Opening Panel: Changing the Cold War World Introduction by Ambassador Richard H. Solomon Moderated by David Ignatius, The Washington Post

Transcription

1 Opening Panel: Changing the Cold War World Introduction by Ambassador Richard H. Solomon Moderated by David Ignatius, The Washington Post Dr. Robert Kagan, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy, Brookings Institution Ambassador Stapleton Roy, Director, Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars General Brent Scowcroft, President, The Scowcroft Group RICHARD SOLOMON: Let me just make an offline comment. This is the future of lots of organizations but certainly this one. You saw the first use of high-definition television link halfway around the world. Thanks to the Hauser Foundation, we're building out that capacity and giving our mandate our work around the world. We'll be able to do these kinds of presentations, run seminars, workshops anywhere in the world as long as you're willing to get up at 4 in the morning or whenever whenever the time is. We now segue to a series of presentations and panels that will get us into detail of the issues that have been raised in these welcoming welcoming statements. So to begin with, we're going to look at the impact of the time of Nixon visit and subsequently of the normalization of our relations. So I invite up to the podium David Ignatius, distinguished columnist of the Washington Post who will moderate our next discussion, General Brent Scowcroft, Stape Roy, Ambassador Roy, and Bob Kagan. I know this is going to be an interesting start. Please. STAPLETON ROY: Good morning. ROBERT KAGAN: Good to see you. DAVID IGNATIUS: It's a pleasure for me to be here as a Washington Post columnist and student of these events. It's terrible to think that if the clock were speeded up, it wouldn't have been necessary to go to China. They could have just done a video telecast which would have taken the fun out of it. As I ve looked back on these remarkable events in preparation for today's session, I ve been struck by the surprise that President Nixon achieved the phrase Nixon goes to China is almost a synonym for doing the unexpected and a turnabout in foreign affairs, and also how carefully planned this surprise was. Reading Henry Kissinger's first volume of memoirs, White House Years, I came across a wonderful brief passage that shows how carefully the tracks were covered here. At President Nixon's first White House news conference of January 27, 1969, he was asked about improving relations with Beijing and he'd writing the foreign affairs article the year before suggesting that he was interested in this so it was a natural enough question, and he said [00:45:00]

2 very emphatically, I see no immediate prospect of any change in our policy. Dr. Kissinger notes in his memoirs that that the real message was conveyed in a February 1 private memo that the president sent to Dr. Kissinger and I m quoting from his summary of that, I think we should give every possible encouragement to the attitude that the White House is 'exploring possibilities of a rapprochement with the Chinese.' This of course should be done privately and should under no circumstances get into the public prints from this direction. So President Nixon had in mind keeping people from the Washington Post and New York Times outside of this remarkable process -- ROBERT KAGAN: Good idea. DAVID IGNATIUS: -- at that early at that early phase. So we have a very distinguished panel. You all know the figures here. General Brent Scowcroft served as National Security Advisor to both presidents Ford and President George H.W. Bush and is now President of the Scowcroft Group; Ambassador Roy has already with you. Many of you I m sure know that he was born in Nanjing, China, grew up as a Chinese speaker, served as U.S. Ambassador there from 1991 to '95 and is now Director of the Kissinger Institute and to my immediate left, Dr. Robert Kagan is senior fellow of the Brookings Institution, author of five books including his latest called The World American Made. I'd like to start our conversation about these events with General Scowcroft because General Scowcroft was on the plane in 1972 that we just saw in that marvelous historical documentary and I d like to ask you, General Scowcroft, what the feeling was on that plane as you headed across the Pacific for this week that changed the world, the conversation among the president's aides, the feeling when you landed on the ground and had the first contacts with Chairman Mao. BRENT SCOWCROFT: Well, thank you, David. I need to make one thing clear. I was on the plane. I was on the advance trip to China but that was a week after I got to the White House. I was not a part of the NSC team. I was the White House Manager of Defense Department Assets that were used by the White House, communications, the transportation, all those kinds of things. So while I was fortunate enough to be on the plane and for reasons which still escape me, I was a part of the official party. There were 12 members of the official party. Henry Kissinger wouldn't even talk to me at that time. So I m an observer. I'm an observer to the substance of the trip. But, you know, comparing it to a trip to the moon which I ve never been to either is I think apt. It was a world so foreign in almost every respect that it's hard to comprehend how different it really was. China in general to me was so different that when we finally went from Beijing and other parts of China to Shanghai, it was like coming back to Europe because Shanghai, the physical attributes were at least familiar but the attitude on the plane was to me just almost breathless. Well, what's it going to be like? What are we going to do? How is it going to come out? And it was almost an electric spirit and there isn't anybody who didn't want it to work. [00:50:00] And the Chinese that we worked with in preparing for the visit were incredible in the lengths to which they went to deal with our needs. On the advance trip for example, they said well, I understand you want to bring some press with you. How many do you expect? And we said 500. They had never seen 500 correspondents. So, I mean this was literally two separate worlds 2

3 coming together to meet at the same time. And Ron Walker who was my colleague on the advance trip I think can testify to all of these, and all of our communications like, you know, how are we going to travel from here to there? What kind of food? All these things, it was like people from Mars talking to people from the from Earth. It was just hard now to imagine. Our cultures had been completely separated since 1949, not completely because there was some hostility in there but we had no communication. The Chinese government had thrown out Chinese, the Chiang Kai-shek group. So this was really reaching out, touching, and feeling a completely alien body. DAVID IGNATIUS: Ambassador Roy, at the time of this Week That Changed the World, you were in Moscow in a communication to me prior to our gathering this morning. You quoted Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin who said in his memoirs, Needless to say, this visit did not change the world. But then you go on to quote him, Yet, it was even more than a breakthrough in Chinese-American relations, it had major international implications in the way Washington and Moscow dealt with each other. I'd be grateful if you'd address that aspect of this strategic opening. It was something obviously that Nixon and Kissinger had thought through but give us a sense of how it felt at that time watching it from Moscow and what the implications were in this trilateral process. STAPLETON ROY: Ambassador Dobrynin in that same general area in his memoirs describes the Soviet leaders as surprised and confused when the announcement of President Nixon's upcoming visit to China was made. I think a more accurate word that combines surprise and confusion is stunned because that is exactly the way it was. They had simply not anticipated the possibility of a rapprochement on that scale. And it dramatically changed their behavior. They had been stalling for a long period of time on the issue of a visit by President Nixon to the Soviet Union. They quickly agreed to have the visit take place. They had been stalling on a Berlin agreement. That quickly moved forward. Dr. Kissinger has described this in his memoirs. They had been stalling on negotiating an agreement to prevent accidental nuclear war. It quickly moved ahead. In my case, I had been covering Soviet far eastern relations. I could not get any access to any Soviet agent specialist prior to the announcement of President Nixon's trip to China. After the announcement, all of a sudden, they wanted to see me. It wasn't a question of my having to go in and see them. I arrived in the Soviet Union shortly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Our relations for three and a half years were in the deep freeze literally. After the announcement of President Nixon's visit to Beijing, three months later, he visited Moscow and I had the experience of seeing little Soviet schoolgirls, Russian schoolgirls waving American flags standing on the streets of Moscow. Inconceivable without that visit that you would have had that turnaround. Dobrynin himself as you quoted indicates that it changed the course of the Cold War by putting the United States in the driver's seat by being able to simultaneously manage possible improvements in our relations with both Beijing and Moscow, [00:55:00] and that gave the Russians a strong dynamic to want to prove that they were more important to the United States than China was. And that's exactly the way the dynamic emerged, and Dr. Kissinger has described it very thoroughly is his memoir about that period. 3

4 DAVID IGNATIUS: Bob Kagan, you're well known in addition to being a brilliant analyst as a contrarian analyst who doesn't mind arguing the unconventional point of view. So I want to put it to you. Would you be prepared to argue the case that this week didn't change the world or it didn't change that trajectory that it would otherwise have ensued? ROBERT KAGAN: Well, I don t want to let you down and not fulfill my role. I think there is a case to be made that there was a certain inevitability about the movement of the United States and China closer together at this time, and I actually would take for my source on that. I have here holy scripture, the gospel according to St. Henry, and Dr. Kissinger points out in his memoirs which is one of the greatest books on foreign policy ever written that precisely that, that there was a trend in the world that was inevitable if China was in fact going to get stronger, if China was in fact wanting to open up to the world. And obviously the situation was that the Chinese were the initiators of this discussion because they were so petrified about what was happening on their Soviet border. I think Dr. Kissinger points out that only the most skillful players on both sides could have brought it to fruition and I m sure that's true but the initial impulse I think there was a certain inevitability to it. What was going to change, what changed is hard to say. I'm sure the Soviets did become more flexible for a certain period of time but of course, then we have the rest of the 1970s and moving into the 1980s to look at and to decide whether the games were really that significant. I think it's worth recalling that the initial impulses at least on the American side were very much domestic, and I think that sometimes gets lost in our discussion of this. We think about the grand players and of course, the grand players were important but it was also domestic. And if I can can I just read from scripture -- DAVID IGNATIUS: Please. ROBERT KAGAN: -- briefly? Because this is when you read Dr. Kissinger's memoirs, you realize how important it is and we know how important it was for Richard Nixon from a public relations point of view and a political point of view but I find this paragraph very interesting. For over two years, my nightmare had been that Vietnam would sap our nation's self confidence and drain it of its crucial capacity to preserve the free nations and to sustain all hopes for progress. While the post-war world was crumbling and our creative contribution was more than ever indispensable, we stood in danger of consuming our national substance in bitter domestic strife over a corner of southeast Asia. Whatever happened in Indo-China, we would have to begin a new era of international relations, a goal unachievable without national dedication and national consensus. The meaning of the trip, the meaning of the opening for Kissinger at this time was there was now for once the prospect that Americans could at last begin to unite behind a vision of a more constructive and peaceful world, and would be given hope by the demonstration that even in adversity, America still had the inward strength for great enterprises. For the first time in two years, I experienced amid the excitement a moment of elation and inner peace. I'm sure that I hope there are other occasions when Dr. Kissinger experienced elation and inner peace but I think to me what's striking about this is first of all, the great similarity of that moment in our history with what many take to be our present moment but also the degree to which Dr. Kissinger was thinking almost beyond geopolitics and about trying to revive the nation through some dramatic action like this. And I don t know. I think if it hadn't been for Watergate, that might have been the case. But of course, the next thing, you know, practically the next thing that occurs is Watergate and that hope of reviving the nation I think is delayed. 4

5 DAVID IGNATIUS: And there was a period of great turmoil in China which we remember as the Gang of Four. We'll talk about that perhaps in a minute but I want to turn to General Scowcroft. As I was listening to Ambassador Roy describe the reaction in Moscow of the stunned [01:00:00] Soviet leadership suddenly making the invitation to for Nixon to come visit, suddenly opening the way for more cooperative dialog with U.S. Diplomats, greater problem solving. In a sense, I m surprised that they were such a pushover. I mean it wasn't inevitable surely that they would react so differentially to what was in part a strategic attempt to corner them, to get a little leverage towards the Soviets. And so I want to ask you whether people in the White House considered the possibility of a different sort of Soviet reaction, not congenial, friendly please come see us but something that would have been quite sharper. BRENT SCOWCROFT: Well, again at this particular time, I was not a participant in the policy but I would say from my observation, the answer is clearly yes because the opening to China was accompanied by detente and a measured effort to reach out to the Russians and say let's change the fundamental basis of this relationship from emotion to practicalities. Let's talk about things we can do together. So I think without that, you may well have been right. But I think it was also fundamentally in the Soviet interest to respond that way. And they turned out to be relatively skillful in this whole thing because I think as detente went on, it was a brilliant tactical move. But I think the American people tended to confuse detente as a foreign policy gesture with a fundamental change in the U.S./Soviet attitude and the Cold War was sort of over. And leading the Soviets later on in the decade to talk about the correlation of forces in the world was changing. So I think all of these things are part of the package but does Bob did it change the world? Was it inevitable? I was it was inevitable but it was done in a way which allowed us to concentrate our energy in the change, and many of the things we agonize and dither so long, eventually we would have gotten there anyway with China. But much of the drama and much of the significance might have gone out of it had it not been done in this way. DAVID IGNATIUS: Ambassador Roy, I want to ask you whether you remember in Moscow hearing talk of any alternative Soviet strategies of response that would have been less cooperative, less focused on the detente process that was under way. And then secondly, we've talked a lot about American expectations and strategic designs for this opening but far less about how the Chinese viewed it, and perhaps with your two tours in China and lifelong understanding of Chinese policy, you could speak secondly to that question. How is as they saw this unfolding in Beijing, what was their strategic calculus? STAPLETON ROY: Those are big questions and I m going to have to limit my the extent of my comment on them. It's important to remember that the visit did not defang the Soviet Union. It remained our most formidable threat and that continued for a substantial period of time after the visit. And we saw the fact that the Soviets were not helpless. It was demonstrated in the Indian-Pakistan War that took place in 1971 when the Russians used that opportunity to support India in essentially dismembering Pakistan, and since Pakistan was the closest friend of China 5

6 and had played a role in enabling Dr. Kissinger to visit Beijing, in a sense it was the hard edge of the Soviet response. With the United States, they didn't really have good hard options. They could have adopted a harder position [01:05:00] but they would have ended up suffering from it. We were in physical terms still the stronger power but the key thing that the visit did was it changed the psychological balance of the Cold War. Throughout the 50s, Americans were nervous about the expansion of the Communist world, and in the 60s, we were frustrated because the Sino-Soviet dispute had emerged and we could gain no benefits from it because we couldn't break through to Beijing. And the visit all of a sudden gave us this enormous card to play and I think that we played it very well. Now, would China's course have been different without this? It might very well. Within barely a month after Dr. Kissinger made his July 1971 visit, the heir apparent to Chairman Mao, Lin Biao was killed in an airplane crash in Mongolia when he was trying to flee to the Soviet Union. The period from '71 right up until Deng Xiaoping's reemergence in '77-'78 was marked by a bitter two-line struggle within China between those forces who did not want to foster cooperation with the United States and those who did. And when Zhou Enlai became terminally ill, Chairman Mao himself brought back Deng Xiaoping in order to have somebody who was in favor of the opening to the United States managing China's domestic affairs. If the visit hadn't taken place, we have no idea how the secession to Mao would have played itself out. We I met with members of the Gang of Four on visits to China in the middle '70s, and I can tell you they were sinister events. They talked in ideological language that did not provide room for cooperation with the United States. And the visit by President Nixon altered that domestic balance in China in favor of those leaders who saw that this was the direction that China should move in. Without that impulse, I suspect that we wouldn't have seen the reform in openness policies emerge in 1978 and that the whole course of developments in Asia would have been very different. DAVID IGNATIUS: That's a fascinating point about the effect of the secession of leadership in China. Bob Kagan, you were I think 14 years old when Nixon went to China so I -- ROBERT KAGAN: It made very little impression on me. DAVID IGNATIUS: -- I m not going to ask you what you were doing on that fateful day. But I do want to ask you about another part of this drama that we haven't discussed and that's Taiwan. You could argue that what the United States did when Nixon went to Beijing was to sell out an old ally. I mean, you know, it was measured and careful but at the time, certainly there were those on the right who made that argument. And it's an interesting question about what great powers should do when confronted with strong, vulnerable allies who have a claim on our loyalty that's partly emotional, partly strategic, and I m curious. You can make reference to current events if you want or leave them aside but how you'd read the question of Taiwan and U.S.-Taiwan relations in this larger story. ROBERT KAGAN: Well, obviously as China grew, the United States was going to adjust its policy toward Taiwan. Now, there is some question as to whether the U.S. at the time gave away more than it actually needed to give away in order to satisfy the Chinese because after all, I think 6

7 that again one of the points that Dr. Kissinger makes in his memoirs is the Chinese were not actually obsessed with Taiwan in this. They were mostly I would say obsessed with the Soviet Union, and their greatest concern was to find some friend out there. First of all, to forestall any American-Soviet cooperation against China but at a time when the Soviets said I don t know what was it? 30 or 40 divisions on China's border, they were looking for some help, and Taiwan was not so high on the list. And I think Mao in the discussion said that it might be a hundred years or more before we had to, you know, Taiwan and China would be brought back together. I think the American delegation said no, it could be sooner than that [01:10:00] or it gave them indication along those lines. This is a debatable point. I see Dr. Kissinger shaking his head but in any case, you brought me here to raise these points so I m raising them. I just don t know whether it was necessary and then of course I think not necessarily this meeting but in general, I m not sure we haven't generally misled the Chinese as to what our Taiwan policy could possibly be, that we have perhaps encouraged them to believe that we are moving faster and more determinately toward abandoning Taiwan than we have in fact been able to do, certainly in terms of what Congress has wanted but even in terms of what I think the United States' interests are and what it's capable of. And so, right now, I mean up until now that tension has sometimes played itself out in very dangerous ways as when, you know, there was that crisis of the mid-1990s. Right now, things seem to be fairly stable but I don t think we've unfortunately heard the end of where this whole policy that began there will wind up. I don t know where it will wind up. I think that we probably have a great opportunity for tension and possibly unfortunately if not managed well, even conflict in the future. So whether if things had been done differently in the beginning, we wouldn't be in that situation, I m not prepared to say but I do think we were a little bit more generous and forthcoming than even perhaps the Chinese expected. But can I say one word about the detente point? DAVID IGNATIUS: Please. ROBERT KAGAN: And then I mean there's no question that we achieved some flexibility in our relations with the Soviets at that period but let's not forget the detente itself was a fairly short-lived policy and I don t know where you want to claim that it died particularly I think I remember Brzezinski saying it died in the sands of Ogaden or something like that but it might even have died during the Ford administration for all we know, in the Ford administration. So we're talking about a brief window before it turned into some pretty hard-headed U.S.-Soviet relations certainly in the early Reagan years. So I just again when you talk about what did the world change completely, we shouldn't overstate the gains of detente in that period. DAVID IGNATIUS: General Scowcroft. BRENT SCOWCROFT: Could I add just one point? I think the whole Taiwan issue is one that's that symbolizes the unrest inside the United States that this move took. We tend to overlook that but it was it still is there in the Taiwan relations that all of these things are the back force to what happened. And I think we need to remember that. I would argue that China policy is perhaps the most successful American foreign policy in the last 50 years, that presidents 7

8 of both parties, every president since Nixon including Nixon of both parties, some with very different ideas, Ronald Reagan was a member of the Taiwan lobby, have come to the notion that broadening and deepening our relationship with China was in the national interest. But we've had backs and forths and so on so it has been it's hidden behind Taiwan but it is a controversial issue, and I think it has not gone away yet. ROBERT KAGAN: But of course if I could just think this, the strategic environment of '72 is so completely different than the strategic environment today. Then of course, we're looking to the Chinese to help balance with the Soviets. Then aren't the Soviets really our biggest challenge and that's the one we're seeking to address. Then Taiwan is a dictatorship and sometimes brutal dictatorship. Then we go through the sequence of 1989 and everything that entailed, the collapse of the major strategic concern that we had and really the rise of China as perhaps our major strategic concern was also the year of Tiananmen Square and the disappointments of that are brought about, and then of course Taiwan becomes a democracy. So now, we're in a situation where our largest, our greatest likely strategic competitor is now China. And our continuing relationship whatever you want to call it is with a stable, democratic allied friend, whatever you want, which I think is another reason why this issue continues to stay alive because now the old, you know, Jesse Helms is gone. I mean we're not dealing with the Taiwan lobby anymore. We're dealing with a completely set of circumstances which have added new complications to this whole situation. STAPLETON ROY: How about I just add? [01:15:00] I've been heavily involved in the Taiwan issue because I was involved in the normalization negotiations where that in many ways was the central issue. Nations act in their national interest and this is a common assumption in foreign ministries around the world. If you negotiate agreements that no longer reflect the national interests of the signatories, you cannot expect them to be implemented. So therefore, Taiwan recognized the United States was acting in its national interest which was to no longer recognize a small island as the government of all of China when clearly that was no longer the case. But we also had a national interest in not abandoning Taiwan, and that's why to this day we still have a problem with China because of our continued arms sales to Taiwan. We were not prepared to abandon Taiwan but we were prepared to shift our diplomatic relationship to what was clearly the government of China. But we did so in a more orderly fashion and with more protection for our interest vis-à-vis Taiwan than any other country has been able to do, and that continues to this day. I would also argue that if you look at Taiwan's current situation where it is among the more affluent entities in the world ranking in a per capita basis with European countries that Taiwan actually has benefited enormously from the tough decisions that President Nixon and President Carter later made in order to carry out the breakthrough to China and put us in a position to end the bipolarity of the east Asia, which has been the roots of the success that has emerged in east Asia over the last 30 years. DAVID IGNATIUS: The you suggest and I think probably rightly that my provocative phrase sell out is not appropriate, that this was something that benefited Taiwan over time. I want to ask each of you to take up the challenge that Foreign Minister Yang implicitly made in his comments 8

9 introducing our session. When he talked about the importance of the United States and China moving now 40 years on from a period of dialogue and ever-growing trade relations to a period of as he put it strategic cooperation, and this is a subject that all of us have thought about as we've watched the United States and China try to see if there are ways to cooperate effectively in issues of joint concern. And General Scowcroft, maybe I could start with you in asking what's missing. What's needed to be added to this relationship to achieve the kind of greater strategic cooperation even partnership that the Chinese foreign minister suggested? BRENT SCOWCROFT: Well, I think we have made a start in the six-party talks on Korea. It's one the few places that the Chinese had been prepared to internationalize or to participate in a if you will world structure that they didn't think they have a part in creating. So I think there we ought to press it and I think the possibilities are greater now. There was a time when on the Korean issue that the Chinese were hesitant because we kept saying, you know, the solution is regime change in the south. Well, that's anathema to them. If we back off that and say, you know, what do we like what would we both like to see the Korean peninsula look like in 10 years, then you have a basis for cooperation because I don t think we differ that much. On Taiwan as well, instead of holding out the Taiwan relations act and the Chinese building missile deployment, why don t we propose reversing it? The Chinese dismantle some of their missile deployment against Taiwan. In return for that, we say Taiwan no longer needs these kinds of arms and try to de-escalate that as two of the issues most tense. You could go around the world with that but that is a distinct possibility I think. DAVID IGNATIUS: Ambassador Roy, how would you put a little [01:20:00] more substance to this idea of strategic cooperation? STAPLETON ROY: There are so many big issues in the world that you can't effectively challenge or address if the United States and China aren't able to work together. The G-2 idea I never liked because all of the G bodies of the world whether it's the G-8 or the G-20, et cetera, are essentially rule-making bodies. And nobody wants China and the United States to be setting rules for international conduct by other countries. A much better parallel is the European Union where nothing can get done if Germany and France are not prepared to work together but they don t dominate the European Union. In many ways, that's the role that China and the United States have. You can't address climate change if China and the United States, the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are not prepared to address the problem because other countries then won't make the steps necessary to address it. They're too insignificant compared to our role in this. You can't address proliferation issues effectively if China and the United States aren't able to work together. You can't address the problems of the Korean peninsula effectively if China and the United States aren't able to work together. So anywhere you look at the strategic level, there is a China-U.S. aspect to it. In many cases, there is a significant overlap of our interests. In other cases, there's less of any overlap. Iran is a case where we have a significant overlap of our interests on the proliferation issue but they differ in terms of access to Iranian energy and the fact that Iran is a near neighbor of China. So I think that this factor is enormously important in understanding our overall relationship. We can't have a stable world system if 9

10 China and the United States are not able to work together. DAVID IGNATIUS: Bob Kagan. ROBERT KAGAN: Well, to paraphrase Ronald Niebuhr, the fact that you can't have a solution without international cooperation doesn't necessarily logically lead to the fact that you're going to get international cooperation, and unfortunately I would say that the degree of strategic competition that exists between the United States which is both on a sort of fundamental great power level but also on an ideological level I think makes it difficult to have many areas of strategic cooperation. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be talking with each other. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to minimize our differences and it certainly doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to work very hard to avoid conflict but as I go as we go down the list of issues that have already been named, I don t actually I mean we could have a longer debate about this but I don t actually believe that China's future vision of a Korean peninsula is the same as the American vision of a Korean peninsula. I think the Chinese are most of all worried that somehow this regime won't hold up. I know that's not our concern and I think that, you know, the outcome in which for instance there's a unified Korea that is friendly to the United States I think is a disaster from the Chinese point of view and that's not what they want, which is one reason they are not putting pressure on North Korea on this issue. Just to dance around, I mean on climate change, I think the Chinese believe that the whole climate change effort is a plot to keep them weak. You know, the advanced industrial nations of the world have all polluted the world into oblivion and now we're saying stop just as China is getting started, and both India and China feel this way by the way. And so I m not sure that we actually will come to agreement. In fact, I would say present evidence suggests we won't come to an agreement on climate change. I mean I think the answer to the problem that we're going to get a lot of proliferation if China and the United States can't agree on Iran and other countries is that we're going to get a lot of proliferation, not that they're necessarily going to come together. So I think we shouldn't oversell and I know you're not overselling but I think we shouldn't oversell and/or mislead the peoples of either side into believing that it's just a matter of us trying to figure this out, and then we'll all figure it out and then we'll all work together on all these problems. We are in a position of competition with China that is inescapable and but so it's going to be managing that competition, accepting that we have divergent interests. It's not just that we don t have overlapping interests everywhere. We have divergent interests especially in the region of Asia. DAVID IGNATIUS: I would conclude this stepping out of my role as moderator for a moment. As I listen to people tell the story of this remarkable event [01:25:00] of 40 years ago, I am reminded that one interest that the United States and China had in common then and have in common today is the stability and security of Pakistan. Pakistan's role is the crucial intermediary between our countries in 1971 when Dr. Kissinger used it as his jumping off point before going to Beijing and subsequently is well known. But as I think about the challenge that Foreign Minister Yang put to us, how do we move towards strategic cooperation that's meaningful, Pakistani stability and by extension some stable resolution of the conflict in Afghanistan that leaves our joint ally, Pakistan, in a reasonable situation along with other key 10

11 regional countries such as India. That would seem to me to be an area worth thinking about. So I want to close with a final question for our panel, and then I would ask the audience to think if you have questions that you would like to pose. There are microphones waiting but on an occasion like this where as we've said this is one of the great examples of diplomacy in American history, I m reminded of what President Nixon said in his meeting with Chairman Mao, flattering Chairman Mao, he quoted him and said when opportunity arises, the great leader seizes the day, seizes the moment, which was something that Chairman Mao himself had written. And opportunities arise just not in 1972 but maybe in 2012, and so I d like to ask members of the panel finally to think a little bit about whether as we study this amazing lesson from the history of diplomacy, there's an area today where creativity, thinking outside the box, doing the unconventional, daring to take the trip to the forbidden place, whether there's anything that would occur to you by way of analogy to suggest as a modern day analog. Brent, would you? BRENT SCOWCROFT: Wow. Nothing jumps to mind. I guess one of the things I would think about as the as a possible move is in the area of nuclear energy and weapons, and to see if we could not mobilize the important countries of the world to a common outlook on how we can realize the benefits of nuclear energy without the deficits of a proliferated world. And it seems to me that is clearly in everyone's interest but it's a very difficult thing to move from the notion to the practicalities of how do you implement. DAVID IGNATIUS: Ambassador Roy? STAPLETON ROY: I think it's wrong to think of the Nixon visit to China as a kind of precedent for other types of diplomatic behavior. It's not simply in U.S. Diplomatic history. It's in world diplomatic history. Events of this magnitude carried out or prepared for in utter secrecy so that a dramatic development occurs to the surprise and shock of everybody else. These are extraordinarily rare occurrences. Perhaps in our recent memory, the only comparable action could be considered the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, which had negative consequences as opposed to the breakthrough to China which had enormously positive consequences for the world. The world lived in mortal terror that there were going to be other major developments negotiated in secret and then sprung on an unsuspecting world. That psychology continued well into the 1980s because not [01:30:00] only was the preparation for Dr. Kissinger's trip carried out in total secrecy but our conclusion of the diplomatic relations with China. The negotiations were carried out in total secrecy and the actual establishment of diplomatic relations stunned everybody because it they knew it was coming but they didn't know when. So I think that one shouldn't think in terms of are there Nixon visits to China that we can do now that will somehow straighten out things but I do think that they are an enormous number of areas where we have to prepared to think out of the box. I think Brent Scowcroft has referred to the nuclear issue. One of the big issues is how can China and the United States find a modus vivendi for two strong militaries to be able to coexist in the western Pacific without driving tensions through the roof. We're heading in that direction, namely toward having two strong militaries that will create a rise in tensions, and we need to reverse that process unless we think that it's a good idea to repeat history in terms of rising 11

12 powers and established powers. We haven't yet intellectually thought through how to address that question but it's a very urgent question, and here is where we need an ability to think out of the box. China needs a stronger military to defend the wealth that it's generating but we have had this absolute naval and air superiority in the western Pacific since the end of World War II and that's incompatible with a China capable of defending its coastal areas. So how do we find middle ground between those approaches if there is available? I totally agree with Dr. Kagan that a desirable goal doesn't automatically produce the solution but on the other hand, it seems to me better to have desirable goals than undesirable goals. DAVID IGNATIUS: Dr. Kagan. ROBERT KAGAN: I'm not controversial that I won't agree with that. DAVID IGNATIUS: You're invited to think outside the box. ROBERT KAGAN: Well, I don t do that very well. But I m actually tempted to read the wisdom of Dr. Kissinger again but I ll save it for other people because I well, let me just say he in regard to this exact question on how many breakthroughs to China are there in your in one's life, he writes, High office often involves harassments, frustrations, petty calculation rather than the dramatic peeps of the public imagination that usually means an accumulation of seemingly endless pressures and tensions in which every apparent solution proves to be only a ticket to a new set of problems. The character of leaders is tested by their willingness to persevere in the fact of uncertainty and to build for a future they can neither demonstrate nor fully discern. I mean that's sort of the end of wisdom when it comes to statesmanship. Now, the answer to your question, I think what that means is leaders have to look at what's going they have to history is happening. They have to figure out how to try to bend it and shape it in the direction that's most useful and most productive. I think what's happening now is the most important things that are happening now are happening in the Middle East. I think the Arab Spring is the most important development of our time and whether it's an Arab Spring or Arab Winter or whether it's going to go in a bad direction or a good direction, this is the current thing that is going to change when we can have a meeting 40 years from now and talk about the period that changed the world for good or for ill. And I would say the greatest challenge we face right now, as important as the U.S.-China relationship is and is going to be, right now the greatest challenge is how we in our whatever way we can manage these evolutions in the Middle East. DAVID IGNATIUS: So I do want to now turn to the audience if you would please identify yourself, identify the member of the panel to whom you'd like to direct your question. Keep your questions short please. MALE: Yeah. DAVID IGNATIUS: And I saw a gentleman here. Yes, please. JIM MANN: Hi, I m Jim Mann, author in residence at John Hopkins sites. I guess I would address this to General Scowcroft but really it could be addressed to any of the three of you. It involves what a leading diplomatic historian, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker called the mythology of 12

13 the Nixon trip, that it was entirely far-sighted and a bolt from the blue. The record shows that in the 1968 campaign Senator Humphrey Nelson Rockefeller urged a reexamine of China policy. Once Nixon took office, Senators [01:35:00] Mansfield, McGovern, Muskey, all and Kennedy all sought to go to China and called for a reexamination and part of the negotiations of the Nixon opening were that no democratic leaders would go to China. So in a way, the fact that only Nixon could go to China was by order of Richard Nixon. Was there a political a domestic political component to the Nixon opening, and if so, then what do you think Nixon himself would have said if someone else had carried out the opening? DAVID IGNATIUS: Who Brent, would you like to take that? BRENT SCOWCROFT: Well, I ll take a start. Yeah, I think there was clearly a political dimension to it and I think President Nixon probably realized that and took advantage of it because we've talked about the dissension that the whole Taiwan, the residue of this has created turmoil inside the domestic body politic. Had it been Kennedy or Humphrey or somebody proposing it, the right would have said horrors; you cannot abandon our closest ally, so on and so forth. Richard Nixon had a reputation that he used to implement what intellectually and politically made sense. That's my interpretation. STAPLETON ROY: I'd just like one point on that. In diplomacy, you can't offer half a loaf where you need to offer a full loaf in order to establish your credibility. If President Nixon had offered to send his vice-president to China or had offered to send his secretary of state to China or even Dr. Kissinger to China as all he was offering, we wouldn't have had the breakthrough to China because it would have it would have resulted in months, possibly years of negotiating back and forth over what we would be doing and what we'd be talking about. The significance of the Nixon visit was that the president did what nobody thought was possible including the U.S. Intelligence community, which was send the president of the United States to a hostile country with whom we did not have diplomatic relations, where we had diplomatic relations with a rival government in order to get the breakthrough. I cannot conceive of any leader at that time or since who would have been prepared to take such a dramatic step, and without it, I would be prepared to defend the position that we couldn't have gotten the breakthrough the way we did. So the real significance of the visit of this understanding that to overcome the enormous hostility that had been built up over the 20 years when we were actually enemies of each other, it required a dramatic step, not simply a half-loaf step. And therefore whether even if President Nixon had permitted democratic senators or presidential candidates to go, that wouldn't have produced the breakthrough under the circumstances at the time. And I think this is what makes this a truly remarkable international development. DAVID IGNATIUS: Bob, do you want to add to that? ROBERT KAGAN: No, just that it's unfair to make situational alternative histories like that. Obviously, politicians do entirely different things when they re in office as opposed to when 13

14 they're out of office. DAVID IGNATIUS: I would just note that one striking fact about this opening is that although it was undertaken in part for domestic political reasons and the architect of it, Richard Nixon, was discredited by the biggest scandal in our modern political history soon after, this proved remarkably durable in a bipartisan sense. Often in America, foreign policy initiatives become political footballs that are batted back and forth. That really hasn't been the case with the core of the U.S.-China relationship but it's striking to me. Ken Lieberthal in the second row. KEN LIEBERTHAL: Thank you. Ken Lieberthal of the Brookings Institution. This panel has been framed in terms of changing the Cold War world and the attention has really been on the visit in a U.S.-Soviet-China framework. My understanding at the time the visit occurred was that this also had a very strong Vietnam component to it and that there was a strategic idea behind it that if [01:40:00] we could open China and we were trying to get a detente going with the Soviet Union, we could really squeeze Hanoi into a very different approach to resolving the Vietnam war. Am I just wrong on that or if I m not, how much a part of the niche was that and how would you evaluate that component of the thinking behind this visit? Thank you. STAPLETON ROY: It's all in here. ROBERT KAGAN: Well, it's not just in here. It's also in Jim Mann's book. I mean I think it's in Jim's book where Nixon writes down the top issues for everybody for both sides on his way and the top word on his list is Vietnam. But I think that the whatever was accomplished in a larger sense, I think the record is pretty clear that what was accomplished in Vietnam was pretty minimal, that the Chinese didn't particularly lean on Hanoi. It didn't put any real pressure on them. I mean I ve searched in fact through these memoirs and don't find a lot of evidence that China was helping us in Vietnam other than the fact that we knew, and this is a point that Jim makes in his book, we knew that they probably weren't going to use troops against us in Vietnam. But I think given their situation with the Soviet Union, that was a good bet anyway. So my personal sense is that there really was not much help for the United States on Vietnam. BRENT SCOWCROFT: I think I m sure Dr. Kissinger will comment on that later today. But I think we were disappointed. I think we had higher hopes there and perhaps Zhou Enlai and his illness and so on made it less likely that there would be what we hoped for in Vietnam but whether it's clearly we did have those hopes. DAVID IGNATIUS: It's my -- STAPLETON ROY: I'd just like to add the codicil though that while I think the hopes attached to the visit with respect to Vietnam may have been excessive, I think that in fact we probably would not have been able to get the 1974 Peace agreement with as favorable terms as we got in that agreement without the breakthrough to China. Now, that's a debatable question but I would 14

15 at least throw that out as a possibility. BRENT SCOWCROFT: Good point. DAVID IGNATIUS: It's my privilege to call on the man who was the co-architect of these events, Dr. Kissinger. HENRY KISSINGER: Since I'll be talking later, I ll just comment on some historical points. With respect to the question might the Soviet Union have gone the other way, that was very much on Nixon's mind. When the overtures began, it was in We made some barely noticeable moves like admitting to us to buy $100 worth of Chinese products in Hong Kong. But the person who picked it up was George Cannon and he enlisted three other Soviet experts to come into the White House and say to Nixon and to me that if you go down this road, war with the Soviet Union is certain, and you must stop now. And Nixon ignored this. DAVID IGNATIUS: He proved he was a wonder. HENRY KISSINGER: Yeah, but that took some courage at the time when the leading Soviet experts tell you what is then when we called in the three men and informed him of the secret with it, it gave him a very tough message that said we are prepared for the consequences if you interpret it in a certain way but we prefer to call the road that later was called detente. And actually, in the strategy that was first designed, the plan was to have a Soviet summit first so that it would make it harder for the Soviets to turn, and the Soviets overplayed their hand and they thought they could blackmail Nixon and get containment on Berlin and a number of things. And so at some point, we broke [01:45:00] off the Soviet, the explanation of the Soviet summit which we would have preferred and that the secret trip to Beijing and reversed the order. The plan was to have summits, two summits in any event with respect to Democrats going to Beijing first. We have records and phone conversations about it available. To feel that Kennedy or somebody might go to Beijing before Nixon was not a consuming fear. I have that fear expressed. After the secret trip, Nixon did not want any Democrats to go between the my visit and his visit because he thought that a lot of public discussion would screw up the dialogue and the reason he thought that was if you look at the record of 136 ambassadorial talks that had taken place before the secret visit, they had a ritual like a kabuki play. The Chinese made formal demands. We made formal demands and no progress would ever have been made, and the country fusion of the Nixon approach was that he was willing to scrap all these technical discussions. Yet, the original intention was to do it through the ambassadorial talks in Geneva in Warsaw, and there were but then we got huge papers on immunities, telephone communications, briefing memos, 24 foreign countries, 19 ambassadors and senators, and Nixon said they're going to kill this before it's known and then put it into the other channel. The theme of it was let's not talk about these complete issues. Let's talk about where we are trying to go. And so he spent most of his time in Beijing talking political philosophy and not going to all these these technical points on the point that more could have been achieved. Someday, one could look at the handling of the time on problem as a rather 15