Trust, but Verify uses trust—with its emotional and predictive aspects—to explore international relations in the second half of the Cold War, beginning with the late 1960s. The détente of the 1970s led to the development of some limited trust between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lessened international tensions and enabled advances in areas such as arms control. However, it also created uncertainty in other areas, especially on the part of smaller states that depended on their alliance leaders for protection. The contributors to this volume look at how the "emotional" side of the conflict affected the dynamics of various Cold War relations: between the superpowers, within the two ideological blocs, and inside individual countries on the margins of the East–West confrontation.
Trust, but Verify uses trust—with its emotional and predictive aspects—to explore international relations in the second half of the Cold War, beginning with the late 1960s. The détente of the 1970s led to the development of some limited trust between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lessened international tensions and enabled advances in areas such as arms control. However, it also created uncertainty in other areas, especially on the part of smaller states that depended on their alliance leaders for protection. The contributors to this volume look at how the "emotional" side of the conflict affected the dynamics of various Cold War relations: between the superpowers, within the two ideological blocs, and inside individual countries on the margins of the East–West confrontation.
Trust, but Verify: The Politics of Uncertainty and the Transformation of the Cold War Order, 1969-1991
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Trust, but Verify uses trust—with its emotional and predictive aspects—to explore international relations in the second half of the Cold War, beginning with the late 1960s. The détente of the 1970s led to the development of some limited trust between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lessened international tensions and enabled advances in areas such as arms control. However, it also created uncertainty in other areas, especially on the part of smaller states that depended on their alliance leaders for protection. The contributors to this volume look at how the "emotional" side of the conflict affected the dynamics of various Cold War relations: between the superpowers, within the two ideological blocs, and inside individual countries on the margins of the East–West confrontation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781503600133 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2016 |
| Series: | Cold War International History Project |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Trust, but Verify
The Politics of Uncertainty and the Transformation of the Cold War Order, 1969â?"1991
By Martin Klimke, Reinhild Kreis, Christian F. Ostermann
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Woodrow Wilson International Center for ScholarsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0013-3
CHAPTER 1
Untrusting and Untrusted: Mao's China at a Crossroads, 1969
Sergey Radchenko
Introduction
The congress hall roared. "Long live Chairman Mao! Love live Chairman Mao Zedong! Long, long live Chairman Mao!" Hundreds of delegates, in their cotton suits and caps, shouted out in ecstasy, their hands outstretched, clasping the "little red book," as Mao Zedong emerged at the podium flanked by Defense Minister Lin Biao, Premier Zhou Enlai, and a coterie of disciples who had risen to power on the tides of the Cultural Revolution. Speaking in his high-pitched voice, Mao proclaimed the opening of "the congress of unity, congress of victory."
In April 1969, the Ninth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) convened in troubled times. Over the three preceding years, Mao had wrecked the very party he had labored to build up, subjecting the country to youthful radicalism to purify the spirit of the revolution and revive an aging utopia. Consumed by internal strife, China became isolated on the international stage and tottered on the verge of a war with the Soviet Union. A god in the eyes of his fanatical worshippers, Mao faced mortal dangers: unrest on the home front and the prospect of an overseas invasion.
In 1969, the People's Republic of China (PRC) marked twenty years since its founding. Twenty years had passed since Mao proclaimed the triumph of the Chinese revolution in rhetoric ringing with overpowering confidence: "We, the Chinese people, have stood up!" Then, China was in ruins, but the future was bright and clear. That future was in carrying forth the promise of country's socialist transformation in a world where China would stand side by side with its "elder brother," the Soviet Union, under the banners of struggle against reaction and imperialism in the unfolding Cold War. China was a member of a family of nations bound by common destiny.
The next twenty years turned this world upside down. Mao's radical domestic policies — breakneck industrialization, gargantuan public works, and the creation of "people's communes" — were meant to help China make a "great leap" into communism, but they backfired badly. By the late 1950s, China faced famine and economic ruin. Mao had sought a shortcut to communism, but instead he had created a monstrous regime where misery was hailed as progress, where poverty was extolled as virtue, and where hideous crimes were perpetrated for the sake and in the name of the revolution. The failure of the "Great Leap Forward" showed the bankruptcy of Mao's radicalism, and the early 1960s witnessed retreat from utopia as the party leadership struggled to keep the country from utter collapse.
Seeing his revolutionary dreams dissipate before his eyes, Mao accused his party comrades of lacking faith in the masses and of attempting a capitalist restoration in China. In 1966, he launched the Cultural Revolution, calling on China's youth to "bombard the headquarters," that is, to criticize and depose party cadres who had betrayed the revolutionary cause. For three years, the country descended into chaos and anarchy as crowds of these youthful "Red Guards," bent on destruction, attacked party and government institutions, taking over schools, factories, and even ministries, and drowning China in an orgy of violence and terror. Truth and falsehood lost all meaning. The border lines between right and wrong were eroded. Even Mao was appalled. By 1969, he had lost his faith in youthful revolutionaries and in his own utopian visions. "Long live!" extolled the crowds — but Mao the revolutionary had already died.
Several weeks before the Ninth Party Congress, on March 2, 1969, Chinese troops set a trap for the Soviet border guards in the vicinity of Zhenbao Island (known as Damanskii Island to the Soviets) on the Ussuri River. Thirty-one Soviet border guards were killed in the skirmish. Two weeks later, Chinese and Soviet troops fought another, much more serious engagement. The Soviets deployed tanks and resorted to massive bombardment of the Chinese positions with new BM21 "Grad" rockets, killing (in their estimate) up to a thousand Chinese troops. In the following months, China and the Soviet Union balanced, menacingly, on the brink of war. Although the worst did not come to pass, the prospect of war triggered a policy reassessment in Beijing that within a few years brought about China's rapprochement with the United States, even as relations with Moscow went into a deep freeze that continued until the 1980s.
Historians have discussed this turning point at length. The usual line of argument is that Mao Zedong's fear of Soviet invasion forced him to turn to Washington in an act of triangular diplomacy that would support realist interpretations of international politics. But this explanation presents a number of interesting questions. If Beijing and Washington managed to overcome decades of hostility and begin a fruitful dialogue, then why was it not possible to make progress in Sino-Soviet relations? If neither the Soviets nor the Chinese actually planned to wage war against the other (and the historical records support this interpretation), then how could they have misread each other's intentions so fundamentally? These questions go deeper than the superficial realist framework would allow. They bring out the underlying psychology of decision-making. This approach to the question is not new. There is extensive scholarly literature on the intersections between social psychology and international politics, with several studies investigating Soviet-American relations during the Cold War in terms of trust and mistrust between policymakers. This chapter applies the same interpretative psychological framework to explore 1969 as a turning point in China's foreign relations.
China's Road to 1969
In 1949, China, in Mao's words, leaned to the Soviet side in the Cold War. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union extended massive aid to the Chinese. Those were the years of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the bygone age of fraternal solidarity, when the two sides kept no secrets from one another, when their mutual trust was such that Moscow helped Beijing in the pursuit of nuclear weapons and even agreed at one point to hand over to the Chinese a prototype of the atomic bomb. Yet by the late 1950s, the alliance was plagued by hidden frictions. After Mao unexpectedly ordered the shelling of the Guomindang-held Mazu and Jinmen islands in the Taiwan Strait in August 1958, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev (who had not been consulted over the military action) became concerned that Mao would start a global war. Given that Mao had gone on record downplaying the significance of the A-bomb and depicting bright prospects for communism after a nuclear war, Khrushchev felt that he could no longer trust his Chinese friend with atomic weapons. The promised bomb was never delivered, and soon Moscow withdrew its experts from China and canceled cooperation agreements. In the early 1960s, the quarrel became public with a spectacular exchange of polemics, in which the Chinese accused their erstwhile brothers of betraying the revolution and Moscow lambasted Beijing for dogmatism and warmongering.
But although on the surface the Sino-Soviet split was about divergent interpretations of the creed of Marxism-Leninism, there were of course other issues at stake. In particular, Mao deeply resented what he perceived as Soviet efforts to impose control on China. He flew into a rage in July 1958 when he learned of a Soviet proposal to establish a joint submarine fleet, which, he thought, would subordinate the Chinese navy to Soviet command: "You don't trust the Chinese, only the Russians," he told Pavel Yudin, the bewildered Soviet ambassador. In March 1965, the Chinese rejected the Soviet offer to station MiG fighter jets in the Chinese city of Kunming to cover the southern border against possible US raids. The reason, the Soviets were told, was that the offer was an attempt to put China under control. The Soviet leaders could not understand the allegation: "They [the Chinese] are not disturbed by the absurdity of the statement that a several hundred people, stationed in the regions bordering [Vietnam] could 'put China under control' with the population of 650 million people."
Moscow's imperialist ambitions aside, there was another reason why Mao Zedong was apprehensive about his erstwhile Soviet comrades. The Soviet Union and China were linked not only by state-to-state but also by party-to-party relations. Even before the PRC was established, the Soviets exercised considerable influence on the CCP's internal politics. Mao did not forget the challenge posed by Wang Ming, who in the 1930s had served as the key proponent of the "Moscow line" in the Chinese leadership. Sidelined by 1945, Wang Ming eventually moved to Moscow, where he continued to criticize "Mao Zedong's betrayal," urging the Soviet leaders to invade China and topple his rival. Mao also believed that former Defense Minister Peng Dehuai, who had blamed him for the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and had been purged from the leadership in 1959, was covertly supported by the Soviet leadership. Moscow voiced concern over Peng's purge, which did not help alleviate Mao's suspicions. PRC president Liu Shaoqi (the country's second-in-command) and CCP general secretary Deng Xiaoping, who were among the main targets of the Cultural Revolution, were condemned for taking China down the road of "revisionism," in effect for serving as agents of Soviet influence. The Soviet Union was seen as a threat not only to China's independence, but also to China's revolution.
What really heightened Mao's suspicions of Moscow's intentions was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to put an end to the Prague Spring. The intervention was swift and effective, and, to Beijing's surprise, encountered virtually no resistance. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev justified the violation of Czechoslovakia's sovereignty by referring to the imperative of saving socialism from the perils of counterrevolution, a rationale dubbed the "Brezhnev doctrine." Although the Chinese leaders did not share Czechoslovak party leader Alexander Dubcek's reformist notions of "socialism with a human face," his fate alerted them to the possibility that Chinese communism, too, might become a victim of the Soviet effort to save socialism from Maoist perversion. "They call themselves socialism," Zhou Enlai noted shortly after the Soviet invasion, "but in reality they are social imperialism, now they have already developed into social fascism. They swallowed entire Czecho[slovakia], set up a puppet regime in the same hideous way as the Fascists did that year in Norway [i.e., 1940]. Now that they have gone down that road, what sort of socialism can they speak of?" Worried that Czechoslovakia would be just the beginning, the Chinese leaders called on Romania and Albania, their friends in Europe, to rebuff Soviet encroachments: "Resist," said Zhou. "If you have need, we'll give you cannons."
In 1969, Mao spoke of two possibilities: "Either war will cause revolution or revolution will prevent war." The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was seen as an act of war, but it also had the positive effect as a catalyst of a coming revolution. "There will be a day in the Soviet Union when their people will revolt," Mao concluded when discussing the consequences of the invasion. From this perspective, further Soviet expansionism would only hasten the arrival of another revolution in the Soviet Union. But what if the Soviets chose China as the target? Mao saw a number of benefits in this possibility. First, this would "exercise the masses." Because the last major war China was directly involved in — the 1949 civil war — had ended nearly twenty years earlier, many Chinese did not know how to make weapons: "It's just generally not good when one has not touched a knife or a gun," Mao thought. Second, a war would "expose bad elements," something that Mao was thoroughly preoccupied with in the Cultural Revolution.
Nevertheless, China's internal weakness and backwardness moderated Mao's revolutionary vigor. He did not want a big war. With the escalation of the American involvement in Vietnam throughout the 1960s, the Chinese quietly signaled via various nonofficial channels that Washington should avoid bringing China into the war. Mao skillfully used the Vietnam War to achieve a high degree of domestic mobilization. While he urged the Vietnamese to continue fighting, Mao wanted a limited conflict: something that would trap and exhaust the Americans, inflame revolutionary passions throughout the world, but fall short of an all-out, ruinous war. By the late 1960s, the threat of a spillover from Vietnam no longer appeared as acute. The United States, in Mao's estimate, faced difficulties not only domestically but also in both Europe and in Asia. Its European allies were dissatisfied with the drain of the Asian quagmire, its capitalists were "at odds with each other," and its forces were scattered unhelpfully all over the world. The morale of the American soldiers was low; they did not want to fight. The war, Mao believed, could not last, because the United States "cannot stand wars."
The Soviet situation was in many respects similar. In the Chinese leaders' estimates, Soviet troops, although well equipped, were weak in spirit. General Nie Rongzhen spoke to the issue in a meeting on March 8, 1969: in the past, he said, the Soviet troops had shouted "Long live Stalin!," but what would motivate them now? Mao put it even in starker terms: Soviet soldiers were like the Guomindang. All they wanted was "face" (i.e., personal glory), loot, and women. More important, perhaps, was the Chinese assessment of the Soviet strategic focus as being in Europe and to some extent in the Middle East. For the Soviets, as for Americans, Asia was just a sideshow. Even when strong Soviet response to the Zhenbao Island shootout challenged this assumption, the Chinese continued to believe that Moscow was "feigning an attack in the East to attack in the West." In this interpretation — which probably would have appeared to Brezhnev as rather strange — the border conflict with China helped the Soviets consolidate their control over Eastern Europe. In 1968, the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Albanian information on a covert Soviet troop buildup in Bulgaria all suggested to Mao that the Albanians, the Yugoslavs, or the Romanians had more reasons to worry about a potential Soviet aggression than China did.
But Mao was worried. He was especially concerned that unlike Nikita Khrushchev, who famously had argued in his day against the thesis that war was inevitable, the new Soviet leadership appeared to take a more ambiguous position. "In recent years they no longer mention this issue. Isn't [it] that they seldom touch upon this issue?" Mao wondered in his conversation with visiting Australian communist Edward Hill in November 1968, and his questioning betrayed a tinge of uncertainty about Soviet intentions. Unlike the Americans, who practically had been beaten in Korea and in Vietnam, the Soviets had experienced no such setbacks in recent memory, so their intentions could not be taken for granted. The buildup of Soviet forces in Siberia and the Far East — already in full swing by 1968 — with the introduction of Soviet troops to Mongolia and increasingly assertive Soviet behavior in frequent standoffs with Chinese troops in the border regions, could all be construed as signs that the Soviet Union, as Mao put it, was "preparing to spread the war."
The situation along the Sino-Soviet border gradually deteriorated throughout the 1960s; between 1965 and 1968, the Soviets registered 8,690 "incidents" involving 35,000 Chinese citizens, including 3,000 troops. Most of these incidents were relatively peaceful, with both sides resorting to sticks and rifle butts to reinforce their arguments concerning the disputed border, but Chinese numbers suggest that scores were injured and, in one incident on January 5, 1968, five were killed on the Chinese side. Tensions came to a head between December 1968 and January 1969 in the area of Zhenbao Island, as the Soviet use of armored personnel carriers and helicopters in these encounters increased Chinese perception of military threat. In January 1969, the Chinese Central Military Commission considered reacting to the tougher Soviet posture. Although detailed records of these discussions are not yet available, the existing information indicates that the Chinese leadership proposed to adopt a "tit-for-tat" response, making good preparations and counterattacking "for the purpose of self-defense." Acting on these instructions, the Heilongjiang Military Region prepared a plan for an ambush of Soviet troops at Zhenbao Island, and on February 19, 1969, the Chinese General Staff and the Foreign Ministry approved the plan, paving the way for the violent border clash on March 2.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Trust, but Verify by Martin Klimke, Reinhild Kreis, Christian F. Ostermann. Copyright © 2016 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Tables and Figures,Acknowledgments,
Introduction Martin Klimke, Reinhild Kreis, and Christian F. Ostermann,
I: The Personal Factor,
1. Untrusting and Untrusted: Mao's China at a Crossroads, 1969 Sergey Radchenko,
2. "No Crowing": Reagan, Trust, and Human Rights Sarah B. Snyder,
3. Trust between Adversaries and Allies: President George H. W. Bush, Trust, and the End of the Cold War J. Simon Rofe,
II: Risk, Commitment, and Verification: The Blocs at the Negotiating Table,
4. Trust and Mistrust and the American Struggle for Verification of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, 1969–1979 Arvid Schors,
5. Trust and Transparency at the CSCE, 1969–1975 Michael Cotey Morgan,
6. Trust or Verification? Accepting Vulnerability in the Making of the INF Treaty Nicholas J. Wheeler, Joshua Baker, and Laura Considine,
III: Between Consolidation and Corrosion: Trust inside the Ideological Blocs of East and West,
7. Whom Did the East Germans Trust? Popular Opinion on Threats of War, Confrontation, and Détente in the German Democratic Republic, 1968–1989 Jens Gieseke,
8. Not Quite "Brothers in Arms": East Germany and People's Poland between Mutual Dependency and Mutual Distrust, 1975–1990 Jens Boysen,
9. Institutionalizing Trust? Regular Summitry (G7s and European Councils) from the Mid-1970s until the Mid-1980s Noël Bonhomme and Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol,
10. Trust through Familiarity: Transatlantic Relations and Public Diplomacy in the 1980s Reinhild Kreis,
IV: On the Sidelines or in the Middle? Small and Neutral States,
11. "Footnotes" as an Expression of Distrust? The United States and the NATO "Flanks" in the Last Two Decades of the Cold War Effie G. H. Pedaliu,
12. Switzerland and Détente: A Revised Foreign Policy Characterized by Distrust Sandra Bott and Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl,
Conclusion Deborah Welch Larson,
List of Contributors,
Index,