{"id":165894,"date":"2020-08-03T12:01:02","date_gmt":"2020-08-03T11:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=165894"},"modified":"2020-07-29T09:12:09","modified_gmt":"2020-07-29T08:12:09","slug":"presumptuous-pompeo-pushes-preposterous-peking-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/08\/presumptuous-pompeo-pushes-preposterous-peking-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Presumptuous Pompeo Pushes Preposterous \u2018Peking\u2019 Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

A rant by Mike Pompeo regarding what the U.S. should do with China led to a fruitful exchange between an old China and an old Soviet hand.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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U.S. President Richard Nixon and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai toast, Feb. 25, 1972. (White House\/Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

28 Jul 2020 – <\/em>Quick. Somebody tell Mike Pompeo. The secretary of state is not supposed to play the role of court jester \u2014 the laughing stock to the world. There was no sign that any of those listening to his \u201cmajor China policy statement\u201d last Thursday at the Nixon Library turned to their neighbor and said, \u201cHe\u2019s kidding, right? Richard Nixon meant well but failed miserably to change China\u2019s behavior? And now Pompeo is going to put them in their place?\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, that was Pompeo\u2019s message. The torch has now fallen to him and the free world. Here\u2019s a sample of his rhetoric:<\/p>\n

\u201cChanging the behavior of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] cannot be the mission of the Chinese people alone. Free nations have to work to defend freedom. \u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cBeijing is more dependent on us than we are on them (sic). Look, I reject the notion \u2026 that CCP supremacy is the future \u2026 the free world is still winning. \u2026 It\u2019s time for free nations to act \u2026 Every nation must protect its ideals from the tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party. \u2026 If we bend the knee now, our children\u2019s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party, whose actions are the primary challenge today in the free world. \u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have the tools. I know we can do it. Now we need the will. To quote scripture, I ask is \u2018our spirit willing but our flesh weak?\u2019 \u2026 Securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time, and America is perfectly positioned to lead it because \u2026 our nation was founded on the premise that all human beings possess certain rights that are unalienable. And it\u2019s our government\u2019s job to secure those rights. It\u2019s a simple and powerful truth. It\u2019s made us a beacon of freedom for people all around the world, including people inside of China.<\/p>\n

\u201cIndeed, Richard Nixon was right when he wrote in 1967 that \u201cthe world cannot be safe until China changes.\u201d Now it\u2019s up to us to heed his words. \u2026 Today the free world must respond. \u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Pompeo delivers speech on \u201cCommunist China and the Free World\u2019s Future\u201d at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, in Yorba Linda, California, July 23, 2020. (State Department photo Ron Przysucha\/ Public Domain)<\/p><\/div>\n

Trying to Make Sense of It<\/b><\/p>\n

Over the weekend an informal colloquium-by-email took pace, spurred initially by an op-ed article<\/a> by Richard Haass critiquing Pompeo\u2019s speech. Haass has the dubious distinction of having been director of policy planning for the State Department from 2001 to 2003, during the lead-up to the attack on Iraq. Four months after the invasion he became president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a position he still holds. Despite that pedigree, the points Haass makes in \u201cWhat Mike Pompeo doesn\u2019t understand about China, Richard Nixon and U.S. foreign policy\u201d are, for the most part, well taken.<\/p>\n

Haass\u2019s views served as a springboard over the weekend to an unusual discussion of Sino-Soviet and Sino-Russian relations I had with Ambassador Chas Freeman, the main interpreter for Nixon during his 1972 visit to China<\/a>\u00a0and who then served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia<\/a> from 1989 to 1992.<\/p>\n

As a first-hand witness to much of this history, Freeman provided highly interesting and not so well-known detail mostly from the Chinese side. I chipped in with observations from my experience as CIA\u2019s principal analyst for Sino-Soviet and broader Soviet foreign policy issues during the 1960s and early 1970s.<\/p>\n

Ambassador Freeman:<\/b><\/p>\n

As a participant in that venture: Nixon responded to an apparently serious threat to China by the USSR that followed the Sino-Soviet split. He recognized the damage a Soviet attack or humiliation of China would do to the geopolitical balance and determined to prevent the instability this would produce. He offered China the status of (what I call<\/a>) a \u201cprotected state\u201d \u2014 a country whose independent existence is so important strategically that it is something we would risk war over.<\/p>\n

Mao was sufficiently concerned about the prospect of a Soviet attack that he held his nose and welcomed this change in Sino-American relations, thereby accepting this American abandonment of the sort of hostility we are again establishing as outlined in Pompeo\u2019s psychotic rant of last Thursday. Nixon had absolutely zero interest in changing anything but China\u2019s external orientation and consolidating its opposition to the USSR in return for the U.S. propping it up. He also wanted to get out of Vietnam, which he inherited from LBJ, in a way that was minimally destabilizing and thought a relationship with China might help accomplish that. It didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Overall, the maneuver was brilliant. It bolstered the global balance and helped keep the peace. Seven years later, when the Soviets invaded and occupied Afghanistan, the Sino-American relationship immediately became an entente <\/i>\u2014 a limited partnership for limited purposes.<\/p>\n

In addition to its own assistance to the mujahideen<\/i>, China supplied the United States with the weapons we transferred to anti-Soviet forces ($630 million worth in 1987), supplied us with hundreds or millions of dollars worth of made-to-order Chinese-produced Soviet-designed equipment (e.g. MiG21s) and training on how to use this equipment so that we could learn how best to defeat it, and established joint listening posts on its soil to more than replace the intelligence on Soviet military R&D and deployments that we had just lost to the Islamic revolution in Iran. Sino-American cooperation played a major role in bringing the Soviet Union down.<\/p>\n

Apparently, Americans who don\u2019t see this are so nostalgic for the Cold War that they want to replicate it, this time with China, a very much more formidable adversary than the USSR ever was.<\/p>\n

Those who don\u2019t understand what that engagement achieved argue that it failed to change the Chinese political system, something it was never intended to do. They insist that we would be better off returning to 1950s-style enmity with China. Engagement was also not intended to change China\u2019s economic system either but it did.<\/p>\n

China is now an integral and irreplaceable part of global capitalism. We apparently find this so unsatisfactory that, rather than addressing our own competitive weaknesses, we are attempting to knock China back into government-managed trade and underdevelopment, imagining that \u201cdecoupling\u201d will somehow restore the economic strengths our own ill-conceived policies have enfeebled.<\/p>\n

A final note. Nixon finessed the unfinished Chinese civil war, taking advantage of Beijing\u2019s inability to overwhelm Taipei militarily. Now that Beijing can do that, we are unaccountably un-finessing the Taiwan issue and risking war with China \u2014 a nuclear power \u2014 over what remains a struggle among Chinese \u2014 some delightfully democratic and most not. Go figure.<\/p>\n

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Kissinger meets Mao, Beijing, 1971. (Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

Ray McGovern:<\/b><\/p>\n

This seems a useful discussion \u2014 perhaps especially for folks with decades-less experience in the day-to-day rough and tumble of Sino-Soviet relations. During the 1960s, I was CIA\u2019s principal Soviet analyst on Sino-Soviet relations and in the early 1970s, as chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and Presidential Daily Brief <\/a>writer for Nixon, I had a catbird seat watching the constant buildup of hostility between Russia and China, and how, eventually, Nixon and Henry Kissinger saw it clearly and were able to exploit it to Washington\u2019s advantage.<\/p>\n

I am what we used to be called an \u201cold Russian hand\u201d (like over 50 years worth if you include academe). So, my not being an \u201cold China hand\u201d except for the important Sino-Soviet issue, it should come as no surprise that my vantage point will color my views \u2014 especially given my responsibilities for intelligence support for the SALT delegation and ultimately Kissinger and Nixon \u2014 during the early 1970s.<\/p>\n

I had been searching for a word to apply to Pompeo\u2019s speech on China. Preposterous came to mind, assuming it still means \u201ccontrary to reason or common sense; utterly absurd or ridiculous.\u201d Chas\u2019s \u201cpsychotic rant\u201d may be a better way to describe it. And it is particularly good that Chas includes several not widely known facts about the very real benefits that accrued to the U.S. in the late 70\u2019s and 80\u2019s from the Sino-U.S. limited partnership.<\/p>\n

Having closely watched the Sino-Soviet hostility rise to the point where, in 1969, the two started fighting along the border on the Ussuri River, we were able to convince top policy makers that this struggle was very real \u2014 and, by implication, exploitable.<\/p>\n

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Moscow\u2019s unenthusiastic behavior on the Vietnam War showed that, while it felt obliged to give rhetorical support, and an occasional surface-to-air missile battery, to a fraternal communist country under attack, it had decided to give highest priority to not letting Moscow\u2019s involvement put relations with the U.S. into a state of complete disrepair. And, specifically, not letting China, or North Vietnam, mousetrap or goad the Soviets into doing lasting harm to the relationship with the U.S.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

At the same time, the bizarre notion prevailing in Averell Harriman\u2019s mind at the time as head of the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks, was that the Soviets could be persuaded to \u201cuse their influence in Hanoi\u201d to pull U.S. chestnuts out of the fire. It was not only risible but also mischievous.<\/p>\n

Believe it or not, that notion prevailed among the very smart people in the Office of National Estimates as well as other players downtown. Frustrated, I went public, publishing an article<\/a>, \u201cMoscow and Hanoi,\u201d in Problems of Communism<\/i> in May 1967.<\/p>\n

After Kissinger went to Beijing (July 1971) \u2014 followed in February 1972 by Nixon \u2014 we Soviet analysts began to see very tangible signs that Moscow\u2019s priority was to prevent the Chinese from creating a closer relationship with Washington than the Soviets could achieve.<\/p>\n

In short, we saw new Soviet flexibility in the SALT negotiations (and, in the end, I was privileged to be there in Moscow in May 1972 for the signing of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and the Interim Agreement on Offensive Arms). Even earlier, we saw some new flexibility in Moscow\u2019s position on Berlin. To some of us who had almost given up that a Quadripartite Agreement could ever be reached, well, we saw it happen in September 1971. I believe the opening to China was a factor.<\/p>\n

So, in sum, in my experience, Chas is quite right in saying, \u201cOverall, the maneuver was brilliant.\u201d Again, the Soviets were not about to let the Chinese steal a march in developing better ties with the U.S. And I was able to watch Soviet behavior very closely in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. opening to China.<\/p>\n

As for the future of Sino-Soviet relations, we were pretty much convinced that, to paraphrase that \u201cgreat\u201d student of Russian history, James Clapper, the Russians and Chinese were \u201calmost genetically driven\u201d to hate each other forever. In the 1980s, though, we detected signs of a thaw in ties between Moscow and Beijing.<\/p>\n

To his credit, Secretary of State George Shultz was very interested in being kept up to date on this, which I was able to do, even after my tour briefing him on the PDB ran out in 1985. (I was acting chief of the Analysis Group at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) for two years \u2026 (an outstanding outfit later banned by Robert Gates.)<\/p>\n

Some Observations<\/b><\/p>\n

1 \u2014 Unless Pompeo had someone else take the exams for him at West Point, he has to be a pretty smart fellow. In other words, I don\u2019t think he can claim \u201cInvincible ignorance\u201d, (a frame of mind that can let us Catholics off the hook for serious transgressions or ineptitude). The only thing that makes sense to me is that he is a MICIMATTer. MICIMATT for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MEDIA is all caps because it is the sine quo non, the linchpin) For example: Item: \u201cOfficials cite \u2018keeping up with China\u2019 as they award a $22.2 billion contract to General Dynamics to build Virginia-class submarines.\u201d December 4, 2019<\/p>\n

2 \u2014 I sometimes wonder what China, or Russia, or anyone thinks of a would-be statesman with the puerile attitude of a U.S. secretary of state who brags: \u201cI was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.\u201d<\/p>\n

3 \u2014 If memory serves, annual bilateral trade between China and Russia was between $200 and 400 MILLION during the 1960\u2019s. It was $107 BILLION in 2018.<\/p>\n

4 \u2014 The Chinese no longer wear Mao suits; and they no longer issue 178 \u201cSERIOUS WARNINGS\u201d a year. I can visualize, though, just one authentically serious warning about U.S. naval operations in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait. Despite the fact that there is no formal military alliance with Russia, I suspect the Russians might decide to do something troublesome \u2014 perhaps even provocative \u2014 in Syria, in Ukraine, or even in some faraway place like the Caribbean \u2014 if only to show a modicum of solidarity with their Chinese friends who at that point would be in direct confrontation with U.S. ships far from home. That, I think, is how far we have come in Pompeo\u2019s benighted attempt to throw his weight around at both countries.<\/p>\n

Three years ago, I published here an article<\/a> titled \u201cRussia-China Tandem Shifts Global Power.\u201d Here are some excerpts:<\/p>\n

\u201cGone are the days when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger skillfully took advantage of the Sino-Soviet rivalry and played the two countries off against each other, extracting concessions from each.\u00a0Slowly but surely, the strategic equation has markedly changed \u2013 and the Sino-Russian rapprochement signals a tectonic shift to Washington\u2019s distinct detriment, a change largely due to U.S. actions that have pushed the two countries closer together.<\/p>\n

But there is little sign that today\u2019s U.S. policymakers have enough experience and intelligence to recognize this new reality and understand the important implications for U.S. freedom of action.\u00a0Still less are they likely to appreciate how this new nexus may play out on the ground, on the sea or in the air.<\/p>\n

Instead, the Trump administration \u2013 following along the same lines as the Bush-43 and Obama administrations \u2013 is behaving with arrogance and a sense of entitlement, firing missiles into Syria and shooting down Syrian planes, blustering over Ukraine, and dispatching naval forces to the waters near China.<\/p>\n

But consider this: it may soon be possible to foresee a Chinese challenge to \u201cU.S. interests\u201d in the South China Sea or even the Taiwan Strait in tandem with a U.S.-Russian clash in the skies over Syria or a showdown in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

A lack of experience or intelligence, though, may be too generous an interpretation.\u00a0More likely, Washington\u2019s behavior stems from a mix of the customary, na\u00efve exceptionalism and the enduring power of the U.S. arms lobby, the Pentagon, and the other deep-state actors \u2013 all determined to thwart any lessening of tensions with either Russia or China. After all, stirring up fear of Russia and China is a tried-and-true method for ensuring that the next aircraft carrier or other pricey weapons system gets built.<\/p>\n

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.@SecPompeo<\/a>: The old paradigm of blind engagement with China has failed. We must not continue it. We must not return to it. We need a strategy that protects the American economy and our way of life. The free world must triumph over this new tyranny. pic.twitter.com\/6F5O50qlYf<\/a><\/p>\n

— Department of State (@StateDept) July 27, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n