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I he U.S. can usefully exploit Soviet fears of China, but it ought to do so extremely carefully.
America should continue to build up economic and diplomatic contacts with the People's Republic. But selling China offensive arms or entering into formal defense agreements with China would be an especially risky form of military competition with the U.S.S.R. The U.S. is already cooperating with the Chinese in gathering intelligence about Soviet military activity. To cross the threshold from that kind of defensive cooperation to arms sales would give the Sino-American relationship too much the cast of an anti-Soviet alliance. Such an alliance would be politically provocative without being militarily formidable—a highly undesirable combination. With or without U.S. assistance, the Chinese military will be extremely backward for some time to come. In a crisis (over Indochina, say) with Washington and Peking allied against them, the Soviets might be tempted to attack just China, and thus call the bluff that the China card represents in strictly military terms.
The U.S. has a considerable interest in the success, or at least the survival, of the Four Modernizations policy of Deng Xiaoping. The U.S. can help with investment, financing, technology, bilateral trade and exchange programs for scientists, scholars and especially managers. Richard Nixon, among others, has speculated about the tantalizing, though still extremely remote, possibility that Deng's program, with its stress on pragmatism over ideology, could some day even lead the Chinese to abandon not just Maoism, which it is now doing, but Marxism-Leninism. Such a monumental defection from the Red banner would be a huge setback to the Soviet Union and the cause of Communism around the world.
I here are opportunities for the U.S. to take the offensive on behalf of its own interests in the Third World.
As a result of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, its clubfooted interventions in Angola and Ethiopia, and its support for Viet Nam's subjugation of Laos and Cambodia, the U.S. has new openings in the so-called Nonaligned Movement. Afghanistan was a founding member of the movement 26 years ago; the Soviet invasion there was a devastating setback to Fidel Castro's attempt to achieve permanent leadership for Cuba in the movement and to establish a kind of godfather status for the U.S.S.R. as the natural ally of nonalignment. States as diverse as Burma, Mozambique and Guyana have begun to distance themselves from the U.S.S.R.
With a combination of propaganda, economic assistance and diplomatic massaging, the U.S. should be able to exploit these openings. Even Cuba and Viet Nam, Moscow's principal hit men inside the Nonaligned Movement, may some day be receptive to efforts by the West to lure them into positions more independent of Moscow and into roles less troublesome in their regions.
While the Soviet Union can deliver arms to national liberation movements, the U.S. and the West can deliver something far more useful in the long run: multilateral negotiated settlements that resolve regional conflicts. A recent and promising though still precarious example: the end of the Rhodesian civil war and the creation of Zimbabwe. Both events were midwifed by Britain, with