 See Medvedev, R. (1986), op.cit., pp. 91-93 9 See Nixon, Richard M. (1967), Asia After Viet Nam, in: Foreign Affairs, vol. 46 no. 1, pp. 111-125. 10 See Kissinger, Henry A. (1995), Diplomacy, Simon & Schuster, London., p. 721. 11 Ibid., p.721.
11 1. 1. The year 1969, US-China
We are at the beginning of the year 1969. Richard Nixon swore as the President of the United States for the next four years and appointed Henry Kissinger as his National Security Adviser, who will play the role of R. Nixon's chief co- conceptualizer and assistant in the field of foreign policy. On January 27 1969 the People's Daily, the main Chinese daily expressing the views of China's communist party, responded to the inaugural address of President Nixon in the following way: "... The US monopoly capitalist class thrust Nixon into power with an eye to extricating the imperialist system from crisis. The event had been intended to be a joyful occasion. But it was run like a funeral. Secret service men and police ringed Nixon with protective cordons and even the platform from which he made his inaugural speech was screened off by bullet-proof glass. The Western press ridiculed Nixon's inaugural address as a 'speech made from a glass cage'. However, it serves as excellent teaching material by negative example for the revolutionary people throughout the world. In enables us to see more clearly the very weak, paper-tiger nature of US imperialism and helps us recognize the counter-revolutionary tactics that US imperialism is going to adopt...An outstanding feature of Nixon's address was that US imperialism is relying more on the tactics of political deception to cover up its military aggression...".12 R. Nixon's days of celebration were still a fresh memory when Pentagon and White House received intelligence reports saying that serious skirmishes between Chinese and Soviets broke out along the Ussuri river in Siberia. Henry Kissinger in his "White House Years" claimed that it was probably the Soviet side which was to blame for these clashes, because, among other reasons, the Chinese were weaker than Soviets. He also added that the main cause of the serious military clashes, which protracted for several months and threatened both the PRC and the Soviet Union with a catastrophe, will probably never be completely clarified.13 Here comes the Soviet version:
12 See Lawrence, Alan, ed. (1975), China's Foreign Relations since 1949, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and Boston, pp.207-209. 13 See Kissinger, Henry A. (1979), White House Years, Little, Brown and Company, Boston-Toronto, pp. 171-177.
12 "A specially trained sub-unit of 300 Chinese troops occupied Damansky Island on the night of 2 March 1969 and there they secretly concentrated mortars, grenade launchers, machine-guns and anti-tank weapons. When a unit of Soviet border guards approached the Chinese positions and demanded the removal of the sub-unit from Soviet territory, the Chinese opened fire on them without warning, virtually at point- blank range. The Soviets guards called up reinforcements and, after a battle in which lives were lost, occupied Damansky Island and forced the Chinese to withdraw. The Chinese in turn brought in their reinforcements and on 14-15 March again tried to capture the island; they were again beaten and compelled to retreat, this time under heavy Soviet rocket fire on Chinese territory".14 The skirmishes soon expanded and spread over to the Amur River. All in all, from early June to the middle of August the Soviet border authorities registered no less than 488 serious armed incidents along the Sino-Soviet border. Even the Soviet embassy in Peking was on March 4 and 7 besieged by organized groups of Chinese who had not been countered by any police force. On March 11 1969 the Soviets took the same measure against the Chinese embassy. On September 16 1969 the Soviet leadership had threatened the PRC with nuclear attack against its nuclear installations. As of that date the situation calmed down and negotiations on territorial division between the Soviet Union and the PRC resumed.15 In my opinion, the Soviet story of what happened during the Sino-Soviet border clash was true. First, Mao was the one who challenged the then existing borderlines between the Soviet Union and the PRC. Soviets, from their side, wanted to keep the status-quo. Why would then Soviets have had any interest in provoking incidents along their border? Second, the Soviet retaliations were limited and kept under control throughout the conflict. Third, the Soviet military operations were frequently paused to show the willingness to resolve the territorial dispute by peaceful means. And fourth, the clashes did not stop until Brezhnev issued a serious warning against the PRC.16 R. Nixon and Henry Kissinger seem to have believed otherwise. In August 1969 Nixon has invited Allen S. Whiting, a former State Department specialist on
14 See Medvedev, R. (1986), op.cit., p. 48. 15 Ibid., pp. 48-51 16 For the reasons which support such an interpretation of the series of skirmishes, see Cohen, Arthur A. (1991), The Sino-Soviet Border Crisis of 1969, in: George, Alexander L. (ed.), Avoiding War - Problems of Crisis Management, pp. 269-296, Westview Press, Boulder.
13 China, to brief him about the Sino-Soviet border clashes. Whiting conveyed to R. Nixon his opinion that the Soviet Union was actual aggressor in this case and that President Nixon should react to the border clashes more strongly. On August 14 1969, at the meeting of the National Security Council, Nixon announced his 'revolutionary thesis' that the Soviets were more aggressive than the Chinese in recent conflict and that it was in the United States' interest to see survival of the PRC. He also indicated to the media that they should refrain from releasing anything which could insult the Chinese public opinion. On September 5 1969 Nixon issued a strong statement to be delivered to Moscow which, as Kissinger interpreted it, slightly indicated that Nixon was ready to give its support to the PRC, as a victim of the Soviet aggression.17 Even before September 1969 the White House showed some friendly gestures to the PRC. For instance, in July 1969 a series of unilateral actions were taken to indicate the United States' friendliness toward the PRC. The prohibition against traveling to China was lifted for seven categories of American citizens, Congressmen, journalists, teachers, students, scientists, doctors and the Red Cross workers. All those who would travel to the PRC were allowed to bring $ 100 worth of Chinese-made goods back into the United States; and a limited sale of grain to the PRC was permitted too. On August 8 1969 the State Secretary William P. Rogers delivered a speech in Australia where he said that the United States would welcome a significant role by Communist China in Asian and Pacific affairs. He added that if the Chinese leaders abandoned their introspective view of the world, America would open up channels of communication, and that the unilateral initiatives taken by the American side were meant to help remind people on mainland China of the United States' historic friendship for them.18 At that point however R. Nixon has already tried to open up channels of communication with the PRC. He used two channels to convey his good intentions to the PRC's leadership, the Pakistani and the Romanian channel. It was through the latter channel that leaders of the Soviet Union got informed on Nixon's intentions. On October 20 1969 the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, held a conversation with R. Nixon in which he, in a disguised manner, warned against any American attempts to "capitalize on the differences between the Soviet Union and China".19 Nixon understood the warning and said that a) his China
17 See Kissinger, H.(1979), op.cit., p. 182, and Kissinger, H. (1995), op.cit., pp.722-724. 18 See Kissinger, H. (1995), op.cit., p. 723 19 See Dobrynin, Anatoly (1995), In Confidence, Times Books, New York, p. 207.
14 policy was not directed against the Soviet Union, and b) the United States had no intention to remain a permanent enemy of the People's Republic of China any more than of the Soviet Union. Dobrynin was of course only passing on the message directed to him from Kremlin. 26 years later Dobrynin will say that the Soviet politicians "were making a mistake from the start by displaying...anxiety over China to the new administration".20 Nixon and Kissinger decided also to end patrols of two American destroyers in the Straits of Taiwan, and to leak the decision to the Chinese officials in Hong Kong. On December 6 1969 the PRC for the first time responded to the American gestures of good will by releasing two Americans whose yacht strayed into Chinese waters. On December 11 1969 the PRC responded for the second time by inviting American Ambassador to Poland, Walter Stoessel, to the Chinese Embassy in Warsaw. It was interesting that Chinese obviously did not have the slightest intention to cover up the Stoessel's arrival at their Embassy. They suggested to him to use the front-door while entering their embassy. The Soviet KGB' agents were probably shadowing every visitor to the Chinese embassy in Warsaw at that time and the Chinese probably wanted Stoessel to be spotted by the KGB. Stoessel used that opportunity to offer to the Chinese a resumption of Warsaw talks. The Chinese representatives agreed that another meeting would take place within month.
1.2. The year 1970, US-China
Then on January 8 1970 the Chinese charge d' affaires arrived at the United States Embassy in Warsaw and said that the Chinese side was agreed to the idea of the resumption of talks. Two more meetings were held in Warsaw between American Ambassador Stoessel and the Chinese charge d' affairs Lei Yang, where Stoessel basically wanted to reassure the Chinese that the United States have not intended to establish a condominium with the Soviet Union. The Chinese from their side basically agreed with the idea that Nixon sends his special envoy to Peking.21 However, in early April 1970 the relations between the PRC and the United States became tense again, the reason for that lying in the American invasion of Cambodia. The Chinese
20 Ibid., p.207. 21 For the Warsaw talks, see Kissinger, H. (1979), op. cit., pp. 188-191, and pp. 684-693
15 interrupted the Warsaw talks and the verbal attacks on the United States in the Chinese press intensified. Nixon, however, did not want to give up easily. The Chinese leaders, on the other hand, probably came in the meantime to terms with themselves and have probably realized that the PRC' opening to the United States was a goal more valuable than was their repetitive confrontation with every single American move vis-a-vis Vietnam. On October 25 1970 Nixon met the President Yahya Khan of Pakistan, who was about to visit Peking. Nixon asked the Pakistani President to convey to the PRC' leaders the message reading that the United States considers a Sino-American rapprochement essential and that he would be willing to send a high-level secret emissary to Peking. Nixon asked the Romanian President Ceausescu for the same favor and the request was probably leaked to the Soviet intelligence. On December 9 1970 the Pakistani Ambassador to the United States brought to the White House the Chinese reply. The reply was sent by Zhou Enlai, the Prime Minister of the PRC, and it declared that, "China has always been willing and has always tried to negotiate by peaceful means....In order to discuss the subject of vacation of Chinese territories called Taiwan, a special envoy of President Nixon will be most welcome in Peking." The message which Zhou Enlai put through the Romanian channel was even more dramatic, because it read that the President Nixon was most welcome to pay a visit to China, since he already paid a visit to Belgrade and Bucharest. Kissinger and Nixon responded to such messages from Zhou Enlai in a matter of hours, stressing the need to discuss a broad range of subjects, not only Taiwan, and giving the assurances to Chinese that American forces would withdraw from Taiwan as tensions in the area and in the South-East Asia lessen. 22 Mao Zedong himself displayed few friendly gestures in a typical fashion of oriental symbolism. He let photographers make a photo on which he and E. Snow, American citizen and famous journalist, together took frontal position. In December of 1970 Mao gave an interview to E. Snow in which he said that the Taiwan issue has not been created by Nixon, but by Truman and Acheson. Mao added that he would gladly receive the visit of President Nixon, either as a president or as a tourist. 23 And finally, in March 1971 Mao invited the American table-tennis team which was competing in the world championship in Japan to China. The team was received by Zhou-Enlai who
22 Ibid., pp. 698-704 23 See Lawrence, A., ed. (1975), op.cit., pp. 210-212
16 publicly said that "the visit is a new chapter in relations between the Chinese and American peoples" and that "other Americans would soon be able to come to China".24
1.3. The year 1971, US-China
The rest was going to be a merely technical issue. H. Kissinger was appointed a special envoy of President Nixon to travel secretly to China. Kissinger paid the secret visit to China between July 9 and 11 1971 and met there with Zhou-Enlai. The State Secretary of the United States, William Rogers, got to know about the trip at the time when it was underway. The only subject Kissinger and Zhou discussed about was Nixon's visit to China in year 1972. It was agreed that Nixon would pay the visit before March 1972. On July 15 1971 Nixon gave a short statement on national television announcing that Kissinger visited Peking, that he, Nixon¸ accepted the invitation to visit China before March 1972 with satisfaction, that the scheduled trip was not directed against any third country, and that he hoped that the Soviet government would not misinterpret the meaning of his trip to China. There were some myths built around this episode. For instance, Kissinger wrote that Dobrynin, after he learned that Nixon would visit China, came to the White House and asked President Nixon to schedule his summit with Brezhnev first, i.e. before his meeting with Mao. By reading this description one easily gets the impression that the Soviets felt a need to compete with the Chinese for American attention, that they instantly took the hook and became more flexible and willing to negotiate as an effect of their worries about potential positive development of the Sino-American relations. But, the real sequence of events was not that simple. First, Nixon originally intended to hold the U.S.-Soviet summit first and thereafter to fly to China. He said to Dobrynin that the summit could take place in 1971. However, Moscow wanted to have two agreements first, the agreement on West Berlin and the SALT agreement, and for Moscow they were precondition for the summit. As the process of reaching the two agreements was pretty complicated, the U.S.-Soviet summit could not have taken place before May 1972. And, as we today know, the West Berlin agreement was signed on September 3 1971, i.e. prior to the U.S.-Soviet summit, which was a consequence of the Soviet pressure. In other words, the U.S.-Soviet summit had to be
24 See Medvedev, R. (1986), op.cit., p. 98
17 delayed, with or without the Chinese 'card'. Dobrynin's understanding is that it was the Soviet side which determined the pace of the pre-U.S.-Soviet summit dynamics in the Soviet-American negotiations. When the Kremlin then saw Nixon announcing his coming visit to China, they were, as Dobrynin claims, surprised and confused. But, although Kissinger offered to Dobrynin to frankly answer whatever questions Kremlin would put about Kissinger's visit to China, no questions whatsoever followed. Dobrynin also wrote that he "felt we had allowed ourselves to be outplayed by the Americans and the Chinese, although I certainly did not let Kissinger know that".25 What one can thus conclude from the above descriptions is that there was a change of atmosphere in the U.S.-Soviet relations after Nixon announced his plan to visit China. It is nevertheless very difficult to identify the exact nature of the change. The Kremlin was confused, but was it worried and did it feel threatened? Was, from the then Soviet perspective, the West Berlin agreement a sufficient compensation for the delay of the U.S.-Soviet summit, the delay which allowed Nixon to simulate that improved Sino-American relations were placed on his agenda higher than improved U.S.-Soviet relations? It would probably take many years of intensive scholarly work to discern how the Kremlin might have felt after they realized that the normalization of the Sino-American relations was coming soon.26 There was another thought-provoking episode in the aftermath of the Kissinger's secret visit to China in July 1971. The White House administration namely forgot that Japan had to be informed on every move of the United States vis-a-vis China. Tokyo was given an assurance years before that the United States would not make any initiatives toward Peking without consulting Japan first. Kissinger, however, was too worried about the possibility of information leakage so that he did not permit any information on his secret trip to China to be proceeded in any way to Tokyo. Kissinger, later on, admitted that he committed serious error in manners, but at the time of his admission it was already too late. The Japanese were extremely worried by the sudden and secret trip of the American envoy to Peking, because they understandably contemplated that it could have meant a reversal in the United States' policy toward China at the expense of cordial US-Japan relations. They were upset and
25 See Dobrynin, A. (1995), op.cit., p. 232 26 Ibid., pp. 231-238
18 felt publicly humiliated by the violation of established diplomatic conventions, i.e. by the Kissinger's sudden "outbursts" of a friendship with the Chinese.27 Anyway, the history of the triangular diplomacy does not end in July 1971. On October 5 1971 the White House announced that H. Kissinger would again travel to China, this time publicly. In October 1971 two interesting things happened, one in China and the other one in the UN General Assembly. First China. During his October stay in China, Kissinger had only one task, to discuss and prepare a draft, with Zhou Enlai, of a communique which Nixon and Mao were to sign at the end of Nixon's visit. The draft which Kissinger proposed was a classical diplomatic document in which significant differences were simply 'papered over'. Zhou did not want to accept such a draft. What Zhou wanted to see was a document in which not only agreements would be voiced, but disagreements as well. He wanted to see two separate world-views expressed in the communique so that the PRC would confirm the independence and uniqueness of its approach to the issues of international politics. Kissinger felt forced, or compelled, to accept Zhou's approach to the document.28 On October 25 another interesting thing happened. While Kissinger was preparing his visit to Peking, nobody in the White House seemed to realize that the visit would coincide with the annual vote in the U.N. General Assembly on whether to expel Taiwan from, and admit the PRC instead, into the U.N. The American approach was to insist on the dual representation formula which implied that both the PRC and Taiwan would have a seat in the U.N. Zhou Enlai openly stressed that the PRC would never accept the dual representation formula, but he also added that the PRC was ready to wait as long as it was necessary for the U.N. seat. This latter sentence was an extremely wise fake maneuver. The Chinese knew that it would be impossible for the United States to block the two-third majority vote of the UN members in favor of China once the public visit of Kissinger to Peking was announced and paid. So the Chinese leaders very wisely combined the time of Kissinger's visit to Peking with the time of the U.N. decision and basically forced American diplomats in the U.N., including George Bush, into a cul-de-sac. The final vote in the General Assembly was 76 for admission of China and 35 against it, with 17 abstentions. Taiwan lost its seat and the PRC replaced it. As Kissinger frankly admitted in his White House Years, "Our
27 On the incident "caused" by Kissinger's diplomatic manners towards Japan, see Isaacson, Walter (1992), Kissinger - A Biography, Simon & Schuster, London, p. 348. 28 Ibid., pp. 351-352
19 opening to Peking effectively determined the outcome of the UN debate, although we did not realize this immediately".29 And, oddly enough, the representatives of the Soviet Union to the U.N. voted for the UN October 25 Resolution on admission of the PRC into the U.N.
1.4. The year 1972, US-China
So, on February 21 1972 Nixon landed in Peking. The visit was broadcast world-wide. After the meeting with Zhou Enlai, Nixon and Kissinger met with Mao who looked pretty weak and whose life-time was obviously closing to an end. One of the thorniest issues for both Nixon and Mao was definitely the American military presence around Taiwan. But, Mao seemed more than willing to take a conciliatory attitude toward the issue. Mao said that the world is a big issue, while the Taiwan is a small issue. He also said that the history of his friendship with the leader of Taiwan, Jiang Gai-shi, was longer than the history of the American friendship with Jiang. It seemed that the Chinese were quite satisfied with the outcome of the UN vote and, as far as Taiwan was concerned, were not in any hurry. They obviously wanted more to exploit the symbolism of Nixon's visit than to quarrel about some temporarily negligible, though substantive issues. During Nixon's meeting with Mao the Chinese leader said a few elliptical and metaphorical sentences about the global situation and the relation of the PRC and the United States toward the Soviet Union. He said that the United States was not efficient enough in opposing the Soviet expansionism. When R. Nixon tried to find out what was Mao's opinion about the two nuclear super-powers, Mao said that the danger of the United States' or the PRC's aggression was relatively small for the reason that the Chinese troops do not go abroad, while Nixon himself wanted to withdraw a number of the American troops back to the U.S. territory. It was probably at that meeting too that Mao warned Nixon against "standing on China's shoulders to reach Moscow".30 The Shanghai Communique was the most important and most tangible result of Nixon's visit. The document had unique structure which was proposed by Zhou Enlai
29 See Kissinger, H. (1979), op. cit., pp. 770-774 30 Ibid., pp. 1065-1074, and p. 763
20 during Kissinger’s October 1971 visit to China. Approximately two thirds of the document was spent on a separate exposition of essentially different views that the United States and the PRC had about the world affairs. For instance, the Chinese side expressed its own view on Japan, emphasizing that it "firmly opposes the revival and outward expansion of Japanese militarism". The American side expressed in the very same document its own view on Japan, emphasizing that "the United States places the highest value on its friendly relations with Japan; it will continue to develop the existing close bonds". The Chinese side declared that "all foreign troops should be withdrawn to their own countries", while the US side declared that "in the absence of a negotiated settlement the United States envisages the ultimate withdrawal of all US forces from the region consistent with the aim of self-determination for each country of Indochina". But, the closing part of the communiqué expressed some common views. The two sides jointly stated that: "- progress toward the normalization of relations between China and the United States is in the interest of all countries; - both wish to reduce the danger of international military conflict; - neither should seek hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region and each is opposed to efforts by any other country or group of countries to establish such hegemony; and - neither is prepared to negotiate on behalf of any third party or to enter into agreements or understandings with the other directed at other states. Both sides are of the view that it would be against the interests of the peoples of the world for any major country to collude with another against other countries or for major countries to divide up the world into spheres of interest".31 Zbygniev Brzezinsky, the future National Security Adviser of President Carter, commented on Nixon's visit to China by saying that it served two purposes, to give to Moscow food for thought and to influence voters in the United States.32 The Shanghai Communiqué was at the same time a beginning and the peak of the Sino-American relations in the 1970s. After February 28 1972, further developments in the Sino-American relations were basically a logical outcome of the principles laid down in the document, and took place more by inertia than by new diplomatic initiatives. The volume of trade between the United States and the PRC
31 For the full text of the Shanghai Comminuque, see Lawrence, A., ed. (1975), op.cit., pp. 219-222 32 See Medvedev, R. (1986), op.cit., p. 102.
21 rose from 1972 till 1975, not too significantly. In comparison with the American trade with Taiwan, it was negligible. As the Chinese did not wish to accept further American credits on which their imports of grain from the United States depended, they considerably curtailed their purchases in 1975 and 1976. In 1973 offices of the PRC and the United States were established in the United States and the PRC respectively, but until 1979 the offices did not really have the function of diplomatic missions, because within the 1972 till 1979 period the United States was not willing to grant a formal recognition to China. And, finally, both Mao and Zhou were soon to die which made the Chinese side more interested in domestic issues than in the foreign policy ones. Kissinger visited China in 1973 and 1974, but the two visits did nothing to further improve the Sino-American relations. R. Nixon was too occupied with the Watergate affair to think of subtleties of diplomacy. And the Taiwan issue remains an American concern in Asia.33 Let us now take a look at the second line of the geopolitical triangle, the line connecting the United States and the Soviet Union.
1.5. The year 1969, US-USSR
In accounting the evolution of the U.S.-Soviet relations over the period of triangular diplomacy one could easily start with September 16 1968, when the then Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko submitted his "Assessment of the Course of Foreign Policy and the State of Soviet-American relations" to Politburo which approved the draft. In the draft Gromyko stated that "the development of our relations with the United States calls therefore for combining the necessary firmness with flexibility in pursuing a policy of strength and for actively using means of diplomatic maneuver...The Soviet-American dialogue of 1961-1963 was not, however, accidental; the reasons that gave rise to it are still in force today. That is why under certain conditions the dialogue can be resumed even on a broader range of issues. The
33 Concerning the further evolution of the Sino-American relations in the aftermath of the Nixon's 1972 visit to China, see Medvedev, R. (1986), op.cit., pp. 102-107
22 preparations for this dialogue should be conducted systematically and purposefully even now".34 After Nixon's inauguration Anatoly Dobrynin, the then Soviet Ambassador to the United States, started probing the possibilities of dialogue at the meeting with Nixon on February 17 1969 at the White House. Dobrynin told Nixon that "the Soviet Union favored peaceful cooperation and if the United States would proceed from the same principle, broad possibilities would open for the solution of pressing international issues. The main goals...were to enforce the nuclear nonproliferation treaty; find a political settlement in Vietnam leading to the withdrawal of American troops, open a bilateral exchange to settle the conflict in the Middle East, base our actions and policies in Europe on the postwar status quo, and continue the Soviet-American exchanges on strategic weapons in order to curb the arms race between us".35 Nixon however in early 1969 was not that eager to accelerate the process of negotiating the limits on nuclear arms. It took him 9 months to agree with the Soviet initiative to start talks on nuclear arms control. On October 25 both American and Soviet side announced that the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) talks would start in Helsinki on November 17 1969. Since the American side used two negotiating teams, one coming from the State Department and the other coming directly from the President and his National Security Adviser, the SALT process was necessarily slowed down and made more complex than it was necessary.36 Early troubles were following the Middle East discussions as well. Although W. Rogers, the U.S. Secretary of State, was officially responsible for the Middle East peace talks between the United States and the Soviet Union, H. Kissinger was the one who had real authority in this matter. The Soviet Minister Gromyko was confused when he realized that the American party played a sort of double game with regard to the Middle East talks and this fact also slowed down and burdened the Soviet-American negotiations.37
34 See Dobrynin, A. (1995), op.cit., p. 652 35 Ibid., p. 203 36 For an account of an official who was directly participating in the SALT negotiations, see Nitze, Paul H. (1996), Nixon and Arms Control, in: Hamburg, Eric (ed.), Nixon - An Oliver Stone Film, pp. 73-79, Bloomsbury, London. 37 See Dobrynin, A. (1995), op.cit., pp. 210-211
23 1.6. The year 1970, US-USSR
The year 1970 was a year of "drift and doubt", as Dobrynin recounts, for the Soviet-American relations. There was no major international crisis over that year, but the Soviet leadership was not clear about Nixon's intentions, because he, on one side, favored negotiations over confrontation, at least verbally, but, on the other side, he publicly claimed that "negotiations do not necessarily imply agreements". In early 1970 the United States invaded Cambodia, which contributed to the drifts and doubts and aggravated its relations both with the Soviet Union and the PRC. As far as an eventual Soviet-American summit was concerned, Dobrynin recounts that "the question of summit cropped up time and again during my contacts with Kissinger during the administration's first two years, but it became a live issue only during the following year, in the middle of 1971. Kissinger in his memoirs claims that the Soviet side overplayed its hand by making its price for a summit during 1970 a de facto alliance by Moscow and Washington against China, a European Security Conference, and a SALT agreement on Soviet terms. He writes that Nixon would not agree to any of these demands and that the Soviet Union 'achieved nothing'. I do not remember any such demands about an alliance against China or any solid grounds for his sensational conclusion that 'collusion against China was to be the real Soviet price for a summit'. The leadership of the Soviet Union was not that naive. We could not conceive of an alliance against China with the United States, especially under Richard Nixon whose anti-Soviet persuasions were well-known".38
1.7. The year 1971, US-USSR
In 1971 the Soviet-American relations started gradually evolving. R. Nixon spent the first half of his mandate and was under time-pressure to achieve something with regard to the American relations with Soviets. The Soviet side centered on two main issues, the issue of nuclear arms reductions and the issue of West Berlin, and the American side followed this path. The nuclear arms limitation discussions were very complicated, but what they basically amounted to was a search for strategic parity and for upper limits on the construction of nuclear weapons. The agreement, which in 1971
38 Ibid., pp. 211-213
24 the Soviet and the American negotiators wanted to achieve, was intended to cover four types of nuclear missiles, ABMs, anti-ballistic missiles which served the purpose of countering a nuclear attack by opposite side, ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, MIRVs, launchers with multiple nuclear warheads, and SLBMs, submarine- launched ballistic missiles. Before May 1971 the negotiating parties basically agreed on disagreements and on the future direction which negotiations should take. As the Soviet side started construction of SLBMs and the American side already had considerable number of SLBMs, the Soviets were very reluctant to negotiate a freeze on this type of nuclear weapons. As the American side already had considerable number of MIRVs, while the Soviets had none, the Soviets wanted to impose a ban on this type of nuclear weapons. This was of course unacceptable for American negotiators. Kissinger and Dobrynin, however, after many give-and-takes, reached an understanding to couple ABMs to certain limitations on ICBMs. Both Soviets and American considered the ABMs dangerous because they could have given incentive to both sides to proliferate the number of ICBMs, and both sides agreed that the number of ABMs had to be kept very low. The zero option for ABMs was dropped before May 1970 and both sides principally agreed to allow for two ABMs, one protecting the capital, and the other one protecting one of the ICBM bases.On May 20 1971 these agreements were given voice through a statement which was announced both in Moscow and Washington, and which declared that the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to seek to work out an ABM agreement and certain measures to limit offensive strategic weapons, i.e. ICBMs.39 On May 24 1971 Nixon made a good- will gesture toward the Soviet Union by deciding to exempt wheat and other grain exported to the Soviet Union from the list of items requiring the Commerce Department's prior approval. June of 1971 was a month of discussions within the White House on the future course of relations with the Soviet Union and on the American foreign policy priorities. Two different approaches were suggested by two different groups within the Nixon's Administration. One group preferred giving priority to the relations with the Soviet Union. The other group preferred giving priority to the relations with the PRC, which could a) help end the Vietnam war; and b) give the United States a leverage in
39 For a brief and in-depth analysis of the stakes involved in the SALT negotiations, see Dobrynin, A. (1995), op.cit., pp. 216-221
25 its dealings with the Soviet Union. As Llewellyn Thompson, who witnessed the split of opinion, observed, Nixon was trying to strike a balance between the two groups and to keep both options open.40 On July 27 1971, after he publicly announced his trip to China for the next year, Nixon made another good-will gesture toward Moscow. He proposed to conclude an agreement with the Soviet Union on reducing the risk of an unprovoked and accidental outbreak of nuclear war. After the Soviet side accepted the proposal, the agreement was signed on September 30 1971 by Gromyko and Rogers. Nixon made another wise gesture on August 5 1971 towards Moscow by sending a first personal letter to Brezhnev. By doing this he intended to achieve a closer personal contact with the first man of Politburo, and his letter had the intended impact. He proposed to Brezhnev an announcement of a summit which could have taken place either in late 1971, or after March 1972. Brezhnev responded positively and Dobrynin informed Kissinger that the summit could take place in May or June 1972. Nixon then responded that the best date for the summit would be May 22 1972. In October 1971 Nixon announced the date of the U.S.-Soviet summit.41
1.8. The year 1972, US-USSR
On January 17 1972 Brezhnev sent a new message to Nixon to inform him that the Soviet side would like to have on the agenda of the summit the following items: Vietnam, European security, the Middle East, SALT, and the Soviet-American economic relations. After Nixon returned from China, he met Dobrynin to discuss the agenda of the summit. As Dobrynin recounts, Nixon mentioned that the most pressing issue was the issue of the nuclear arms limitation. He also added that he was ready to establish parity in strategic weapons, though the concept of strategic parity with Soviets was anathema for many influential groups in the United States. Nixon's statement on the strategic parity made understandably very favorable impression in Moscow.42 Brezhnev once again emphasized that he looked forward to the summit and expected that a progress
40 Ibid., p. 229 41 Ibid., pp. 233-238 42 Ibid., p. 247
26 on all important issues would be made. However, nobody at that time expected that a month later the things would become extremely complicated. In early April 1972 the North Vietnam launched a major offensive and crossed the South-North border. The American troops came under strong attack by the Vietnamese, and Nixon had to retaliate. The American side first asked the Chinese for assistance in terms of influencing the decisions taken by the North Vietnamese leadership, but the Chinese turned aside the request, and observed that Moscow should be held responsible for the North Vietnamese actions. Nixon's first reaction toward the increase in hostilities in Vietnam was to blackmail Soviets with the delay of the summit, provided they fail to influence the North Vietnamese. Nixon then decided to send Kissinger secretly to Moscow on April 20 1972, to make necessary preparations for the summit and, which was Kissinger's first task, to try to convince Soviets to convince the Vietnamese leaders to stop their military offensive. Nixon clearly said that, in the case the Soviets did not accept his demand Kissinger should immediately stop discussions and return home. Kissinger disobeyed the directive by achieving nothing substantial with regards to Vietnam and yet proceeding with the discussions on the subjects such as SALT, contrary to the Nixon's directives. Nixon was extremely disappointed and upset, while his personal sympathies for Kissinger sharply diminished. Nixon then decided to take severe military measures against Hanoi, went on the national television on May 8 and announced that the United States would cut off North Vietnam's arms supply by bombing and blockading the North Vietnamese ports. The bombing unfortunately had a very unpleasant consequence for the United States, because in the course of the bombing the U.S. air force killed some crewmen on Soviet vessels in North Vietnamese waters. Brezhnev immediately communicated a very strong protest and the Soviet-American summit was put into jeopardy. Nixon and Kissinger expected the worst to happen, i.e. the Soviets to cancel the summit. A few days later Politburo debated pros and cons of holding the summit, and finally decided to go on according to the agreed schedule and to hold the summit as it was originally planned, on May 22. It seems that the only thing which decided in favor of the summit was the Politburo's dissatisfaction with its relations with North Vietnamese. It concluded that North Vietnamese should not be further encouraged in their actions by a delay of the summit for the reason that they themselves were not
27 considerate enough to the Soviet intentions and plans. Dobrynin also wrote that "we learned much more from the Americans about their negotiations with Hanoi than we did from the Vietnamese."43 On May 22 1972 Nixon landed at Vnukovo airport. The summit was very successful. The two sides signed, among other agreements, the Treaty on Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems, which limited the number of ABMs to two for each country, and the Interim Agreement on Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, which states that neither country would start construction of additional land-based ICBM launchers. The two agreements were jointly called SALT I. The ABM agreement was of unlimited duration, while the ICBM agreement was limited to the duration of five years, after which the further negotiations on far-reaching arms reductions were supposed to take place.44 The Protocol to the latter agreement specifically stated that the U.S. was limited to 710 submarine ballistic missile launchers on 44 modern submarines, while the Soviet Union was limited to 950 launchers on 62 modern submarines. Another document of special importance for the Soviet side was signed, "The Basic Principles of Relations between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". What the document declared was a sort of philosophy which should guide both the United States and the Soviet Union in their future international behavior. It proclaimed that the two powers were co-equal, that both of them would show maximum restraint in their international behavior, and that they would consult each other whenever a problem of mutual concern occurs. Here one should, however, take into a special account the fact that The Basic Principles was drafted and signed at the insistence of the Soviet side, not the American.45 Several other agreements were signed during the Moscow summit: on the peaceful use of space; on cooperation in science, technology, medicine, and public health; on prevention of incidents at sea; on cooperation in environmental protection. During the summit Brezhnev did mention the PRC. Though he did not criticize the very rapprochement between the United States and the PRC, he issued a sort of
43 Concerning the pre-1972 U.S.-Soviet summit crisis, as well as the reasons which convinced the Soviet side of the need to go on with the preparations for the summit, see Dobrynin, A. (1995), op.cit., pp.248-254 44 See Weihmiller, Gordon R. (1986), U.S.-Soviet Summits, University Press of America, Washington, pp. 54-66, and Dobrynin, A. (1995), op.cit., pp. 256-261 45 See Dobrynin, A., (1995), op.cit., p. 256
28 warning, and said that the Chinese leadership was out "to sow discord in international relations and exploit the differences between the Soviet Union and the United States, and other countries as well".46 Anyway, the Moscow summit was considered a real breakthrough by both sides, the more so because a few weeks before its closure neither side sincerely believed that the summit would take place, let along be so successful. Brezhnev summed up his impressions by having said that "you can do business with Nixon. It is time to prepare for a return visit to the United States".47
1.9. The year 1973, US-USSR
Immediately after the end of the Moscow summit the first task for Nixon and Kissinger was to "extricate themselves" from the war in Vietnam. From late 1972 till early 1973 they achieved this goal, and on January 27 1973 the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam was signed by the United States, the South Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. It is, however, important, from the perspective of triangularism, to notice that in June 1972 Kissinger traveled to Peking to try to reach an agreement with the PRC on Vietnam. The Chinese were not too eager to help him and his trip was, as far as the Vietnam issue was concerned, a failure.48 As R. Nixon was re-elected President of the United States in November 1972, he started preparing for the second summit with Brezhnev. As the preparations were made, as a matter of principle, by Kissinger, he went to Moscow from May 4 till May 9 1973. Later he claimed that during that visit Brezhnev insisted on a kind of Soviet- American nuclear condominium which the Soviet Union would then eventually use to justify its attack on China. But, Anatoly Dobrynin denied that claim. "Our main political and ideological doctrine provided for peaceful coexistence not condominium with the capitalist United States, and the Kremlin publicly and angrily denounced 'fabrications concerning superpower condominium'...As for China, the Kremlin was not so naive as to ally itself with Washington against Beijing, knowing only too well that Washington would not agree and that its sympathies lay on China's side anyway. Many
46 Ibid., p.259 47 Ibid., p. 261 48 Ibid., p. 262
29 years later Kissinger admitted to me that he had been wrong in basing his concepts on the inevitability of a Soviet attack against China".49 After the preparations, during which all the later signed agreements were drafted beforehand, it was agreed that Brezhnev would come to the United States on June 18 1973 for the second U.S.-Soviet summit. The second summit was also marked by a proliferation of agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union. The following agreements were signed: Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, Agreement on Basic Principles of Negotiation on Strategic Arms Limitation, Agreement on Scientific Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, Agreement on Cooperation in Agriculture, Agreement on Cooperation in Transportation, General Agreement on Contacts, Exchanges and Cooperation, and, finally, Protocols on US- USSR Chamber of Commerce, Commercial Facilities and Expansion of Air Services. The first two agreements were the most crucial ones. The Prevention of Nuclear War Agreement declared it unsuitable to threaten or use military force to serve political objectives, which was a statement much weaker than the Soviet side originally proposed. The Soviets wanted to have both the United States and the Soviet Union pledged not to use nuclear weapons first, but the U.S. side believed it was too a strong commitment. 50 On June 23 Brezhnev wanted to speak to Nixon tete-a-tete only about the PRC. He again warned Nixon against selling military supplies to China and asked him for stronger guarantees for Soviet security within the triangular network. But, Nixon's assurances were so disguised that Moscow remained in dark as to what were his true thoughts on the future of the Sino-American relations.51 On June 24 1973 the Joint Communiqué was signed in San Clemente, which declared that "both sides noted with satisfaction that the outcome of the US-Soviet meeting in Moscow in May 1972 was welcomed by other states and by world opinion as an important contribution to strengthening peace and international security, to curbing the arms race and to developing businesslike cooperation among States with different social systems....Convinced that such a development of American-Soviet relations serves the interests of both their peoples and all of mankind, it was decided to take further major steps to give these relations maximum stability and to turn the
49 Ibid., p. 282 50 Ibid., pp. 282-283 51 Ibid., p. 287
30 development of friendship and cooperation between their peoples into a permanent factor for worldwide peace...The two Sides...reaffirm that the ultimate objective is general and complete disarmament, including nuclear disarmament, under strict international control".52 There were understandably some shortcomings in those agreements as well. For instance, the Prevention of Nuclear War Agreement did not contain any provisions on the measures of implementation. Nevertheless the agreements, which also contained the provision that the future U.S.-Soviet summits will be held regularly, had extremely positive impact on the international atmosphere. The Soviet Foreign Ministry thus proclaimed in its confidential summary for Soviet ambassadors that Brezhnev's visit to the United States was "an important milestone in the removal of the threat of nuclear war".53 However, not all members of the international community shared this estimate. Peking sent a message to President Nixon a few days after the second U.S.-Soviet summit in which it complained that the behavior evinced by the United States at the summit was pro-Soviet, that the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War was a step toward "a world hegemony by the two powers", and that "it is impossible to rely on the words of the Soviet Union". Later, Kissinger said to Dobrynin that, in the aftermath of the 1973 summit, Peking proposed to the United States an agreement similar to the Prevention of Nuclear War Agreement, but Nixon was apparently not willing to give any consideration to that proposal.54 And so, in the second half of 1973 Nixon and Brezhnev started heading for another, third summit between the Soviet Union and the United States. However, two important factors aggravated preparations for the summit, and almost dismissed any possibility of further progress in the Soviet-American relations. First, the Watergate affair. Nixon was more and more occupied by the affair which slowly eroded both his authority, and his policy of detente with the Soviet Union. It is interesting to note that Brezhnev was probably one of the few remaining persons who believed that Nixon could have kept holding his presidential position until after 1974. As the consequence of the erosion of Nixon's authority, his policy of an increased cooperation with the
52 For the full text of the joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. Communique, see Weihmiller, G.R. (1986), op.cit., pp. 153-163. 53 See Dobrynin, A. (1995), op.cit., p. 283 54 For the Chinese negative reactions to the second Nixon-Brezhnev summit, see Dobrynin, A. (1995), op.cit., p. 290
31 Soviet Union became a target of strong criticism within the United States. For instance, on January 10 1974, the then Secretary of Defense James Schlessinger proposed a new strategy of limited nuclear war which envisaged a knockout blow to the other side's military potential on the first strike. Schlessinger's proposal was interpreted by the Soviet side as a return to the pre-1972 period, and as a direct blow against the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War from 1973.55 Second, in October 1973 the Yom-Kippur war broke out between Israel and joint forces of Egypt and Syria. One of, for both Soviets and Americans, undesirable consequences of the war was encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army Corps by the Israeli troops, which gave Israelis an opportunity to win an overwhelming victory over the Egyptian forces. After a cease-fire was brokered on October 22 1973, the Israeli forces simply did not want to stop and they proceeded attacking the surrounded Egyptian troops. Brezhnev allegedly issued a strong message to Nixon which communicated the Soviet readiness to take unilateral actions against the Israeli troops. Kissinger responded to this threat by putting the U.S. air force on combat alert. Fortunately for both Soviets and Americans, the Israeli attacks stopped and the situation calmed down. But, both Nixon and Brezhnev were left with a bitter feelings and suspicions about the ultimate effectiveness of the solemn agreements signed during previous two years.56
1.10. The year 1974, US-USSR
These suspicions were to be somehow overcome in the next two months and at the end of January of 1974 Kissinger and Dobrynin started preparations for Nixon's next visit to Moscow. In the late March 1974 Kissinger visited Moscow in an attempt to find a compromise with Brezhnev on the issue of further restrictions on the strategic nuclear missiles and to propose extension of the SALT agreement till the end of the decade. The latter was easily acceptable by Brezhnev, but the compromise on the issue of further restrictions on the strategic nuclear missiles was not reached.57
55 Ibid., p. 311-312. See also Kissinger, H. (1995), op.cit., pp. 740-755 56 For the details of the Soviet-American confrontation, as a result of the Yom Kippur War, see Dobrynin, A. (1995), op.cit., pp. 299-305 57 Ibid., pp. 313-317
32 On June 27 1974 Nixon paid his last official visit to the Soviet Union. The third summit which took place from June 27 till July 3 was also rich in agreements, but none of them was comparable to the agreements reached at the preceding summits. Brezhnev and Nixon agreed to hold a 'mini-summit' before end of 1974 to clarify the remaining issues related to further limitations of the strategic missile systems. The two also signed the following agreements: Protocol to the Treaty on the Limitation of Anti- Ballistic Systems, Treaty and Protocol on the Limitation of Underground Nuclear Weapon Tests, Long-Term Agreement on Economic, Industrial, and Technical Cooperation, and Agreements on Cooperation in Energy, Housing, Artificial Heart Research. The first protocol basically stated that the two sides agreed to reduce the number of ABM systems from 2 to 1, while the second treaty basically stated that the two sides agreed that underground testing of nuclear weapons would be limited to yields of less than 150 kilotons.58 Brezhnev used the summit as an opportunity to express his concerns with the PRC again. He urged Nixon to conclude a nonaggression treaty with the Soviet Union, which would once and for all undermine the Chinese attempts at embroiling the two super-powers in conflict. As Dobrynin later recounted, Nixon told Kissinger on the spot to pursue the idea with Dobrynin for the planned 'mini-summit', but "Kissinger later on quietly killed the idea", while Soviets decided not pursuing it either.59 It was tragic irony of history that the man, who signed the Joint Communiqué in Moscow on July 3 1974, which stated that "both sides are deeply convinced of the imperative necessity of making the process of improving US-Soviet relations irreversible", was forced to resign from the post of president on August 8 1974, as his resignation was followed by a criticism and reversal of the above mentioned process which his opponents wrongfully identified with insufficiencies of his psychological make-up.60 The period of a temporary detente and the niceties of the triangular diplomacy began to recede gradually and irreversibly into the past. But it left its legacy and an intricate web of multiple meanings to animate and amuse future diplomats.
58 See Weihmiller, G.R. (1986), op.cit., pp. 72-75 59 See Dobrynin, A. (1995), op.cit., pp. 319-320 60 For the full text of the 1974 summit final communique, see Weihmiller, G.R. (1986), op.cit., pp. 165-179.
33 PART TWO REALIST INTERPRETATION OF TRIANGULAR DIPLOMACY
As I said in the introductory part, my first task will be to try to explain the triangular diplomacy in terms of realism. I will thus start with the assumption that the chief goals that Kissinger and Nixon were pursuing within the triangular framework were goals from within the "security" cluster of values, that they were primarily interested in the pursuance of tangible objectives, in political and military security of the United States, in an increase or preservation of its national power, and in the defeat or containment of its principal Cold-War rival. After I complete the realist interpretation of triangularism, I will ask myself what are the dimensions of the triangular diplomacy that were left untouched or hidden by the realist narrative. First, it is necessary to lay down tenets of the realist interpretation of international politics.
2.1. The principles of realism
Realism starts with the basic assumption that states, and world-wide distribution of their capabilities, are principal actors of international politics. Each state, as realism hypothesizes, is naturally egocentric, and each state either attempts at dominating other states, or attempts at creating the best possible conditions for a promotion of its own will and interest, uninterrupted by other states' actions and interests. Realism does not have to rely on the hypothesis of an inherent aggressiveness of states. States can be both aggressive and benevolent in realist view. A realist would say that the display of aggressiveness and benevolence by a state will depend on temporary estimates of effectiveness of aggression, or benevolence, by the state. Realism does not have to rely on the hypothesis of an inherent inclination of states to deceive the other states either. States sometimes do employ the strategy of deception for the purpose of, for instance, misleading their adversaries. But they will
34 employ the strategy of transparency as well in order to, for instance, keep close relations with their allies. What realism will, however, typically insist on is the hypothesis that both strategies of deception and employment of aggressive methods by a state will depend only on an independent estimate of national, and never international, interest by the state. All in all, the central hypothesis of realism boils down to the principle stating that state A has to treat other states as a sort of manipulable engines which can be steered either so that they follow the lead of the state A's interests or so that they do not contravene the A's actions in the areas which she considers to be of her vital interest. Realism holds that A must regard other states' goals and values as instrumental to her own goals and values, that A has an interest in the existence of other states only under the condition that she herself can gain tangible benefits from the existence. Realism thus claims that each state would as of necessity treat herself as a center of a Ptolemaic world in which other states must be somehow managed to revolve around the one central, national interest. That is why each and every state, in order to secure its own position, survival and growth, must measure quality, intensity, and direction of external forces, and then proceed to manipulate and neutralize them by exploiting and increasing their antagonisms, whenever needed. States are, for that reason, comparable to organisms which never use their empathic capabilities for altruistic goals. There is in Realpolitik no place for an empathy which cannot identify potential sources of profit. The above are the summarized tenets of the realist interpretation of international relations. They point to the main values that motivate the behavior of states: security, self-help in dealing with adversaries, power, and national interest.61 In what follows I will try to apply these tenets to the period of the triangular diplomacy.
61 The version of realism I described here is a pretty strong one, but I believe that it encompasses most of the hypotheses that most of today's scholars in the international relations would attribute to the realist school of thought. For a classic exposition of realism, see Morgenthau, Hans J. (1993), Politics Among Nations - The Struggle for Power and Peace, brief edition (revised by Kenneth W. Thompson), McGraw-Hill, New York, pp. 4-16.
35 2.2. A realist interpretation of triangular diplomacy
First, I should describe the basics of the United States' national interest in late 1960s in purely realistic terms. The United States had one primary interest at that time which was identified and pursued as of the end of the 2nd World War, and which was to contain the Soviet Union in an intelligent manner and by avoiding risks of direct confrontation as cautiously as possible. While the Soviet Union confirmed its expansionist and anti-liberal drives by having invaded Czechoslovakia, and by having issued the Brezhnev doctrine in 1968, the United States was at higher and higher price becoming increasingly involved in Vietnam which threatened the United States with a new wave of isolationism. America's power was in a relative decline, its relations with the countries of Western Europe were not as clear as they used to be, and the Soviet Union broke into the Middle East where the U.S. had to contain the new threat. The main goal for the new, Nixon's administration was therefore to find a way to keep containing the Soviet Union, to restore the America's standing and power in the world affairs, and at the same time to prevent severe outcomes of the Vietnam experience from happening. And that is why Nixon decided to start playing the China "card". He believed that the Sino-Soviet rift could be manipulated to the United States' advantage and that a progressive improvement of the Sino-American relations would result with two important consequences: a) the Soviet Union would start worring about a potential Sino-American alliance, about an "opening" of the second, Asian front, which would then in turn make the Soviet Union less aggressive, and more flexible and friendly toward the United States, which could then altogether buy some time for the United States to restore its power and clean the slate by extricating itself from inopportune engagements abroad; b) the United States would demonstrate, or rather simulate, its new capability of communicating with its former ideological enemies, which would then teach the Soviets to base their position vis-a-vis the United States not on pure ideological considerations, but on more pragmatic calculus of tangible gains and losses. So, Nixon believed that, by playing the PRC against the Soviet Union, he could transform the sum total of both objective and subjective forces and thus advance the United States' national interest. For that reason he decided simulating a friendship with
36 the weaker force, with China, by which he changed the global situation to the relative advantage of the U.S and the relative disadvantage of the Soviet Union. Comparatively speaking, China was, in terms of its ideology and the treatment of internal enemies, much more backward than the Soviet Union, but Nixon, and Kissinger, did not seem to mind at all. And from a realist perspective they were supposed not to mind. Realism teaches that moral weaknesses of a potential ally do not count if the promotion of one's national interest requires an entry into alliance. Realism teaches that a challenging and threatening power must be kept under control even by the means of control whose morality stands lower than the morality of the power. Tangible profits are the best way to compensate the guilt-feeling that one tolerates the existence of evil, as every realist knows. The methods Nixon and Kissinger used in setting the triangle between the United States, the PRC and the Soviet Union, reflected the realist values I summed up. Nixon, and Kissinger, namely employed the strategies of deception and secrecy.62 Kissinger's first trip to China was secret, and the Soviets should not have known anything about Nixon's preparations to open the China "card". Nixon obviously wanted to give a sort of "shock-therapy" to the Soviet leaders, and secrecy was a part of the therapy. He also narrowed the circle of his assistants and officials who could have gotten to know something about the rapprochement with China, and in that way decreased the probability of a leak, which could have obviously weaken the impact of his announcement of an opening to China. And, finally, he never gave a straight answer to Brezhnev's questions about his dealings with China. All his answers were opaque and ambiguous. So far I have enumerated the values and the methods of their implementation that a realist would identify as the most crucial for understanding of the Nixon's and Kissinger's triangular design. As far as the achievements of the design are concerned, a realist would say that the triangular diplomacy gave a major contribution to the following achievements: 1) The United States, by having stepped in between the PRC and the Soviet Union, decreased the probability of a Sino-Soviet war, which would definitely result with the
62 See Gaddis, John Lewis (1994), Rescuing Choice from Circumstance: The Statecraft of Henry Kissinger, in: The Diplomats: 1939-1979 (ed. by Gordon A. Craig, and Francis L. Loewenheim), pp. 564 - 592, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, pp. 580-583
37 Soviets spreading their influence abroad, and turning the PRC into a Soviet satellite. In that way the United States bought the PRC and prevented the Soviet expansion. 2) By successful normalization of its relations with China the U.S. reduced the size of unfriendly territories abroad, and the North Vietnam lost its main background support, which made the North Vietnamese more willing to achieve a compromise solution and then led to the Paris Peace Agreement. 3) The Soviet Union was put under subtle geopolitical pressure which forced it to decrease its options, to retreat from the Middle East after the Yom-Kippur war, as well as to show more flexibility in negotiations. 4) The United States also won a major propaganda victory by having proved that it was capable of communicating and cooperating with an orthodox communist country, which created an overall impression that ideology does not make difference. This was important because ideology was the only glue which kept both the Soviet Union and the European communist regimes assembled. 5) Finally, the triangular pressures on the Soviet Union might have helped the United States to win the Cold War. As the triangular diplomacy created an incentive for the Soviet Union to contain itself and to stop searching for adventures abroad, and as "a period of peace without expansion strengthened the centrifugal forces within communism"63, the triangular diplomacy was an important, though remote cause of the erosion and collapse of the communist Soviet Union and the Soviet-sponsored communist regimes in the Central and Eastern Europe.
The chief proponent of this realist narrative of the triangular diplomacy is Henry Kissinger. Kissinger emphasized many times that the values he and Nixon tried to materialize, by introducing the PRC into the bipolar structure of the Cold War world, all originated from the considerations of the U.S.' national interest. In his book "Diplomacy" Kissinger writes that "the task at hand, as the Nixon Administration saw it, was to get beyond Vietnam without suffering geopolitical losses, and to establish a policy toward the communists that was geared to the relevant battlefields. Nixon saw detente as a tactic in a long-term geopolitical struggle"64, and that he and Nixon believed that "the wisest course was to discipline a rival super-power"65. Kissinger, as I
63 See Kissinger, H. (1995), op.cit., p. 746 64 Ibid., pp. 744-745 65 Ibid., p. 745
38 already mentioned, compared the triangular diplomacy with a chess play in which the United States was determined to dominate more squares than its main rival. As Kissinger put it: "Once the Soviet Union could no longer count on permanent hostility between the world's most powerful and most populous nations-even more so if the two were actually perceived as having started to cooperate – the scope for Soviet intransigence would narrow and perhaps evaporate. Soviet leaders would have to hedge their bets because a threatening posture might intensify Sino-American cooperation. In the conditions of the late 1960s, improved Sino-American relations became a key to the Nixon Administration's Soviet strategy".66 In a memorandum submitted to Nixon in October 1971 Kissinger also wrote that "we want our China policy to show Moscow that it cannot speak for all communist countries, that it is to their advantage to make agreements with us, that they must take account of possible US-PRC cooperation-all this without overdoing the Soviet paranoia...Pressure on the Russians is something we obviously never explicitly point to. The facts speak for themselves".67 This confirms that the realist values, protection of national interest, stability, national power, security in a turbulent world, were a focal point of Kissinger's understanding of the purposes and achievements of triangular diplomacy.68 As for the achievements of the triangular design, Kissinger claims that the design was obviously successful. He wrote that the policies from the late 1960s "after all, won the Cold War".69 In his book "Diplomacy" he claims that there was a direct causal link connecting the triangular world, a cause, and numerous breakthroughs in international politics, the effects of the cause. "The triangular relationship among the United States, the U.S.S.R., and China unlocked the door to a series of major breakthroughs: the end of the Vietnam war; an agreement that guaranteed access to divided Berlin; a dramatic reduction of Soviet influence in the Middle East, and the beginning of the Arab-Israeli peace process; and the European Security Conference (completed during the Ford Administration)".70
66 Ibid., p. 719 67 See Kissinger, H. (1979), op.cit., p. 765 68 See also Sullivan, Michael P. (1990), Power in Contemporary International Politics, University of South Carolina Press, South Carolina, pp. 78-88 69 See Kissinger, Henry A. (1996), Foreign Policy is More Than Social Engineering, in: International Herald Tribune, Monday, May 13. 70 See Kissinger, H. (1995), op.cit., p. 733
39 We can afford to understand many dimensions of the triangular diplomatic process by relating them to the promotion of the realist values that are so close to Kissinger's heart and that are main ingredient of his own narrative of the triangular diplomacy. The historical account I gave in the preceding section clearly indicates that the subtle geopolitical pressure Nixon and Kissinger created against the Soviet Union, to ensure primarily America's security in the age of strategic equality, seems to have served its purpose well enough, and that it somehow managed to soften the external force inimical to the America's national interest. For instance, the Soviets displayed an anxiety over the Sino-American rapprochement and responded (to it?) with an increased flexibility and readiness to achieve solutions, to cooperate with rather than to confront the United States. Brezhnev insisted on Nixon's assurances that the United States would not push too far its relations with the PRC, that it would not upgrade the Sino-American dialogue to a de facto military alliance, which could strengthen the Chinese muscle, and encourage them to seek for a military settlement of their disputes with the Soviets. The Shanghai Communique expressly declared that the United States and the PRC would oppose any country which would seek hegemony in the Asian region, which was meant to be a message to the Soviet Union. There was a threat and it was more in the air than on the ground. It was a sort of ambiguous threat which assembled its strength not from its actual deliverance but from a possibility of its deliverance. It amounted to a more ideal than real possibility of a threat which, paradoxically, none of the three powers was able to confirm or deny, because their mutual relations themselves were extremely vague. But, I am less than completely happy with the realist narrative of the triangular design. Here are some reasons for my less-then-complete happiness.
2.3. Insufficiencies of the realist interpretation
First, though none could possibly deny that the realist values (stability, power, and security through a threat) played a role in the triangular design, there is no direct historical evidence which could prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the Soviet Union became more cooperative towards the United States as a direct effect of its anxieties over the Sino-American dialogue. There is no a single document which could confirm that the Soviet Union took a strategic decision to change its international
40 behavior because it felt threatened by the U.S.- PRC agreements and communiques.71 There is thus no evidence of a direct causal linkage between the events on one side of the triangle and the events on the other side of the triangle. But, on the other hand, there is no evidence to the contrary either. Which again neither completely confirms nor completely denies one's assumption that the triangular design was a tough game in which realism of its main creators played predominant role. Evidence is here indecisive, and the realist narrative cannot be privileged with the position of the only adequate explanation of the triangular relations, but it cannot be simply dismissed either. That is why, and this is my second point, I strongly believe that one ought, in the interpretation of triangular diplomacy, opt for the position of the "golden mean", and proceed, completely happy, with the hypothesis that the realist values were not the only driving force of triangular diplomacy, and that the triangular diplomacy gave expression to a mixture of different values which pointed to different directions, but which nevertheless reinforced and completed each other. That the sole "security" cluster of values played the crucial role in the triangular diplomatic process is neither affirmable nor deniable. But, what is affirmable is that the "security" cluster of values, combined, completed and upgraded with other clusters of values, such as justice, dignity, cooperation, communication, and international peace and order, was the driving force of the triangular diplomacy. That is why one simply cannot get the whole picture of the triangular dynamics by focusing only on what realism is saying about it. Many dimensions of the triangular design are left untouched and hidden by the realist narrative which provides one with a pale fable in which main characters look too mechanical and cold-blooded, unlike real, fallible and creative people whose multi-layered motivation includes both self-interest and a care for mankind. The following are the dimensions of the diplomatic triangle which the realist perspective is in no position to fully appreciate. First, admission of the PRC into the United Nations. For the Chinese, the U.N. seat was an issue of justice, historical rights, and dignity. It was in no way related to an issue of strategic equilibrium, of balancing one force against the other. The Chinese were ready to diminish importance of the issue of Taiwan in direct negotiations with H. Kissinger and R. Nixon to exploit the symbolism of Nixon's visit and to send a signal to the Soviet Union. But, as far as the seat of Taiwan in the U.N. was concerned, the
71 See Hoff, Joan (1994), Nixon Reconsidered, Basic Books, New York, p. 201
41 Chinese were not ready to compromise. On November 15 1971, 20 days after the legendary vote of the U.N. General Assembly, Chiao Kuan-Hua, chairman of the delegation of the PRC at the plenary meeting of the 26th session of the General Assembly of the U.N., addressed the assembly with the following words: "As is known to all, China is one of the founding members of the United Nations. In 1949, the Chinese people overthrew the reactionary rule of the Chiang Kai-shek clique and founded the People's Republic of China. Since then, the legitimate rights of China in the United Nations should have gone to the People's Republic of China as a matter of course. It was only because of the obstruction by the United States Government that the legitimate rights of the People's Republic of China in the United Nations were deprived of for a long time and that the Chiang Kai-shek clique long repudiated by the Chinese people was able to usurp China's lawful seat in the United Nations".72 This is why the realist narrative of the triangular diplomacy does not suffice. The PRC had its own motivations in the strategic triangle which are by no means explainable in the terms of pure realist values. Second, the first U.S.-Soviet summit was put into jeopardy by an unexpected intensification of hostilities in Vietnam. Few crewmen on a Soviet vessel were killed by the U.S. air force. Why did the Soviets react so strongly to the death of their citizens? The answer is "because the attack of the U.S. air force against the Soviet vessel was a severe breach of the international maritime law".73 This slight complication in the Nixon's and Kissinger's calculations of the strategic triangular forces is again in no way explainable in the terms of realism. And the way the complication was resolved had even less to do with the realist dimension of the triangular diplomacy, because the complication was resolved after the Soviet leadership compared the Vietnamese moral credits with the American moral credits, and formed the opinion that their cooperation with the United States had better prospects than their cooperation with the Vietnamese and that, for that reason, the first U.S.-Soviet summit should be held despite the reasons to the contrary. The delicate threat of the Sino-American side of the triangle did not play any role in the Soviet leadership's decision to keep the U.S.-Soviet summit on the track, which points to another gap in the realist narrative of the triangular diplomacy.
72 See Lawrence, A., ed. (1975), op.cit., pp. 216-219 73 See Dobrynin, A. (1995), op.cit., pp. 248-254
42 Third, the language of agreements. The third section of the Shanghai Communique reads: "..- progress toward the normalization of relations between China and the United States is in the interest of all countries...Both sides are of the view that it would be against the interests of the peoples of the world for any major country to collude with another against other countries or for major countries to divide up the world into spheres of interest". And the first section of the Joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. Communique from June 24 1973 reads: "....Convinced that such a development of American-Soviet relations serves the interests of both of their peoples and all of mankind, it was decided to take further major steps...to turn the development of friendship and cooperation between their peoples into a permanent factor for worldwide peace".74 Due consideration being given to the realist values that probably played a significant causal role in the triangular diplomatic process, how one could possibly explain the language of the aforementioned paragraphs without acknowledging non-realist, liberal values of the triangular design ? The Shanghai Communique refers to an interest of all countries, not only two. It issues a warning not only against the Soviet Union, but, paradoxically, against the PRC and the United States as well, because both the U.S. and the PRC committed themselves to oppose any country which would seek hegemony in the Asian region. If the Shanghai communique was a threat, it was a threat against everyone, and it was also a self-threat. Its language was the language of justice and fairness, the language of human self-restraint, the language of universal values. One could counter-argue that the language was a mere rhetoric, that the language was a diplomatic facade intended to disguise egocentrism and self-interest of the signatories to the documents. But, this counterargument all too easily overlooks the fact that one cannot make an extensive use of the language of universal values without truly holding the beliefs which give meaning and credibility to the language, and that unless one identifies with the content of the beliefs which support the language of universal values, the language itself becomes insecure, incoherent and self-defeating. There is no place in diplomacy for those who cannot come to grips with this simple fact. For all the reasons mentioned above, we should now change perspective and take a deeper look at the dimensions of the diplomatic triangle which the first, realist interpretation was indeed silent about. The following section will tell a different story
74 See footnotes 33 and 54.
43 about the triangular diplomacy, a story about justice, dignity, cooperation, and some other deeply moral concerns.
44 PART THREE LIBERALIST INTERPRETATION OF TRIANGULAR DIPLOMACY
3.1. The principles of liberalism
In contrast with realists, liberalists do not hold that the "power" is a central category of international relations. Nor do they believe that the states are concerned only with their own well-being, their own self-interest, and that the world-image they cultivate approximates the Hobbesian theory of "war of all against all" in which the security of one's own nation represents primary and ultimate value. Liberals believe that the states, or their leaders, can often afford themselves the luxury of describing nations in essentially moral terms. There are some universal values, such as justice, truth, freedom, and cooperation, that each nation aspires to materialize, and that each nation succeeds in materializing at least to some degree.75 The whole mankind is being concerned with those values, liberals would say, and the relations between particular parts of the mankind can be arranged in such a way that all peoples get closer to a final achievement of the universal goals, a final gratification of the deep-rooted needs for truth, freedom, justice etc. Liberalists would also claim that the inter-state borders are artificial, that each and every statesman has an inalienable right to take a close and deep look at the internal state of other nations, not exclusively his own, and to measure the state by the universal criteria of justice, freedom, truth, and cooperation. The liberalists would hence deny that other states are something like billiard balls with an internal structure which is of no concern for a foreign policy maker. Liberals would, besides that, say that each statesman has a right to attempt at influencing the internal state of other nations, provided it does not meet the universal criteria of morality.76 Liberals further believe that the whole of mankind would more and more progress toward the goal of universal freedom, truth, and justice, because human beings instinctively strive for achievement of the ideals. They would buttress this
75 See Fukuyama, Francis (1992), The End of History and the Last Man, Penguin Books, especially pp. 245-284 76 See Human Rights and Diplomacy - The Bloodhounds of History, in: The Economist (1997), April 12th, pp. 21-25.
45 prediction with saying that it is true that at the moment only a part of the mankind fully enjoys the benefits of having approached the universal goals, but the enjoyment would one day come to be a full enjoyment for the whole of mankind, as democracies would naturally and irresistibly spread. Speaking in more concrete terms of democratic ways of governing, liberals would say that the goals that the whole of mankind strives for include a state of no-war, economic prosperity, rule of law, protection of human rights and justice in general, transparency in communication and cooperation. One day, liberals predict, our whole planet would be the host to a sort of universal democratic state. Liberals also subscribe to the hypothesis of a close interdependence of nations, which states that an internal state of a nation must with no exception bear influence on an internal state of other nations, which is why each nation must put its efforts into assisting and supporting other nations in order to achieve its own well-being which, by the force of interdependence, can be nothing but a part of a common well-being. That is why liberals also believe that the natiocentrism, uninterested in the well-being and the internal state of other nations, represents an outdated concept which has to be replaced with the concepts of policentrism, interdependence, and a joint decision- making by equals on the world scale. This would in turn allow all the nations to have their share in influencing the world affairs, in making the relevant decisions on the relevant issues that affect both their existence and well-being. Liberals also claim that it is not only interdependence, i.e. the fact that internal states of different nations bear influence on each other, which tends to bring all of us into a big "family of nations". Besides the factor of interdependence, another factor tends to move nations into the direction of policentrism and internationalism. Different nations can always find, and do find, a common tangible interest which automatically opens the door to a discovery of a new series of common interests. A cooperation aiming at the promotion of one single common interest, when successful, would lead to a number of additional steps of cooperation. Liberals would then say that in the course of working jointly on the promotion of common interests, where a successful cooperation in one field gives birth to an eventually successful attempt at cooperation in another field, importance and relevance of the fact that different individuals belong
46 to different nations would, by the force of the joint endeavors, progressively decrease.77 There is naturally no cooperation without a sense of reciprocity, liberals would further claim. And each instance of reciprocity in cooperation must be based on the mutual understanding between a nation A and a nation B that, throughout the promotion of a common interest I, they must treat one another as ends in themselves, not as a means, or instruments, for an achievement of a partial goal which would satisfy only one of the two. And each instance of cooperation, being based on moral obligation of reciprocity, has to be an instance of the universal value of justice. The triangular diplomacy was not only a crude attempt at playing one force against the other, and it was not entirely disinterested in the internal affairs of the nations targeted. The triangular diplomacy had not a few liberal elements which represented an indispensable part of it, and which made it more interesting than it would otherwise be the case. An interpretation which would not take those liberal elements into account would be biased and poor, while the diplomatic actors thus painted would lack impressiveness of the real people who constantly feel the need to bridge the gap between the real and the ideal, between the self-interest and the interest for mankind, between the inertia of habit and the sudden leap of creation. My next narrative of the triangular dynamics will therefore sort out all its important aspects that originate from the second part of the aforementioned dualities, from the ideal, the interest for mankind, the sudden leap of creation.
3.2. A liberalist interpretation of triangular diplomacy
At the opening of the liberalist narrative I will go back to the year 1967, when R. Nixon published his article "Asia after Vietnam". There he said that "dealing with Red China is something like trying to cope with the more explosive ghetto elements in our own country. In each case a potentially destructive force has to be curbed; in each case an outlaw element has to be brought within the law; in each case dialogues have to be opened; in each case aggression has to be restrained while education proceeds; and, not least, in neither case can we afford to let those now self-exiled from society
77 This is the central principle of functionalism, which, in my opinion, gives all its support to liberalist school of thought in the international relations. See Dougherty, James E., and Pfaltzgraff, Robert L., Jr. (1990), Contending Theories of International Relations, HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, pp. 431-461
47 stay exiled forever. We have to proceed with both an urgency born of necessity and a patience born of realism, moving step by calculated step toward the final goal".78 What do we have here is a typical Wilsonian, liberal description of a foreign state. Nixon compared the PRC with an internal element of the American society itself, which means that he erased the difference between the foreign and the domestic politics. He thereby displayed the typical liberal attitude which gives an inalienable right to the leaders of all nations to follow and judge the internal states of the nations other than one's own. His metaphor of "ghetto element" pictures the world of nations as a common world which does not tolerate artificial boundaries, and where a representative of one nation has to treat other nations as a constitutive part of, as something inextricably linked to, one's own nation. Nixon also emphasized the element of the international law, and the element of educational approach to other nations, which is all indicative of liberal attitude toward the world affairs. Once we take Nixon's words from 1967 serious, we are in position to take a stand toward the triangular diplomacy which substantially differs from the stand of realism. What Nixon accomplished by opening the U.S. to the PRC was a sort of rehabilitation of an outlaw element, which was itself threatened by its prolonged staying in exile. Nixon tried and succeeded to reopen a dialogue with the PRC, a dialogue of equals, based on reciprocity and mutual respect. In that way he "engaged" China, as today's liberals of Clinton's Administration would say, and demonstrated to her that even the nations with diverse interests can find a ground for commonalities, a ground for speaking the same language, which would for both of them then make easier to overcome the differences and animosities imposed on them by past misfortunes. And later on, after 1967, while Nixon was actually opening the U.S. to the PRC, he kept describing the U.S.-PRC relations as the "relations of friendship", in harmony with the liberal tradition of the U.S. foreign policy and contrary to Kissinger's realist description of the inter-state relations as the relations of the "no friend-no enemy" type. Nixon has also several times repeated that the new friendship between the United States and the PRC was simply that, an expression of a need for friendship, which should not make other states, notably the Soviet Union, feel neglected or threatened, but which should be taken as an expression of a genuine need for friendship with all equally open nations. Nixon, in other words, said that the U.S.' call to China was assumed to be a
78 See Nixon, R.M. (1967), op.cit., p. 123
48 call to the Soviet Union as well, a call which should preferably result with the United States coming closer to both the Soviet Union and the PRC, and setting in that way a precedent and a vision to guide the conduct of other nations. Without the liberal spirit, Nixon's triangular design would never flourish. This Nixon's liberal outlook to the foreign policy was very vividly described by none else but Kissinger himself, who in his Diplomacy wrote that, "Nixon was reflecting the essential ambivalence of his society - so in need of being perceived as hardheaded, yet so dependent on drawing inner strength from its traditional idealism. Incongruously, the president most admired by Nixon....was Woodrow Wilson himself... Nixon often invoked standard Wilsonian rhetoric. 'We do have a destiny', he said, 'to give something more to the world simply than an example which other nations in the past have been able to give...an example of spiritual leadership and idealism which no material strength or military power can provide'. Indeed, he shared the great American yearning for a foreign policy devoid of self-interest....The invocations of altruism by a president who in the same breath insisted that the future of the world should be decided by five great powers pursuing their own national interests represented a novel synthesis of the American experience. Nixon took American idealism seriously in the sense that he shared Wilson's passionate internationalism and belief in America's indispensability....Nixon's point of departure was American exceptionalism, although his own extensive acquaintance with foreign leaders had taught him that the fewest of them were altruistic; given a truth serum, most of them would have opted for a certain amount of calculability in American foreign policy, and considered the American national interest more reliable than altruism. This was why Nixon preferred to operate on two tracks simultaneously: invoking Wilsonian rhetoric to explain his goals while appealing to national interest to sustain his tactics".79 There is another liberal component which played a major role in the beginnings of triangular diplomacy, and so far I deliberately left it pass unnoticed. As one should remember from my historical account of triangular diplomacy, serious skirmishes between the Soviets and the Chinese broke out in the middle of March 1969. It was this event which triggered the implementation of Nixon's main foreign policy design, and which gave him an opportunity to initiate the U.S.' opening to China. As Kissinger described Nixon's reaction to the border-clash between the PRC and the Soviet Union,
79 See Kissinger, H. (1995), op.cit., pp. 705-706
49 it had the character of a sudden and inspiring insight into a potential for the foreign policy making; it had the character of a sudden cognitive rearrangement of the foreign policy elements which showed to the U.S. its place in the world and made it almost automatically involved in the international events. Nixon, as Kissinger recounts, reacted to the new situation by remarking "how sometimes unexpected events could have a major effect".80 He, in other words, experienced a sudden encounter of ideas, something which contemporary psychologists call a "creative leap". What stayed behind the ideas? What was their driving force? My answer would be "liberalism". Because, Nixon's ideas on the skirmishes were strongly colored by his moral sense, by the typical liberal American tradition which judges other nations' behavior by measuring how close it stands to the universal criterion of justice and morality. As we should remember, Nixon concluded, rightfully or wrongly, that the Soviet side was aggressive side, while the Chinese were a victim of the Soviet aggression. The Soviets were bad guys, while the Chinese were good guys. The evil attacked the innocent, and the U.S., via Nixon, had to raise its voice. In Nixon's eyes, the skirmishes between the Soviets and the Chinese were thus nothing else but another Soviet abuse of power for immoral purposes, for oppressing the weak and violating its human right to decent life. The evil might have grown too big, and to appease it in the case of China would imply a moral defeat of the United States. The United States hence had to step in the middle to counterbalance the evil and protect the weak. And that is exactly how Nixon reasoned about the Sino-Soviet clash and the position which the U.S. had to take in that matter. Liberalism played an essential motivational role in the triangular diplomacy, and without it Nixon would have probably never reacted so timely, directly and persistently to China's troubles with the Soviet Union. Later, in 1972, the U.S. and the PRC adopted the Shanghai Communique which declared that both sides would oppose any country which would seek hegemony in the Asian-Pacific region. The Communique was an expression of anti-hegemonism, and it clearly favored democratic principles in the conduct of international relations. 'No' to hegemony meant 'no' to any attempt at changing the international situation by force and at violating the principle of 'self-governance'. No wonder then that the process which was initiated by the strong liberal spirit of an
80 See Kissinger, H. (1979), op.cit., p. 172
50 American president was to reach its peak in the document which confirmed the liberal values and made use of the typical liberal notions and phrases. Kissinger himself was, contrary to popular thinking, more sensitive to liberal values than one could conclude from reading the textbooks on international relations and the diplomacy of the 20th century. Kissinger was fully aware of the demoralization of the United States in the late 1960s. It is not only a concern with morality of other nations which makes one liberal, but a concern with morality of one's own as well, and even more so. We should now, for the purpose of understanding the concern with one's own moral standing, one's own moral credibility, read more carefully the third section of Kissinger's book "White House Years", in which he described the America's "Zeitgeist", its spirit of the age, in the late 1960s.81 What Kissinger said there could be retold in the following way. The image a nation has of itself is of extreme importance for its behavior on the international arena, because the image, if containing the elements of self-esteem and self-confidence, could have favorable impacts on the way the nation behaves internationally. The nation has to have some evidence confirming its own readiness to stand by its promises, obligations, and involvements, since otherwise it would lose self-respect and start behaving erratically. The problem with the United States in the late 1960s was that it basically lost the faith in its own purpose, as it was confronted with more and more of the evidence disconfirming its positive self-image, its belief in its high moral standing. There were too many in America at that time who believed that their homeland tended to create too much a mess abroad, and that America became "too evil for the world".82 As Kissinger said, the dissatisfaction of the Americans with the behavior of the U.S. internationally had very firm and real grounds amongst which one of the firmest was "Vietnam". Stanley Hoffman compared the U.S. of that period with the famous literary character "Gulliver", who travelled to distant countries only to find himself immobilized by tiny, seemingly weak creatures called "Lilliputians". Kissinger deeply believed in the truth of this metaphor himself. He wrote that "the process of coming to grips with one's limits is never easy. It can end in despair or in rebellion; it can produce a self-hatred that turns inevitable compromises into a sense of inadequacy. America went through such a period of self-doubt and self-hatred in the late 1960s. The trigger
81 Ibid., pp. 55-65 82 Ibid., pp. 56-57
51 for it was the war in Vietnam....The America was not at peace with itself. The consensus that had sustained our postwar foreign policy had evaporated. The men and women who had sustained our international commitments were demoralized....the insidious theme of the late 1960s was that we should withdraw from the world because we were too evil for it".83 Americans were not only despaired by the experience of Vietnam, but by their increasingly complicated relations with the Western allies as well. And there was the factor of nuclear military technology, which was in itself sufficient to raise fears and doubts about the purpose of being involved in the international universe which was marked by constantly recurring tensions and crises. So, the task which was put in front of new Nixon's Administration was to raise the spirits again, to find a way to recover America's self-image, and to find a new evidence which could confirm that there is a place in the world for America's standards; that the U.S. is not only capable of committing sins, but also of regaining its strength and creativity by opening new perspectives for the future. The task for Nixon's Administration was thus to provide the American nation with a new world-image which would fit its ideals, which would provide them with a novel orientation to rebuild America's trust in the values which were so close to its hearts and minds. As Kissinger put it, "The new Nixon's Administration was the first of the postwar generation that had to conduct foreign policy without the national consensus that had sustained its predecessors largely since 1947. And our task was if anything more complex....Could we shape a new consensus that could reconcile our idealism and our responsibilities, our security and our values, our dreams and our possibilities?"84 As one can clearly see, the considerations of morality, especially of America's own morality, were in the forefront of new Nixon Administration's concerns, even according to what Kissinger the Realist narrates about the foreign policy making of his former boss. Kissinger himself vividly expressed this concern with America's morality upon his return from the February 1972 trip to China. The following are the words he said to the President cabinet's staff at that point: "This could not have been done at a lower level. The Chinese had to ask themselves: Do these people have a view of the world we can live with? Are they reliable enough as a people - and as leaders - to carry
83 Ibid., pp. 56-57 84 Ibid., p. 65
52 this out for a period of time ?....When the words of communique are long forgotten, it may be considered a historical turning point if...they now look on our whole society and see there is enough there to be what they want".85 Is there however any more direct link to connect this concern about America's moral standing, about its image of its own moral credibility, with the events that later took place within the grand diplomatic triangle ? Yes, there is a clear link, and Kissinger will again provide us with the guidelines to track it down. Both Nixon and Kissinger believed that the world split into two super-power camps was extremely rigid, that the bipolar split lacked flexibility and a potential for objective, rational dealing with the international issues. In the bipolar world, as they thought and I agree, every side tends to interpret the gains of the other side as an absolute loss for itself, which indispensably turns each of the two chief actors into a mechanical automaton blindly reacting to the reactions of the other, and curses upon the world a vicious circularity of the most boring kind, which deprives the two of any possibility of seeing a progress in their relations. The world Nixon and Kissinger envisaged as a better than the bipolar one was a multipolar world where at least five regional powers, meaning both states and multistate entities, would be taking decisions of their own, independently of each other, on all the issues of their concern. Kissinger, for instance, stood for the idea of leaving the European allies as much freedom as possible in determining their own course and taking their own decisions on all for them relevant issues. "I had urged for years that it was in the American national interest to encourage a sharing of responsibilities. If the United States insisted on being the trustee of all the non-Communist areas we would exhaust ourselves psychologically long before we did so physically. A world of more centers of decision, I believed, was fully compatible with our interests as well as our ideals".86 And Nixon, on January 3 1972, said: "So I believe in a world in which the United States is powerful. I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance".87
85 See Schulzinger, Robert D. (1989), Henry Kissinger - Doctor of Diplomacy, Columbia University Press, New York, p. 100 86 See Kissinger, H. (1979), op.cit., p. 69 87 See Kissinger, H. (1995), op.cit., p. 705
53 The multipolar world Nixon and Kissinger envisaged was assumed to lead to an end of the extreme simplicity and immobility of bipolarism which kept the will of non- major actors necessarily suppressed, and reduced the number of relevant and truly free decision makers to two. Democratic spirit was not able to flourish in the bipolar international setting which was characterized by a blind competition between the poles, and nothing close to liberal cooperation of equals was possible under the unhealthy condition of the bipolar struggling. That is one of the main reasons why both Kissinger and Nixon thought the world of several independent decision centers would be much closer to the American ideals. That is finally why Nixon said that the multipolar world would be a better one, and why Kissinger said that the world of more centers of decision would be fully compatible with the American, i.e. liberal, ideals. Which is perfectly understandable. Such a multipolar world would by definition be the world of multilateralism, multiculturalism, of equal freedoms for different groups, the world of checks and balances, where nobody is privileged and everybody enjoys equal opportunities. To put it into one single sentence, such a world would represent a projection of America's liberal self-understanding on the world-wide scale. Now we can return to the subject of triangular diplomacy again. The triangular diplomacy, if seen in the light of Nixon's and Kissinger's defense of multipolarism, was a step toward a world which would progressively match the liberal ideal of free and freely cooperating nations, nations in the state of even and just balance. It was a step in the process of transforming the rigid and oppressive bipolar universe into a universe of more centers of decision making. The PRC had to be brought back to the world of internationally relevant factors, because its return would imply an increase in the number of truly free world centers, an increase which would, from the standpoint of all liberalist-minded people, be good as such. The very subtleties of the triangular relations between the China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, did not matter so much as the very basic and simple fact that the world society moved toward its more liberal form. Both Kissinger and Nixon knew that China's place in the triangle was to be secured only by treating it as a partner equal to the United States, and as, by that very fact, a state in its importance equal to the Soviet Union as well. And once the world could have changed its old structure, which was based on the two giants having usurped the right to speak on behalf of other, second-rank, nations, there was no remaining reason why that pattern of change would not be promoted even further,
54 toward a truly policentric world of autonomous, equal, and mutually dependent nations. I don't believe that this dimension of the triangular diplomacy demonstrates inadequacy of the former, the realist narrative. By looking at the triangular diplomacy as a simple effect of a simple desire to give birth to a multipolar, or policentric world of democratically functioning centers of decision making, one gains a broader perspective, and further useful insight into the rich, multidimensional, flexible, and essentially ambiguous triangular diplomatic process run by the real, sensitive, and creative people. As Kissinger on some pages of his "White House Years" recollects, there was something in the Sino-American relations that went deeper than a brute yearning for power. He mentioned that triangular diplomacy required agility, and implied risks. The opening to China, he wrote, had to be accomplished in a non-aggressive way, without giving any hint at a possible manipulation. "'The China card' was not ours to play....To the extent that we tried to aggravate rivalry we would lose in other ways. Paradoxically, we might even disquiet Peking by doing so: To speak of a China card implied that for a price we might not play it. The Chinese often expressed the fear that having achieved our objective with Moscow we might find Peking expandable; Mao warned us against 'standing on China's shoulders to reach Moscow'. Any attempt to manipulate Peking might drive China into detaching itself from us..."88 In other words, the liberal way of managing the international relations had to be a true component of the U.S.' opening to the PRC. The fakes were forbidden, and anything hinting at a possible manipulation, at a power play behind one's back, would imply catastrophic risks. The PRC had to be treated as a partner equal to the United States, not as a pawn on a chess-board of Realpolitik to be manipulated for ulterior motives.
Triangular diplomacy thus provides diplomats with an extremely important lesson. The lesson reads that the realistic values of power and security can set nothing else but a loose base for a broad orientation in the international arena, a base which simply cannot stand on its own. The base is useful, as it makes one alert to the perennial concepts around which groups, peoples, and states build their identities. But both security and power depend on stability which further depends on the principles of justice. An order the stability of which depends on enforcement and artificial
88 See Kissinger, H. (1979), op.cit., p. 763
55 imposition by the stronger cannot persist in the long run. Violation of the principles of justice will in any system sooner or later backfire. It is for that reason that the values typical of realism must be completed and softened by the values typical of liberalism. Moreover, realism in itself tends not to raise any objections against an instrumental treatment of other nations as a means to achievement of one's own goals. But, as a matter of fact, nobody likes to be treated instrumentally, as it would make him feel dispensable. Actual implementation of the norms of realism thus has to proceed along the guidelines of non-realist, liberal understanding of the international politics. It is hence the dynamics of triangular diplomacy which taught us that no diplomatic process has a chance to succeed unless the atmosphere between its participants has the liberal flavor. The spirit of cooperation, which must be based on mutual trust, and which, being an intangible, cannot be verbally conveyed to its fullest extent, originates from one's almost religious faith in the human's ability to materialize, however imperfectly, the values which transcend the boundaries of self-interest. I don't claim that one has the power to detach himself from his origins, or his fellow-citizens, completely. Nor do I claim that one should try to do so. What I claim is that both types of values, the self-promotion born from an objective assessment of the distribution of relative powers, and the genuine care for commonalities, born from the capacity to identify the areas where one has to rely on others, must be kept in balance whenever one deals with the sensitive international issues that are subject to diplomatic communication. The considerations of power, the Realpolitik, and the considerations of morality, the main engine of liberalism, have to be reconciled, and given equal concern to, in the minds of diplomats. Only then would one see more Shanghai Communiques drafted and delivered.
56 PART FOUR THE "CONFLICT RESOLUTION" APPROACH TO TRIANGULAR DIPLOMACY
The narrative one selects to explain a set of historical elements depends on the way he arranges the elements and on the specific emphasis he puts on certain elements rather than on others. Some time ago I tried to rearrange the elements of the triangular diplomacy in the way which supports neither the realist nor the liberalist interpretation. And here is the initial intuition I had. Prior to the 1970s the U.S. and the Soviet Union were engaged in a sort of "zero sum" game. Every while there was a new crisis. Speaking bluntly, the two super- powers were in the state of conflict. Luckily, however, the conflict never turned into an armed one, which could be explained as a consequence of structural restraints and historical luck, rather than a consequence of inherent benevolence of the two parties. Then enters the PRC, the third player. The entry of China apparently did make a difference, because as soon as China became involved in the strategic triangle, the number of the agreements reached between the United States and the Soviet Union steeply increased, and the atmosphere of the Cold War, the 'chicken' game, started melting.89 The communication between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. improved and the conflictual behavior was replaced with a sort of mixed, both cooperative and competitive, behavior. That means that, somehow, the negative potential for conflict was drastically reduced by the transformation of the bipolar system into a tripolar system. I concluded that some, yet to be identified, mechanism of the conflict resolution must have stood behind the transformation. Was the PRC some kind of unofficial intermediary who was unaware of his proper role? Or was it something closer to a
89 As George and Craig noticed: "It is interesting to note that of the 105 treaties and other agreements that the United States had made with the Soviet Union since 1933, when President Roosevelt extended diplomatic recognition to the USSR, 58, or over half the number, were concluded between 1969 and 1974; and 41 of those were signed between May 1972 and May 1974". See Craig, Gordon A., and George, Alexander L. (1995), Force and Statecraft, third edition, Oxford University Press, New York Oxford, p. 121.
57 bargaining chip which was manipulated by the United States? Such questions deserve special scrutiny, and I hope that this section will provide some answers to those questions. I will begin with a very straight hypothesis which I will further elaborate in the forthcoming arguments. The hypothesis states that triangular diplomacy functioned primarily as an engine which propelled the transformation of the conflictual behavior into a more peaceful and cooperative behavior of both the United States and the Soviet Union.90
4.1. Conflict and communication
One should, however, first understand the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union which was in place over the 1960s. The interests of the two superpowers were obviously divergent. The Soviet Union wanted to have nuclear missiles on Cuba, while the United States did not want them in its neighbourhood. The Soviets invaded Czechoslowakia in 1968, which was by many states, including the U.S., interpreted as another Soviet attack on freedoms of independent nations. The Soviets understood the North Vietnam's war against the U.S. as a movement of national liberation, while the U.S. understood it as a communist threat to its vital interests in Indochina. The Middle East was another area where the American and Soviet interests clashed, and brought the two into a new phase of rivalry and competition. The relationship between the two was a zero-sum game, where whatever gain one side would have achieved the other would interpreted it as an absolute loss for itself. The communication between any two conflicting parties displays some common and easily discernible features. It was thus very predictable that the two superpowers would, once they become entrapped into a protracted conflict, find it
90 Contemporary scholars in the field of conflict research place a strong emphasis on the difference between conflict resolution and conflict transformation. The process which took place within the framework of triangular diplomacy, from 1969 till 1974, was in my opinion an instance of conflict transformation. For a theoretical explanation of the distinction between conflict resolution and conflict resolution, see Vaeyrynen, Raimo (1991), To Settle or to Transform ? Perspectives on the Resolution of National and International Conflicts, in: Vaeyrynen, Raimo (ed.) New Directions in Conflict Theory, pp. 1-25, SAGE, London, especially pp. 2-7, and Wallensteen, Peter (1991), The Resolution and Transformation of International Conflicts: A Structural Perspective, in: Vaeyrynen, Raimo (ed.) New Directions in Conflict Theory, pp. 129-152, SAGE, London, especially pp. 129-132
58 increasingly difficult both to communicate their intentions to one another and to build expectations of the future behavior of the side opposite to one's own. Since parties to a conflict have divergent and contradictory interests, and since a successful communication requires a common world-image which, with an awareness of contradictory interests, cannot be carried through successfully, the communication between parties to any conflict tends to aggravate and to suffer from frequent distortions. The same happened to the United States and the Soviet Union as parties to a conflict. One of the clearest manifestations of the distortions that impede the communication between adversaries is a tendency to read wrong intentions into the pieces of adversary's behavior.91 Parties to a conflict usually read into the adversary's behavior either an amount of intentions which is larger than the one which impartial, third parties would deduce from the available evidence, or an amount of intentions which is smaller than the one which would be deduced by the third parties from the available evidence. For instance, in the case a party to a conflict would display a piece of friendly behavior toward its adversary, the adversary would understand it as an evidence of an attempt to paralyze him, to make him less prepared for defence. And in the case a party to a conflict would display a piece of adversarial behavior, its adversary would understand it as an attempt to deceive, to disguise some other, hidden and more bellicose intentions. This tendency makes for the parties to a conflict extremely difficult to communicate their toughts and intentions to each other, and tends to turn any conflict into a self-perpetuating, hopeless relationship. Once one gets entrapped into a conflict, it is very difficult to transform the conflictual relationship into a more positive one, mainly for the reason of the aforementioned obstacles to normal communication.92 This was exactly the state in which the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves in the late 1960s. They found themselves in an impasse, and each, as the nuclear sword was swinging over everyone's head, had an interest in finding a way out of the impasse. But, neither of the two was willing to initiate a change, because
91 For an evidence that American foreign policy analysts were obsessed by the issue of Soviet intentions, see Kissinger, Henry A. (1969), American Foreign Policy - Three Essays, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, pp. 85-90 92 See Deutsch, Morton (1991), Subjective Features of Conflict Resolution: Psychological, Social and Cultural Influences, in: New Directions in Conflict Theory, ed. by Raimo Vaeyrynen, pp. 26-56, SAGE, London, p. 40
59 whichever of the two would do that it would face a danger of being turned down, or taken advantage of. Each of the two was worried about the possibility that the rival would exploit the situation of relaxed tensions for gathering a new aggressive energy. At least that was the logic which both followed.93 There are two important things one should notice here. First, the parties to a conflict usually rely on intermediaries, the third parties which can facilitate and move the process of achieving compromises and finding mutually acceptable solutions. The third parties serve as translators who can differentiate between legitimate concerns of the parties to a conflict and their irrational fears and misreadings. The third parties must be provided with sufficient skills and credentials to express adversaries' standpoints in a neutral language, and in a manner which makes the adversaries' intentions more transparent. The very fact that a third party takes upon itself the task of expressing the attitudes of the conflicting parties might sometimes prove useful, as the third party detaches the original intentions of a party to a conflict from their bellicose substance and present them to the opposite party as a legitimate concern, not as a misleading piece of behavior.94 The U. S. and the U.S.S.R. were, however, not in a position to rely on assistance of intermediaries. There was simply nobody to provide the two superpowers with sufficiently neutral, skillful, and prestigious third party, or mediator, who could have resolved their differences. Who would dare to try mediating between the two absolutely dominating powers? Second, owing to the fact that communication between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was heavily impeded, i.e. that it was extremely difficult for them to verbally convey indications of benevolence, and assurances of credibility, to one another, which was a precondition for "peace talks" of any kind, and owing to the fact that there was no appropriate intermediary in sight, what the two were supposed to do? There was no possibility of proceeding a serious message on one's own, and there was no possibility of proceeding the message through a third channel. If one can talk neither directly nor indirectly to his rival, then it seems that one cannot do anything else but endure in the state of quiet despair.
93 Kissinger described such situation as "an environment consecrated to stalemate". See Kissinger, H. (1995), op.cit., p. 716 94 See Mitchell, C.R. (1981), The Structure of International Conflict, Macmillan Press, London, pp. 286-313
60 4.2. Tacit communication - a way out of conflictual communication?
Well, the state of a quiet despair was luckily not the only way to tackle the issue of the communication gap. There is another option called 'tacit communication', which does not rest on an exchange of verbal messages, but on a simpler process of making strategic and tangible choices that demonstrate intentions post facto, and, at the same time, point to a broader direction of the future choices that are likely to be taken. Since one of the classic writers on this subject was T. Schelling, I will in the remaining parts of this section base my third narrative of the triangular diplomacy on his book "The Strategy of Conflict".95 Schelling demonstrated in his book that people can often communicate and cooperate successfully without an usage of direct verbal links. Subjects to one of his experiments were given the following task: "You are to meet somebody on New York City. You have not been instructed where to meet; you have no prior understanding with the person on where to meet; and you cannot communicate with each other. You are simply told that you will have to guess where to meet and that he is being told the same thing and that you will just have to try to make your guesses coincide".96 What this task amounted to was to read other people's intentions and then to act in unison with the intentions read, without relying on verbal communication of any kind. Majority of subjects to this Schelling's test resolved the problem successfully. Though they did not have an opportunity to communicate, they succeeded in making correct guesses on what their respective partners intended to do, and on what they would have to do in order to coordinate the expectations of their partners with their own. How ? Schelling's answer to this question was very simple and very deep. He said that the subjects to his experiment had to focus on some elements of the very situation they faced. Some elements of the situation provided clues that prompted the subjects to prefer one outcome over the rest, and to build intentions of one sort rather than another. As Schelling puts it: "Most situations provide some clue for coordinating behavior, some focal point for each person's expectation of what the other expects him
95 See Schelling, Thomas C. (1960), The Strategy of Conflict, Oxford University Press, London Oxford New York, especially pp. 53-80, and pp. 83-118 96 Ibid., p. 56
61 to expect to be expected to do".97 In other words, subjects did not direct their thoughts to their respective partners, isolated from the rest of the situation. They preferred instead to first direct their thoughts to the situation which both them and their partners had to face, and then to conclude what intentions their partners might have had, given the focal points of the situation, and everything else. The subjects reasoned in approximately the following way: "This is our situation. It shows some prominent, conspicuous points. My partner is very likely to perceive these points. And his perceptions are very likely to result with certain intentions. Based on these intentions, I will make my own guess and coordinate it with the intentions of my partner". As Schelling said, in situations such as this one people usually rely more on imagination than on logic, and "poets may do better than logicians at this game, which is perhaps more like 'puns and amagrams' than like chess. Logic helps....but usually not until imagination has selected some clue to work on from among the concrete details of the situation".98 Schelling basically demonstrated that the tacit communication is possible, and that people can coordinate their behavior even when direct verbal communication is impeded, or made impossible. Two parties can find an agreement even in the situation where they cannot talk to one another, because they can rely on their unspoken perceptions, which, given the situation they face, must be there. Once we decide to apply this Schelling's theory to the state of the Soviet-American conflict in the 1960s, the situation ceases to be entirely hopeless. Both Soviet and American Administration had a viable option. Despite the fact that communication between the two was dangerously impeded, and that the potential for distortion of their messages and interpretations was huge, they could have relied on sort of tacit, non-verbal communication to eventually resolve their protracted conflict. The relation between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s was thus comparable to Schelling's experimental designs. And, as we today know, the relation had in the early 1970s produced an outcome comparable to the outcome of Schelling's experiments. The United States and the Soviet Union have also done pretty well in achieving a tacit balance of interests, and in transforming their conflict into a more managable relation of detente. How did the two superpowers achieve this ? How
97 Ibid., pp. 57-58 98 Ibid., p. 58
62 come they suddenly found a clue, a focal point, which made their behaviors more predictable, and their intentions better readable? My answer to the questions would be that as of the early 1970s both the United States and the Soviet Union found their focal point which corresponded with the focal points from Schelling's experimental designs. The focal point, which made both the American and the Soviet intentions better readable, while their behaviors more predictable, was the China factor. Once the PRC entered the map of international relations, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union became more motivated for a resolution of their conflict, and found it easier to lay down the tacit rules governing their behavior. What actually happened, and why the PRC introduced better prospects for a resumption of the Soviet-American dialogue, and for a peaceful management of their divergences?
4.3. How the tacit signalling within the strategic triangle reduced and transformed the potential for conflict
First of all, the involvement of the PRC into the strategic triangle changed radically the definition of the international situation for both superpowers. One should not get the impression that the PRC did not exist prior to the establishment of its links with the United States. The American opening to China, however, provided the latter with a status of the power equal to other two, and changed the perceptions both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had about the international arena. Nixon and Kissinger thus reframed the global political situation, and shed a new light on the international system.99 As Kissinger repeatedly stressed, the new tripolar universe emerged in order to loose the grip the two superpowers had on one another. The logic behind that was very simple. An adversarial relation usually implies that each adversary cultivates an image of the international relations which gives absolute priority to the actions of his opponent. The bipolar system was rigid because everything which was taking place within the system was interpreted by each of the two super-poles as being either related to the opposite super-pole, or affecting the existing power distribution between the two super-poles. Speaking simply, the two super-powers were obsessed by one another, and the
99 For the concept of reframing, see Watzlawick, Paul, Weakland, John H., and Fisch, Richard (1974), Change, W.W. Norton & Company, New York London, pp. 92-109
63 significance each of them was ready to assign to the actions of the opposite pole far exceeded the tangible impact of the actions, which further tended to freeze their relations and make them extremely inflexible, resistant to any change. The new definition of the international system removed that rigidity with a single move. The introduction of the PRC thus increased the freedom of maneuvring for both the United States and the Soviet Union, and provided them with a sense that the number of options, as well as relations, increased. The increase in number of options and relations further implied an increased flexibility of the relations. In other words, both the United States and the Soviet Union had to experience the change in the nature and number of the important international actors as a change to better, because the old grips were proved less valid, as Nixon, by having introduced the PRC into the top of the international system, to a large extent liberated each of the two super-powers from a pathological obsession with the actions of its principal rival; and once the psychological obsession was removed, both sides have gotten a strong incentive to calculate their options more rationally, and plan their future steps more cautiously, which then further generated the tacit mutual understanding between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that the chance for transforming their conflictual relation into a more positive, more cooperative one, was real. Second, some additional positive changes went hand-in-hand with the change in the definition of the international situation. By opening itself to China, and thus changing the very definition of the international system, the United States sent several strong signals to the Soviet Union, the signals which could not have been sent directly, or verbally. First, by relating itself to China and signing the Shanghai Communique which stated that the U.S. and China would oppose any third country seeking for hegemony in the Pacific-Asian region, the United States made further intensification of its relations with China dependent on the subsequent behavior of the Soviet Union. The United States did not confront the Soviet Union with a fait accompli. It did not forge a new alliance, nor did it issue a sort of new threat to the Soviet Union. The United States sent through the joint Sino-American Shanghai Communique a strong, though indirect message to the Soviet Union, signalling that its future decisions would be conditional on the future Soviet behavior; this message had a double connotation, because it connoted that the United States would harmonize its negative actions vis-a- vis the Soviet Union with the negative Soviet actions vis-a-vis the United States; but,
64 on the other hand, it also connoted that the United States would harmonize its positive actions vis-a-vis the Soviet Union with the positive Soviet actions vis-a-vis the United States. By cautiously introducing the China factor, Nixon had therefore both left to the Soviet Union the freedom to choose its future course, and let it know that the United States was willing to improve the U.S.-Soviet relations, provided the Soviet side was willing to do the same. This, as one can clearly see, brought the predictability back to the U.S.-Soviet relations. The establishment of the strategic triangle implied that the United States' future behavior, on one side of the triangle, would unconditionally reflect the future behavior of the Soviet Union, on the other side of the triangle. In that way the United States made its behavior again predictable for the Soviet Union, which unavoidably led to a renewal of psychological transparency between the two super- powers. It goes without saying that a conflict cannot be peacefully resolved unless the parties to the conflict are ready to restore the transparency of their behavior, which the United States did by linking the two sides of the strategic triangle. Another strong signal was sent to the Soviet Union by the U.S.' opening to China. The United States signalled to the Soviet Union its willingness to place certain limits on its behavior, because, by having selected the new policy toward China, the U.S. already placed certain limits on its behavior. The U.S. was not a friend to China, and China was obviously a communist country. Besides that, there was a serious dispute between the U.S. and the PRC on the Taiwan issue. The two states did not have any diplomatic relations, and the U.S. opposed the very idea of the replacement of the Taiwan seat in the U.N. with a PRC seat. Despite all of that, the United States was willing to accept the PRC, such as it was, and to tolerate all inherited disputes that stood between them for the purpose of promoting the common interest in stabilizing the Pacific-Asian region. In other words, the U.S. has, by building one side of the triangle, sent a message to the other side of the triangle, which read that the United States was ready to say 'stop' to itself, when that was necessary, and accept the reality, when the acceptance led to a more stable and peaceful world. The message of self-limitation was tightly linked to another indirect message which the United States, by displaying its soft pro-China attitude, sent to the Soviet Union. The United States de facto built one, the Sino-American, side of the triangle as a model after which the other, the Soviet-American, side of the triangle was to be built. In other words, the United States provided both the U.S.S.R. and itself with a model after
65 which they could have built their future relations, and the model was the new Sino- American relationship. The new Sino-American relationship was inherently ambiguous, since it contained the elements of cooperation alongside the elements of confrontation. The Shanghai Communique was the clearest manifestation of such a relationship. It combined the elements of independent and conflicting interests with the elements of common interest. It combined divergences with convergences. The Shanghai Communique thus bore witness to the possibility of, first, acknowledging differences, then, of separating the points of convergence from the points of divergence, and, finally, of disabling the latter to suspend both cooperation and communication. Nixon hence signalled that he was not willing to question the Soviet communism, nor the Soviet interests that contradicted the American ones. On the other hand, he signalled that he was ready to prevent the points of divergence from exercising a negative influence on the points of convergence, provided that the U.S. and the Soviet Union were in position to identify the latter; he signalled that he would tolerate and accept the differences in order to save a joint, U.S.-Soviet, promotion of common interest. This message was definitely of crucial importance. Consequently, the U.S.' opening to China was a kind of precedent to be followed by further development of the U.S.- Soviet relations, a precedent which acknowledged the then existing strains in the relations, and did not suffer from unfounded optimism. One should keep in mind that the United States and China did not remove the causes of their dispute; they simply found a proper balance between the issues that led to confrontation and the issues that led to cooperation, which allowed them to invest more energy into the latter than into the former, and thus to prevent the former from overwhelming the latter. The U.S. has, by giving the real example of how the Sino-American relations can be managed, sent an umistakable signal to the Soviet Union concerning the change it would like to see in its relations with the Soviet Union as well. As it turned up later, the signal had been accepted. All in all, neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union invented China. But over a protracted period of time neither of the two superpowers saw China in proper light, as an useful focal point through which a radically new way of tacit signalling could had been probed. Once Nixon and Kissinger realized this, and started pointing to the China "focal point", both the American and the Soviet party to interstate communication found an easier way to mutually pattern their tacit intentions vis-a-vis one another.
66 That was finally the way in which triangular diplomacy helped the United States transform its conflictual, zero-sum relationship with the Soviet Union into a positive relationship of competitive cooperation and progressive relaxation of tensions. The capability of tacit signalling, of transmitting the intangible, though implicitly accepted, assumptions, is, as the "conflict resolution" narrative demonstrated, the value which each diplomat has to recognize for himself. Unless partners to a diplomatic process share certain number of unspoken assumptions, it is very likely that the process would collapse, or end in stalemate. The stock of unspoken assumptions, however, is not invariable and fixed once and for all. The diplomats can help their partners build new assumptions and improve the old ones. They can do that not only by talking things, but also, and more so, by doing things, by setting precedents, showing restraint, selecting acceptable diplomatic objectives. Deeds are better means for a build-up of tacit understanding. Also, without a stock of tacitly and commonly held assumptions about meanings, goals, and opportunities, the virtue fundamental to any form of diplomatic communication, the virtue of trust, has no chance of prospering. So, what I learned from triangular diplomacy was that parties to a diplomatic process must be in position to discern intangible patterns of thought and intention behind the tangible reality of their respective actions; that they must be in position to understand the never fully manifested designs that each wants to bring into existence. Under this assumption, pointing to a direction by a piece of behavior will often prove more useful than mere talking about it. The human, including the diplomatic, minds give more weight to the implicit assumptions that are kept in background than to the explicit ones. While the latter could in theory play the role of unmistakable indicators of intentions, but in practice often amount to a mistakable manifestation of nice diplomatic manners, the former are the unmistakable driving force of diplomatic actions; and the only way to learn about the former is to focus on the tacit, indirect signalling as it is externalized by serious diplomatic, and commitment-building actions. As Henry Kissinger commented the U.S.' opening to China: "The ultimate significance of the opening to China thus resides less in the formal exchanges than in the tacit understanding that grew out of Nixon's visit. They provided the foundation for a common if informal strategy, by which different - even clashing - purposes produced an extraordinary parallelism in action. It was a triumph of the intangible in the conduct
67 of foreign policy".100 No wonder then that the tacit understanding, the tacit agreement on the underlying, and implicitly held, guidelines for the future conduct, grew on the other, the U.S.-Soviet side of the triangle as well.
100 See Kissinger, H. (1979), op.cit., p. 1091
68 PART FIVE THE "CREATIVITY" NARRATIVE OF TRIANGULAR DIPLOMACY
In the preceding sections of my paper, I sorted out three clusters of values that diplomats should expect to see implemented in all diplomatic processes of more than moderate importance. The three clusters can be brought under the headings of "security", "justice", and "undistorted communication". As I said in the introductory chapter, no diplomatic activity can aim at success unless all the three clusters of values are given an equal expression, unless they reinforce and complement each other throughout a diplomatic process. However, I did not address a rather interesting issue of the role of individuals in the management of diplomatic relations. Let us thus assume that diplomats, qua selfish, but also moral and pro-social beings, inevitably go for the implementation of the aforementioned clusters of values. Their actual performance in implementing the clusters of values will nevertheless be strongly affected by their personality traits, by their individual make-ups, i.e. psychological characteristics. That is why one has to pay some attention to the role of individuals, or, better to say, to the psychological characteristics of the individuals who conceptualized, initiated, and managed to sustain, the process of triangular diplomacy, as well. Due to the constraints on the size of my paper, I will limit myself to drawing a number of elements of Kissinger's psychological profile, and then showing how the elements were productive in the actual build-up of triangular diplomacy.101 The fourth, and final cluster of values, important for effective management of diplomatic processes, will hence group around the psychological characteristics of the individuals who lead the processes, which I will in this section exemplify with the elements of Kissinger's psychological design.
101 Kissinger's personality was analysed by many psychologists belonging to various schools of psychology. The most interesting analysis I read, which complements my own "creativity" interpretation, and which contains valuable suggestions for further readings, is Starr, Harvey (1984), Henry Kissinger - Perceptions of International Politics, The University Press of Kentucky, Kentucky.
69 5.1. Diplomacy and creativity
Before going into the analysis of psychological components of the triangular diplomacy itself, it is important to make few commonsensical observations concerning diplomats' mental characteristics that their foreign ministries usually find favourable to their effective performance at work. Simply speaking, when a foreign ministry selects among a group of individuals those who have a better chance to run diplomatic affairs successfully, it should normally prefer to choose the individuals with the following characteristics and abilities: 1) An individual has to be open to foreign cultures. He must be capable of communicating with people whose cultural values and practices, including the conceptual presuppositions which underly these values, significantly differ from his own. He must be in position to resist any biases which could force him to reject a foreign social practice without a forethought and observation. A potential diplomat must be not only open to modalities of foreign cultural, and political life, but, apart from that, he must be capable of conveying his experience of foreign culture in the concepts and structures that originate from his own, domestic cultural circle. He needs to be able to bridge the gaps that divide the foreign and the domestic cultural assumptions by finding a proper domestically grounded expression for the contents he learned about the foreign society and its political life. The capability to describe the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar seems to be crucial in this respect, and a future diplomat need to possess such a capability. 2) An individual, who knows how to bring the foreign contents back to his own, domestic conceptual structures, needs to be capable of doing something else as well. He must be ready to suggest changes in the domestic arena, be it in the field of external or in the field of internal relations. His communication skills would not make much sense unless he has the capacity of identifying what needs to be changed, and what is liable to change. Therefore, he needs to be willing to question the behavior of his sending state, and to propose improvements when they are needed, i.e. when the costs of missing the opportunity to improve were intolerably high. Sending states send their foreign officers abroad to receive a feedback, and then to steer their practices in accordance with the feedbacks received. An individual who would not dare to provide the feedback, which requires a change of the existing course of his country, should not
70 be assigned to a diplomatic post. Another capability goes hand-in-hand with the capability of questioning the existing models of one's state's policies, both domestic and foreign; this capability is the capability of setting proper hierarchies, which means, first, that an individual applying for foreign service needs to be in position to distinguish between the things relevant and the things irrelevant, and, second, that he needs to be in position to differentiate among the things relevant those which are on the top of priorities from those which are not a matter of urgency. In other words, he needs to be capable of creating a global picture of the affairs within the receiving state, in which particular elements would be arranged in order of their relative importance, i.e. their capacity to produce far-reaching and relevant consequences. 3) The ability of parallel thinking will also be needed for a successful diplomatic activity. A diplomat must be able to relate the interests and conceptions of the sending state to the interests and conceptions of the receiving state. His knowledge of his country's preferences and his perceptions of the receving country's preferences must both keep on rolling in parallel, and must be checked one with another, balanced one with another, and mapped one onto another constantly. Without this capacity of parallel thinking, an individual won't be in position to identify where dissonant interests might be occuring, and where lies the potential for an increase in the consonance of interests. Provided further that he is not in position to identify these things, he won't be able to react timely to the events in the receiving state which could have an impact on his country, and he won't be able to ask for clarifications, to submit timely proposals, to timely encourage the events that could bring countries closer to each other, etc. etc. That is why the capacity to keep two different mental compounds running in parallel on two different, but interrelated, tracks is a real asset to everyone who is interested in serving his state's interests abroad. 4) Finally, an individual contemplating a career of a diplomat must meet two further criteria. One, he needs to possess the ability of both tolerating and producing ambiguities. Two, he needs to possess the ability of risk-taking, of working under conditions of uncertainty and pressure. Diplomacy itself is highly ambiguous activity, which had not been left unnoticed.102 A diplomat lives in a country of which he is not a genuine part, and he serves the interest of a country in which he does not live. That puts every diplomat in a position of fundamental ambiguity, since he experiences a sort
102 See Hoffmann, S. (1973), op.cit., p. 108
71 of mixture of closeness and distance, by the very nature of his job. The diplomatic relations per se are highly ambiguous as well. Two countries with harmonized interests would not have any need to exchange their respective ambassadors, because the identity of interests makes communication through missions unnecessary. On the other hand, two countries with divergent interests would not have any need to communicate diplomatically either, because the divergence of interests, being taken for granted, would again make diplomatic communication dispensable, as the communication would be inconsistent with the divergence itself. That is why tradition and practice of diplomacy rest on a kind of mixed relations between countries, relations that defy a straight definition in terms of clear friendship, or clear enmity. A diplomat again must live with such ambiguous relations, and be capable of tolerating them, because they form a fundamental part of his own professional life. As far as the production of ambiguities is concerned, a diplomat must possess adequate skills for it as well. Diplomats very often face the dilemma of speaking the truth. Speaking the truth can damage one's country's interests in number of ways. It may present it in unfavourable light, it may reveal an agenda prior to its implementation, or it may simply offend the receiving state. Instead of speaking the truth, a diplomat may decide to lie, which would definitely be a wrong decision. Liars usually have a bad reputation, and reputation is for a state an asset valuable as much as a military and economic power. What a diplomat in such a situation has to do is to transcend the categories of truth and falsehood, and to speak ambiguously, to produce sentences which are open to several interpretations.103 So, in order to qualify for a diplomat, an individual needs to be capable of generating ambiguities. Concerning the ability of risk-taking, there are several factors that require the possession of such ability by a diplomat. First, everyone knows that the stereotype identifying diplomats with spies still prevails, for which reason diplomats are very often put under surveillance by receiving states. Such a situation is potentially explosive, because once a diplomat is met with suspicion by a receiving state, his actions will tend to be misunderstood more often than not. And the more misunderstandings occur, the more unpleasant and stressful situations will a diplomat have to go through. That is why all the individuals who are not ready to tolerate the high-risk situation of an
103 For importance of ambiguous signalling in international relations, see Jervis, Robert (1989), The Logic of Images in International Relations, Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 113-138
72 increased probability of misunderstanding, which forms a part and parcel of the daily diplomatic life, should not qualify for the diplomatic service. Second, a diplomat must be ready to communicate with the regimes which are unfriendly to his state. Here again an individual must be ready to take risks, not only because talking to the enemies is in itself a dangerous activity, but also because talking to the enemies may have negative repercussions for one's reputation and public image domestically. It is risky to talk to one's own country's enemies, because many fellow- citizens would strongly disapprove such an activity and tend to consider those who engage in talks with enemies traitors. Third, negotiations themselves, the principal task of a diplomat, are quite often a high-risk process. They can move foreward, and they can be led by a spirit of optimism, but, they can also be stalled, and they can meet unsurmountable obstacles.104 One never knows for sure what is the likelihood of success of negotiations, which for some people could be a challenge, and a good chance to test one's flexibility and the capacity of speedy reasoning. However, for some other people, who do not like working under conditions of uncertainty, this could be a source of intense frustrations. What one thus needs to understand is that the individuals belonging to the second category should not be admitted into diplomatic missions, as their tolerance of the high-risk situations, which repeatedly occur in the process of negotiations, is very low. That is why a potential diplomat needs to be capable of taking risks, and of working even under the conditions which do not promise a success. Therefore, the list of criteria, which foreign ministries should apply in selecting the individuals capable of playing the role of diplomats, should, as it follows from previous points, include: 1) Openness and the capability of finding equivalent structures in two distinct cultural circles; 2) The capacity of constructive criticism, of questioning the existing policy models; and the capacity of creating hierarchies within a globalized picture of events; 3) The ability of parallel thinking; 4) The ability to tolerate and produce ambiguities; and, finally, the ability to take risks.
104 For traditional tools for coping with slowdowns in diplomatic negotiations, see Berridge, G.R. (1995), Diplomacy - Theory and Practice, Prentice Hall, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, pp. 147-160
73 There is one common denominator encompassing all the above listed criteria, creativity. I won't further elaborate this today widely accepted submission of the enlisted criteria under the category of creativity, as an interested reader can find relevant elaborations elsewhere.105 I will thus immediately return to the subject of triangular diplomacy in order to check if Kissinger's psychological profile meets the criteria enlisted above, and, if it does, to see what role it played in the U.S.- U.S.S.R. - PRC triangle of diplomatic relations.
5.2. Creative individual in triangular diplomacy
The very first thing I noticed while reading Kissinger's writings was a constant use of metaphors. He quite often generated synthetic images that comprised a large number of data, and described the very essence of the topic under discussion. For instance, while writing about the first phase of the Sino-American rapprochement, Kissinger used the following metaphor: "Thus began an intricate minuet between us and the Chinese so delicately arranged that both sides could always maintain that they were not in contact, so stylized that neither side needed to bear the onus of an initiative, so elliptical that existing relationships on both sides were not jeopardized".106 And while writing about the position of the U.S. within the strategic triangle, he used the following metaphor: "We had somehow not to flex our own muscles, but, as in judo, to use the weight of an adversary to propel him in a desired direction".107 If one would compare Kissinger's writing style with, for instance, the style of Z. Brzezinski, he could easily see the difference between the two in the creative uses of language: Kissinger was more prolific in the production of novel language patterns. This made me believe that Kissinger might have possessed the other mental capacities which are indicative of a creative individual as well. So I decided to search for reliable indicators, and found
105 See Simonton, Dean Keith (1992), Genius and Chance: A Darwinian Perspective, in: Brockman, John (ed.), Creativity, pp. 176-199, A Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster, New York; Sternberg, Robert J. (1988), A Three-facet Model of Creativity, in: Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.), The Nature of Creativity, pp. 125-147, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, and Gruber, Howard E., and Davis, Sara N. (1988), Inching Our Way Up Mount Olympus: The Evolving-Systems Approach to Creative Thinking, in: Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.), The Nature of Creativity, pp. 243-271, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 106 See Kissinger, H. (1979), op.cit., p. 187 107 Ibid., pp. 764-765
74 out that Kissinger's intellectual style displayed at least three important dimensions of creative psychic life: the capability of questioning the existing policy models, the capability of producing the globalized pictures of events, and the capacity to produce and tolerate ambiguities. In what follows I will briefly discuss each of the three. 1) Kisssinger understood that the very nature of power changed after the World War II, and that this change deeply affected the traditional concepts on which foreign policy was based, the concept of alliance, the concept of enmity, and the concept of political and military struggle.108 He understood that there was something very paradoxical about the nuclear power; it is a power the effectiveness of which has no precedent in the history of mankind, but, at the same time, it is the least managable power in the history of mankind. This paradox of nuclear power resulted with the above mentioned concepts becoming paradoxical too. System of alliances has become loose and unstable, because the allies of a nuclear super-power must have an ambivalent attitude toward their patron. The concept of enmity also became questionable, because the concept of victory in a nuclear war does not make much sense. Kissinger, however, found out that traditional American foreign policy thinking did not fully internalize those fundamental changes. And he brought the traditional American thinking under sharp criticism. He decided to question the then existing American approches to foreign policy, both from the standpoint of practice, and the standpoint of theory. For instance, in his book "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy", Kissinger attacked American traditional military thought.109 He wrote that the US military strategists did not realize that America must face ambiguous challenges, not only direct military threats. America, militarily speaking, behaved as a power content with its place in the world, which learned to differentiate only between two extreme cases, a total war and a total peace. However, Kissinger added, American military strategy must understand that there are further nuances between the two extremes, and that the nuances are the most important thing in the post-2nd World War world. He writes that "we have therefore been vulnerable to Soviet maneuvers in two ways. Because we have considered the advantage of peace so self-evident, we have been tempted to treat each act of Soviet intransigence as if it were caused by a misunderstanding of our
108 See Kissinger, H. (1969), op.cit., pp. 51-97 109 See Kissinger, Henry A. (1984), Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Westview Press, Boulder Colorado, 1st edition 1957.
75 intentions or else by the malevolence of an individual...On the other hand, because our strategic doctrine recognized few intermediate points between total war and total peace, we have found it difficult, during periods of Soviet belligerency, to bring the risks of resistance into relationship with the issues which have actually been at stake".110 It was not only the American military strategy the assumptions of which Kissinger criticized. The basic tenets of the US, post-World War Two foreign policy were brought under sharp criticism as well. Kissinger believed that classical Wilsonian liberalism, which was a main characteristic of the American foreign policy approach, has done more harm than good to America's actions abroad. He insisted on the thesis that the U.S. behaved as if it did not have its national interests, as if it was free from the sins of the balance-of-power strategy, which, Kissinger diagnosed, resulted in frequent crises of the American engagement abroad, as no nation can run successful foreign policy without having clear criteria of selectivity, which need to be buttressed by some conception of vital national interests. "It is part of American folklore that, while other nations have interests, we have responsibilities; while other nations are concerned with equilibrium, we are concerned with the legal requirements of peace. We have a tendency to offer our altruism as a guarantee of our reliability....Such an attitude makes it difficult to develop a conception of our role in the world. It inhibits other nations from gearing their policy to ours in a confident way - a 'disinterested' policy is likely to be considered 'unreliable'".111 Kissinger also realized that American foreign policy thinking which considered peace to be a normal state of international affairs was deeply flawed, as it was for the US foreign policy typical belief that there could be final results, and that the American security originates from "superiority of our beliefs" rather than "the weight of our power or the fortunate accidents of history and geography".112 Kissinger questioned another important element in traditional American foreign policy apparatus, the element of decision making and the philosophy on which it was based.113 He emphasized that the apparatus of the foreign policy making, which was till the late 1960s prevalent in the United States, suffered from several insufficiencies.
110 Ibid., p. 11 111 See Kissinger, H. (1969), op.cit., pp. 91-92 112 See Kissinger, H. (1979), op.cit., p. 58 113 See Kissinger, H. (1969), op.cit., pp. 29-34
76 First, the apparatus itself was more suitable for immediate problems than for dealing with long-term trends. Empiristic approach of the American foreign policy decision makers limited them to focus on tangible and critical issues, and to treat them in a one- by-one manner. The apparatus of decision making was organized bureaucratically, and separate groups within the bureaucracy were more busy with finding the methods to justify their own existence than with linking their efforts in the interest of common purpose. As Kissinger puts it: "Problems tend to be slighted until some agency or department is made responsible for them. When this occurs - usually when a difficulty has already grown acute - the relevant department becomes an all-out spokesman for the particular area of responsibility. The outcome usually depends more on the pressures or the persuasiveness of the contending advocates than on a concept of over- all purpose. While these tendencies exist to some extent in all bureaucracies they are particularly pronounced in the American system of government".114 Kissinger also questioned the fact that lawyers and businessmen have gotten the main say in American foreign policy making. The two professions have the tendency to prefer dealing with actual issues to dealing with hypothetical ones. They also lack a sense of history which should be one of the chief factors of an adequate foreign policy making. Kissinger wrote that "the same quality also produces a relatively low valuation of historical factors. Nations are treated as similar phenomena, and those states presenting similar immediate problems are treated similarly. Since many of our policy-makers first address themselves to an issue when it emerges as their area of responsibility, their approach to it is often highly anecdotal".115 Kissinger understood that the American empiricism in foreign policy making makes it very difficult for American policy-makers to cope with the conjectural element of foreign policy. In the field of foreign policy one has to make bold conjectures which far transcend what is made available by empirical observation and by a patient accumulation of confirmed pieces of empirical knowledge.116 The then existing way of foreign policy making in the United States, as Kissinger understood, was, however, unsuitable for the conjectural element of foreign policy, and, mainly due to their allegiance to passive empiricism, American foreign policy-makers were usually
114 Ibid., p. 31 115 Ibid., p. 33 116 Ibid., p. 14
77 taking belated decisions, or did not use the opportunities when the scope for American "action was greatest" at all117. Kissinger's capability of questioning the established ways of doing things extended to the way Americans were doing diplomacy as well.118 He noticed that, again, the legal profession played the dominant role in the negotiations over American national interests. Lawyers, Kissinger wrote, tend to conceive negotiations in terms of a joint search for compromises within a framework of tacitly accepted rules. But, negotiations with revolutionary powers, such as the Soviet Union, do not and cannot proceed within such a framework. That is why the negotiations with Soviets were, in Kissinger's opinion, mostly unsuccessful. They were from the American side led by the negotiators who tended to seek for legitimization of status quo, which in dealing with a revolutionary power can never prove successful. Kissinger identified another weakness of the US diplomacy which deserved a strong criticism. In "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy" he wrote that "the major weakness of United States diplomacy has been the insufficient attention given to the symbolic aspects of foreign policy. Our positions have usually been worked out with great attention to their legal content, with special emphasis on the step-by-step approach of traditional diplomacy. But, while we have been addressing the Soviet leaders, they have been speaking to the people of the world. With a few exceptions we have not succeeded in dramatizing our position, in reducing a complex negotiation to its symbolic terms....We have replied to each new Soviet thrust with righteous protestations of our purity of motive. But the world is not moved by legalistic phrases, at least in a revolutionary period. This is not to say that negotiations should be conceived as mere propaganda; only that by failing to cope adequately with their psychological aspect we have given the Soviet leaders too many opportunities to use them against us".119 Kissinger's criticism of the then existing American models of policy making was operational during the period of triangular diplomacy. Kissinger's capacity to question the existing approaches, and to find alternative methods of foreign policy making, played a critical role in the triangular diplomatic relations in several ways. First, Kissinger and Nixon introduced famous back-channels which improved the executive's supervision over the actual foreign policy making, and avoided large bureaucratic
117 Ibid., p. 14 118 See Kissinger, H. (1984), op.cit., p. 336 119 Ibid., pp. 337-338
78 apparatus of the State Department. Second, Kissinger himself played the role of special envoy, which was so untypical of American approach to negotiations. It is interesting to note that Kissinger wrote in his article "Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy" the following lines: "All of this drives the executive in the direction of extra-bureaucratic means of decision. The practice of relying on special emmisaries or personal envoys is an example; their status outside the bureaucracy frees them from some of its restraints. International agreements are sometimes possible only by ignoring safeguards against capricious action".120 This article was published in 1966, and it is amazing how prophetic it was of the ways diplomatic relations were conducted by Nixon and Kissinger during the period of the U.S'. opening to China. Third, the way Kissinger and Zhou Enlai drafted the Shanghai Communique was also an effect of Kissinger's critical approach to traditional American way of striking agreements. As R. Cohen described the Communique: "This document (a radical departure in its form from established U.S. practice) entailed, in effect, American adoption of the Chinese reliance on general principles....How was it possible for the United States to transcend its familiar insistence on specificity in both the conduct and the outcome of negotiations? The answer seems to be in the acceptance by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger (the principal negotiator in all these contacts) of the need to adopt the Chinese approach at this time if the two sides were to get anywhere".121 Without the awareness of shortcomings in American approach to negotiations, Kissinger would have probably never been so open to the Chinese ways of conducting and finalizing negotiations. 2) Let us now turn to the second capability, the capability of producing globalized image of events. I again believe that we can find enough evidence in Kissinger's writings to support the thesis that he possessed such capability. In his PhD thesis Kissinger discussed the main tasks of statesmen.122 His discussion there led him to conclude that statesmen are somehow comparable to scientists. Statesmen, like scientist, must figure out what is the existing distribution of forces in the international system, they must find out which forces support, and which negate each other. This implies that a statesman must take holistic approach to
120 See Kissinger, H. (1969), op.cit., p. 23 121 See Cohen, Raymond (1991), Negotiating Across Cultures, United States Institute of Peace Press, Washington, p. 80 122 See Kissinger, Henry A. (1973), A World Restored - Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, chapter 17
79 international actors and events which cannot be fully understood in isolation from each other. Each force in the international arena is supported by plethora of other simultaneously existing forces, while other forces, which could suppress the existing and acting force, are blocked by some other forces, etc. etc. Statesmen thus need to look at the international system as a spider's web in which individual twitches are interconnected, and where adequate insight into the whole of twitches is needed if one wants to master the statecraft properly. Kissinger also added that statesmen, in difference from scientists, do not enjoy the position of having many opportunities to test their conjectures. Usually, there is only one chance of testing a statesman's insight. Besides that, statesmen cannot treat other nations as factors in a mechanical calculus, but as forces which need to be treated sensibly, and reconciled.123 This serves to show that Kissinger understood that diplomacy cannot be conducted effectively without a holistic interpretation of the international system, and that the capability to produce globalized pictures of events is the first precondition of any holistic interpretation. Moreover, Kissinger's recognition of the need to produce globalized, synthetic picture of world events found a direct way to the agenda of Nixon's foreign policy making. The concept that was so central for foreign policy making during Nixon's presidency was the concept of linkage. Kissinger thought that coherence and clarity of purpose had to find their way back to American actions abroad, and that the only way to achieve that was to promote the idea of linkage of actions in the international arena. He wrote that, in his own and Nixon's view, "linkage existed in two forms: first, when a diplomat deliberately links two separate objectives in a negotiation, using one as a leverage on the other; or by virtue of reality, because in an interdependent world the actions of a major power are inevitably related and have consequences beyond the issue or region immediately concerned".124 Kissinger also stressed that linkage was necessary in restoring the coherence of foreign policy. If foreign policy-makers are not able to produce a general, globalized picture of events, which generates consistency both across various American actions abroad and across the actions of other powers, then American ways of doing international politics would lack both credibility and significance. As Kissinger puts it: "To ignore the interconnection of events was to undermine the coherence of all policy...The most difficult challenge for a policymaker
123 Ibid., p. 326 124 See Kissinger, H. (1979), op.cit., p. 129
80 in foreign affairs is to establish priorities. A conceptual framework - which "links" events - is an essential tool. The absence of linkage produces exactly the opposite of freedom of action; policymakers are forced to respond to parochial interests, buffeted by pressures without a fixed compass".125 Linkage was obviously operating during the period of triangular diplomacy. Every event had its place in an overall conceptual framework. Opening to China was linked both to the Soviet Union and to Hanoi. American actions in the Middle East were linked to the dynamics of strategic triangle. Nuclear arms negotiations were linked to the issue of economic assistance to the Soviet Union, while Soviet assistance to Cuba was linked to nuclear arms negotiations again. American side-taking in the war between Pakistan and India was linked to American rapprochement with China. Linkage sometimes worked, sometimes not. But, whatever the measure of its actual success, linkage demonstrated that its conceptualizers possessed the capability to relate events, to search for global picture which would endow American foreign policy with the qualities of consistency, harmony, and cohesiveness. It demonstrated the ability to form unified images that prevent one from acting blindly. J. Lewis Gaddis commented on Kissinger's conception of linkage in the following way: "Kissinger was surely right to criticize the absence of linkage in the policy of his predecessors: if Vietnam demonstrated anything at all, it was how easily an excessively compartmentalized approach to world affairs can cause a nation's leaders to lose their sense of proportion. His insistence that distinctions be made between vital and peripheral interests, that the connections between policies be reestablished in the minds of policymakers, that the effects produced should bear some relationship to the efforts that went into producing them - all of this served to revive, within a remarkably short period of time, a clarity of purpose and direction in American foreign policy that had been sorely lacking".126 3) Ever since he wrote his PhD thesis, Kissinger found ambiguities of central importance for managing international relations. He was fascinated by Prince Metternich, and described at length how Metternich disentangled Austria from its alliance with Napoleon, and how he managed to achieve the position of a leader of the anti-Napoleon coalition, with Napoleon having approved every single step that Metternich took throughout the process of disentanglement. Metternich treated
125 Ibid., pp. 129-130 126 See Gaddis, J.L. (1994), op.cit., pp. 578-579
81 politics as a patient accumulation of ambiguous steps, the direction of which is known only to their original creator. Kissinger fullheartedly accepted this idea, and buttressed it with a specific philosophy. What were the tenets of Kissinger's philosophy of ambiguity? First, Kissinger believed that the international system is too complex and too multilayered to allow for real friendship between nations to take place. Nations cannot be friends, because that would only create an illusion of a perfect harmony of bilateral interests, which can rarely, if ever, be seen in the international system.127 The relationship of genuine friendship would be sustainable only at the price of turning a blind eye to a divergence of interests which sticks even to the best friends. Kissinger, on the other hand, denied that there was a possibility of the relation of genuine enmity in the international system either. No nation could resist the temptation to embrace its "enemy", if a third nation would become a deadly threat which can be countered only by the collaboration between threatened nations. Perfect divergence of interests is also an ideal case which can never materialize in the reality of the international system. There is always at least a minute scope for cooperation, which would, under proper conditions, change the relationship of opposition into the relationship of mutual adjustment. That is why Kissinger believed that relations between nations are inherently ambiguous, and that the "black-and-white assumption that every country is either friendly or hostile" was wrong, as every binary international relation combines elements of both hostility and friendliness.128 Second, Kissinger considered politics to be a never-ending process in an imperfect world. There are no final solutions in politics, there is no sudden transformation of the international state-of-affairs from good into bad, or from bad into good. Politics is characterized by compromises, painful adjustments, short steps; genuine progress can only be achieved by a satisfaction of contradictory interests, which is the reason why each step forward must contain contradictory elements itself. As there are no final solutions, as each transformation in politics develops stepwise, since it would otherwise become self-defeating, politics is, in Kissinger's opinion, an activity which meets ambiguous challenges and gives ambiguous answers to these challenges.129 In other words, Kissinger believed that ambiguities lie at the very core of
127 See Kissinger, H. (1995), op.cit., p. 741 128 Ibid., 742 129 Ibid., p. 836, p. 742
82 politics, because of a) the character of the international system, and b) the rational demands on the way politically progressive actions can be taken in a world which is imperfect, uncertain, and full of clashing interests, which follow directly from a. Kissinger thus recognized the need for one to produce and tolerate ambiguities in diplomacy, the need for one to take ambiguous steps and to tolerate ambiguous steps by other nations, and the reason why he recognized that need was his philosophical assumptions on the nature of the international system. In other words, he clearly saw what was the role of one of the most important components of diplomatic creativity. What was his practice then? Can we identify some elements in the triangular diplomatic process where the ability to tolerate and produce ambiguities played the dominant role? My answer will be positive, and I will expose it in three separate points. Point 1: The U.S. opening to China was not an easy process. It developed over time, in steps going both directions, forwards and backwards. China was not only displaying friendly gestures toward the United States, and Kissinger and Nixon had to endure Chinese ambiguities. I mentioned above the speech of the Chinese ambassador to the UN from the late 1971, which was extremely hostile to the United States. On May 20 1970 the Chinese press was calling for the defeat of the U.S. aggressors. On July 7 1970 the Chinese attempted to intercept and shoot down an American C-130 on a reconnaissance mission. And in late November of 1970 Moscow and Peking signed a trade agreement, which witnessed a seeming raprochement between the PRC and the Soviet Union, not between the U.S. and the PRC. However, both Nixon and Kissinger knew that the U.S. opening to China would be a slow and ambiguous process, and this knowledge made easier for both of them to lead it toward the Shanghai Communique. As Nixon wrote in December 1969: "This is a slow process, but I have not abandoned it".130 To tolerate Chinese ambiguities was thus a necessary ingredient in the American opening to China, and the chief actors from the American side had to possess proper psychological characteristics for coping with the Chinese ambiguities. None else would have been better prepared for the rapprochement, because Kissinger knew that ambiguity is the name of every diplomatic game, and that diplomatic processes in general, including the U.S. opening to China, evolve through ambiguous challenges towards ambiguous achievements.
130 See Kissinger, H. (1979), op.cit., p. 191
83 Point 2: Kissinger, together with Zhou Enlai, drafted the Shanghai Communique, which was a masterpiece of ambiguities, so untypical of American legal tradition. The document contains ambiguous parts, a part of disagreements, and a part of agreements, which reinforced and shed light on one another. It was clear from the communique that its signatories were not friends, nor enemies, but a combination of both. Divergence of interests was clearly given voice, but, at the same time, the divergence was made less harmful by pinpointing convergent interests. The parts that Kissinger drafted on behalf of the U.S., to describe specifics of the U.S.' interest, were ambiguous in themselves. For instance, Kissinger described the U.S. attitude toward the Taiwan issue in the following way: "The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a province of China". This clause was perfectly ambiguous, because it gave voice to both parties to the dispute over Taiwan, and comprised two contradictory interests by playing on the ambiguity of the word "one". The "one" China" ment for the rulers of Taiwan something very much different from what it ment for Mao. But, the ambiguity, by having left the possibility of several interpretations open, provided for a temporary and imperfect compromise, which could had been upgraded by later clarifications. The authors of the Shanghai Communique thus had to be capable of producing and tolerating ambiguities; they had to be creative personalities who do not have problems with readjusting and reframing their conceptual networks in order to come to grips with contradictions and ambiguous demands of political reality. Point 3: Finally, the maintenance of the relations within the strategic triangle also required the capability to produce ambiguities, because the relations themselves were meant to be ambiguous. The Soviet Union had to be pressured by the U.S. opening to China, but the pressure had to be gentle, and not mistaken for collusion between the U.S. and China against the Soviet Union. The US relation with China must not have impaired the relations of detente with the Soviet Union. In other words, Kissinger and Nixon wanted the Soviet Union to have an ambiguous attitude toward the Sino-American side of the triangle. They wanted the Soviets to identify in the new Sino-American relations both potential benefits and potential costs for the Soviet Union itself. The strategic triangle thus required personalities who were capable of verbalizing the ambiguous spirit of the triangle in daily communications with the Soviet
84 representatives. Kissinger, for instance, in his communications with Dobrynin, used indirect, disguised, and ambiguous way of describing what future shape the new U.S. policy toward China would take. He also used negations, like "the new American policy toward China is not directed against any other country". Negations, however, are ambiguous in themselves, because they express a possible state of affairs, and thus indicate that what they negate could, under certain, unnamed conditions, come true, as every diplomat knows. This ambiguous signalling applied to the U.S.-Soviet side of the triangle as well. The Chinese were not supposed to get the impression that the U.S. would sacrifice its detente with the Soviet Union for the sake of its new "friendship" with China. That is why at the end of Nixon's historic visit to Peking, Kissinger also officially announced that the contract which committed the U.S. to defend Taiwan militarily was still valid.131 Kissinger described vehemently the ambiguous atmospherics of the triangular relations in the following way: "We were on a tightrope, we had to be careful never to lean to one side or the other - regardless of buffeting - or we might drop into the abyss".132 As I understand the metaphor of the tightrope-walker, the United States had to keep the balance between contradictory demands placed on it by the two other powers of the triangle. Ambiguous communication with both of them thus served the interests of the tightrope-walker, and helped Nixon and Kissinger maintain balanced relations as well as independence of the three chief actors within the triangular diplomatic framework. The capability to produce and tolerate ambiguities, the creative part of Kissinger's psychological profile, therefore played an important role at the level of the daily, and official, communication between the individuals closely related to implementation of the triangular design.
In order to sum up this "creativity" narrative of the triangular diplomacy, several points need to be emphasized. The triangular diplomatic relations would have never been run relatively smoothly without the components of Kissinger's psychological profile that played an important role in actual management of the relations. Kissinger is a creative individual who
131 Ibid., p. 1084 132 Ibid., p. 765
85 displayed several basic indicators of creativity such as the capacity to tolerate and produce ambiguities, the capacity to criticize constructively and to question the existing policy models, and the capacity to form a global image of the international system. Kissinger should thus be taken as a role-model for every individual aspiring to manage diplomatic relations effectively. He himself is a positive example of a creative personality who was perfectly suitable for conduct of diplomatic affairs. The lesson which present and future diplomats should therefore draw from this chapter is that individuals do count in diplomacy, and that some individuals are simply irreplaceable as the backbones of a diplomatic service. Implementation of whatever values in a diplomatic process, including those I mentioned in the second, third, and fourth chapter of this paper, cannot be successful unless there are real people who match the criteria of creative personality. Spiritual values hence play in diplomatic processes the role equal to those played by the values of security and justice. What we thus primarily need in diplomacy are the right people at the right place at the right time.
86 CONCLUSION
Triangular diplomacy of the early 1970s should not be considered a finished and gone episode of diplomatic history brought about by unique historical circumstances of the Cold War relations that receded into irreversible past, never to occur again. First, even today triangular diplomacy is very much with us. However, the roles that the United States, the Russian Federation, and China, played in the triangle of the early 1970s have been reversed in today's strategic triangle. Today the United States plays a role roughly comparable to the role once played by the Soviet Union, while over the last few years one witnesses a new rapprochement between the Russian Federation and China. A few weeks ago Jiang Zemin paid a visit to the Kremlin where he and Yeltsin signed a joint Sino-Russian statement which declared that both China and Russia would prefer living in a multi-polar post-Cold War world, not in the one dominated by a victorious super-power.133 Besides that, high-level commentators in Moscow displayed enviable capabilities of describing the Sino-Russian, basically Realpolitical rapprochement, in typical liberalistic terms of reforms, liberalization, opening, and good neighbourly relations. Kremlin and Peking thus keep on intensifying cooperation in both military and economic field, while Washington, on one hand, still dwells on the issues related to the Russian understanding of Nato's expansion eastwards, and, on the other, experiences a "free fall" in its relations with China.134 The irony of today's global order is that the wisdom of former makers of American foreign policy, Nixon and Kissinger, was internalized by today's leaders of the countries on which the wisdom was tested in the first place, while today's American Administration runs the risk of taking a world-view similar to the world-view of the former Soviet Union, which is a natural, though ironic, consequence of the role reversal. Second, understanding of the dynamics within the triangular diplomatic framework can be applied to a plethora of the international and interethnic relations that have a potential for triangularism. One of the typical cases in this respect is
133 See Russia and China - Can a Bear Love a Dragon, in: The Economist (1997), April 26th, pp. 19- 23, and Let Them Be Friends, in: The Economist (1997), April 26th, pp. 14-15. 134 The "free fall" metaphor was used by Kissinger himself on July 13 1995, at the hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on foreign policy goals. See Ross, Wendy S., and Abrams, Andrew (1995), Kissinger Urges Bipartisanship, Cooperation in Foreign Policy, hearings before the Senate Foreign Policy Committee, July 13 1995, via Internet. See also Kissinger, H. (1996), op.cit.
87 Bosnia, where, after four years of severe armed conflict, three national identities attempt to restore normal relations, and establish a viable, moderately centralized political community. Balancing of military powers played a crucial role in setting the conditions for the Dayton peace talks. Balancing of power will, however, have to play an important role in implementation of peace as well. The implementation will, on the other hand, take place only in the case the Bosnian leaders find out a true proportion between liberalistic and realistic values, and in the case the Bosnian diplomats evince enough creativity and open-mindedness in dealing with the micro-issues that jeopardize the peace process almost on a weekly basis. There is a tendency among some Bosnian groups and leaders to search for final solutions which would, once established, last forever. The final solutions though, contrary to the Bosnian leaders' preferences, imply tragic consequences, since no final and unambiguous solution can calm down the spirits of all the three national identities of Bosnia. Bosnian leaders will thus have to understand that it would be better for their relations to have the character of ambiguous challenges and balances, and for their achievements to have the character of temporary and ambiguous respites. Third, and finally, the lessons of triangular diplomacy are universal. Triangular diplomacy provided the lessons that every diplomat should treat as a personal philosophy of diplomacy. It demonstrated the values that drive the engine of diplomatic processes, and how proportionate actualization of the values leads to a successful management of diplomatic relations. It taught us that the values of power and national security cannot have an independent existence, and that they have to be complemented by the values of justice, dignity, and care for others. Security depends on stability which further depends on the principles of fairness and justice. Artificial stability, based on an enforced order which violates the principles of justice, cannot persist in the long term, since the violation of the principles of justice will sooner or later backfire. That is why a diplomat, in order to secure the position of his own state, must also to the largest extent possible take into consideration the interests and concerns of other states. And that is why a balancing of liberalistic and realistic values, the paradigm of which was provided by triangular diplomacy, is to be taken by every diplomat as his ultimate goal. Wise and effective communication is another value which drove the process of triangular diplomacy. A diplomat must prove his credibility, as well as the credibility of
88 his state's interests, and verbal communication, as triangular diplomacy demonstrated, is not the only way to achieve this. Communicating by actions, which give an expression to the implicit and tacit assumptions and designs, may be the best way to demonstrate what one is up to, and to demonstrate it in a credible fashion. Tacit signalling, which has the power to indicate what are the true atmospherics of international relations, was thus another value which I traced throughout the process of triangular diplomacy. Finally, individuals, real people, are generators of diplomacy, which means that their psychic constellation must be suitable for actualization and reconciliation of all the aforementioned values, which further makes the psychic constellation a value in itself. An effective diplomat must be able to guide his thoughts across the spheres of different values, and to respond to challenges of the processes he is involved in with flexible, credible, and smooth changes in accentuation of the values. Triangular diplomacy demonstrates to what a degree an individual, and the value of individuality, can make a difference in a diplomatic process. The presented four-narrative analysis of triangular diplomacy could thus have both practical and theoretical repercussions. It could be used both as a paradigm for future analyses of diplomatic processes, and as a piece of theoretical wisdom which could guide diplomats in their future conduct. As far as the practical side of the analysis is concerned, it could be applied to a broad range of the practical issues that lay ahead of a number of currently unfolding diplomatic initiatives. In both cases the creation of a better, and gradually progressing world should be its primary goal. That the goal will have to be approximated through a slowly evolving accumulation of cautiously painted, and yet ambivalent nuances, is the very essence of the lessons which the U.S.' diplomacy of the early 1970s, so nicely depicted by the geometric metaphor of triangle, taught us.
89 BIBLIOGRAPHY
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93 ABSTRACT
This research paper deals with the main achievement of U.S.' diplomacy during the presidency of Richard Nixon, the establishment of triangular network of relations between the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, and the United States itself. Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's national security adviser and later the State Secretary of the United States, was the chief co-conceptualizer of triangular diplomacy, and that is why I backed up my research by his writings and reflections on international relations, diplomacy, and the history of triangular diplomacy itself.
The questions I asked myself throughout the work on "Triangular diplomacy reconsidered" are: "What lessons can I, as a diplomat, draw from triangular diplomacy for my own diplomatic career? Can triangular diplomacy teach me anything about the norms which should guide the conduct of diplomats and politicians in general, and which should guide my own diplomatic conduct in particular?" The answers to the above questions, which I provided for myself, and which could be beneficial for any other diplomat as well, are presented in the four parts of my research paper: Realist interpretation of triangular diplomacy, Liberalist interpretation of triangular diplomacy, the 'Conflict Resolution' approach to triangular diplomacy, and the 'Creativity' narrative of triangular diplomacy.
Speaking briefly, the first two parts center around the idea that diplomats should be guided by both the norms of realism (power, national interest, national security) and the norms of liberalism (justice, cooperation, adherence to the standards of democracy). Triangular diplomacy was used as a test-case to confirm the idea of a necessity of combining considerations of power with considerations of morality in diplomatic theory and practice. The second two parts of my research deal with an additional set of norms that a diplomat should attempt at materializing. The set includes the norm of an effective communication aiming at reduction and transformation of the potential for conflict, as well as the norm of skilful and creative individual needed in management of diplomatic relations, and in actual implementation of the norms to which diplomacy should give its voice, as referred to above.
94 I also described at some length Kissinger's views on diplomacy, foreign policy making, and international relations, to which I wholeheartedly subscribe.
Finally, in my conclusion I proposed a few ideas on the ways in which my analysis could be extended and applied to a number of practical and theoretical issues that diplomats as well as theoreticians of diplomacy must address.
95