By Sierra Rayne ——Bio and Archives--May 2, 2015
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KRISTOL: I remember even as a sort of younger person just watching, it was demoralizing somewhat. The Nixon-Kissinger policies, whatever their merits in particular tactical ways and in particular parts of the world, if you were a strong anti-communist, it was demoralizing watching them effuse to go to China and refuse to be critical of this horrible tyrant who had killed 50 million people, or whatever Mao killed, and then of course with Solzhenitsyn in '74/'75 -- whenever that was. BELL: When Ford refused to meet with him. KRISTOL: Yeah. BELL: After he was exiled from the Soviet Union. KRISTOL: I think one reason I was for 'Scoop' Jackon, I was for 'Scoop Jackson' in '72 in the Democratic primaries more because of disgust, as much because of disgust at Nixon and Kissinger's detente than for intra-Democratic party reasons which I really had no view on. I didn't care much about the Democratic Party, I think. BELL: You know there was something that happened under Kissinger, which is something called the Sonnenfeldt doctrine. Kissinger didn't want complete blame for it, it was all his idea, but in exchange for a kind of condominium with the Soviet Union, we would recognize that the Soviets had permanent control of eastern Europe. KRISTOL: Yeah, it's amazing to think about.
Deng followed up the Huang Hua critique later that day. Concessions and agreements had never produced Soviet restraint, he warned [Zbigniew] Brzezinski. Fifteen years of arms control agreements had allowed the Soviet Union to achieve strategic parity with the United States. Trade with the Soviet Union meant that 'the U.S. is helping the Soviet Union overcome its weaknesses.' Deng offered a mocking assessment of American responses to Soviet adventurism in the Third World and chided Washington for trying to 'please' Moscow: 'Your spokesmen have constantly justified and apologized for Soviet actions. Sometimes they say there are no signs to prove that there is the meddling of the Soviet Union and Cuba in the case of Zaire or Angola. It is of no use for you to say so. To be candid with you, whenever you are about to conclude an agreement with the Soviet Union it is the product of [a] concession on the U.S. side to please the Soviet side.Replace references to the Soviets and specific time-sensitive regions by Deng with references to China and more contemporary areas such as the East and South China Seas and China's current financial influence operations around the globe, and then we see that Deng's prescriptions to Kissinger regarding the U.S.S.R. are how the Nixon, Ford, and future administrations should have dealt with China. It begs the questions: did not Kissinger and the presidents he served under realize such advice was simply a means for China to use the U.S. as convenient leverage to help remove its Soviet nemesis while concomitantly promoting its own interests -- Chinese interests that for the most part did not align with American interests? A lesson here is that the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. A more realistic view of this complex geopolitical relationship should have been that both China and the Soviet Union (now Russia, of course, with its neo-Soviet ambitions) were -- and still are -- adversaries and that actions taken to harm one should never be able to help the other. Otherwise one risks creating a larger problem than you started with, which is exactly what happened. The West now faces a likely greater long-term threat from China and the neo-Soviets than it did before Kissinger and Nixon opened the door to the Sinosphere. Economic power underlies military strength, and by enabling China to build its economy without any democratic reforms, the West enabled -- actually, promoted -- an existential threat. One is reminded of Diana West's workAmerican Betrayal.
The Soviet Union would never be bound by agreements, Deng warned; it understood only the language of countervailing force. The Roman statesman Cato the Elder is reputed to have ended all his speeches with the clarion call 'Carthago delenda est' ('Carthage must be destroyed'). Deng had his own trademark exhortation: that the Soviet Union must be resisted. He included in all his presentations some variation on the admonition that Moscow's unchanging nature was to 'squeeze in wherever there is an opening,' and that, as Deng told President Carter, '[w]herever the Soviet Union sticks its fingers, there we must chop them off.'Good advice, except not only for the Soviets, but also how to deal with China. China behaves in the same manner as did the Soviets. They are never bound by agreements, as we see with how China acts in bad faith towards the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). They only understand the "language of countervailing force," and it is clear that China's nature is to "squeeze in wherever there is an opening" -- necessitating that the West should adopt a policy position of "wherever [China] sticks its fingers, there we must chop them off." It is time for the West to heed Deng's sage advice, and apply it against his own country.
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Sierra Rayne holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry and writes regularly on environment, energy, and national security topics. He can be found on Twitter at @srayne_ca