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.