Nixon excused himself as the hour went on. This was the night of his banquet for the Chinese, held in the Great Hall of the People, and he wanted to be present to receive his guests. Many of them were unable to decipher the invitations, which the Americans had inadvertently printed in a classical script no longer used on the mainland. The Chinese provided the cooks, but all the ingredients – from Florida oranges to California champagne – had been flown out from the United States. At each table there were packages of American cigarettes with the presidential seal and, much to the surprise of the Chinese, the inevitable health warning from the US Surgeon-General. Although a band played a cheerful selection of American tunes such as ‘Billy Boy’ and ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’, the mood was subdued. Nixon, who always had trouble with social events even when they were important, sat silently, rousing himself to talk to Chou only when the cameras were on him. As one journalist said, it all seemed rather anti-climactic after the events of the week. Nixon, in his toast, praised the Great Wall and the Chinese people with their great past and their great future and said how, in their talks, he and Chou had begun to remove the wall between their two peoples. Two journalists from North Vietnam refused to raise their glasses. In his reply, Chou agreed with the President but said that there still were important differences in principle between the two sides. Rumours went round among the journalists that there was still trouble over the communiqué.24
18
Audience Reactions
WHILE AMERICAN AUDIENCES were watching Haldeman’s spectacle from China, so were others, with reactions that ranged from Albania’s outrage to Canada’s approval. China’s allies such as North Korea and North Vietnam, which were already tilting towards the Soviet camp, watched with alarm but muted their criticisms for fear of alienating their giant neighbour. In India Mrs Gandhi publicly warned the United States and China not to think they could collude in South Asia. Asian countries which had defence treaties with the United States – they included South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, New Zealand and Australia – wondered what the American commitment now meant. The head of Australia’s foreign service wrote to his ambassador in the United States: ‘The proposition that the United States is Australia’s best friend does not any longer command general support’. The British, who had invested much in their ‘special relationship’ with the United States, were irritated at the way the Americans had kept them in the dark over the opening to China. The British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, felt particular hurt because he had assumed that he and Nixon had a good relationship. ‘He never really recovered’, said an American diplomat, ‘from Nixon’s not informing him on such major policy.’ Heath from that point on invested more energy in improving Britain’s relationship with the European Union.1
During Nixon’s week in Beijing, Joseph Kraft, an American journalist, went with a Russian acquaintance to a reception at the Soviet embassy for Soviet Armed Forces Day. ‘A sadder party there never was.’ The Soviets were very apprehensive about the meaning of Nixon’s trip. When Kraft told the ambassador that Nixon hoped that his visit to Beijing would improve the atmosphere at his forthcoming Moscow summit, the ambassador was incredulous. ‘We’ll have to see about that.’2
The Soviets had been concerned ever since they had first got wind of contacts between the United States and the People’s Republic after Nixon’s election. The KGB, the Soviet secret police, had planned a campaign of disinformation to keep the Americans and the Chinese apart. At the news of the first armed clashes between Soviet and Chinese soldiers in March 1969, an ‘emotional’ Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, had told Kissinger that they should all be worried about China. That autumn, Dobrynin had conveyed a warning from Brezhnev to Nixon: it would be a ‘very grave miscalculation’ if ‘someone’ in the United States were tempted to profit from the rift between China and the Soviet Union at the latter’s expense. Dobrynin had also persistently and anxiously questioned Kissinger in their private meetings about what the Americans were up to. The Soviet press was full of dire warnings about an alliance between the Chinese and ‘world imperialism’. As Kissinger commented in his memoirs, ‘It was heavy-handed Soviet diplomacy that made us think about our opportunities’.3
For all their concern, the Soviets had not expected a sudden breakthrough in the Sino-American relationship. The United States and the People’s Republic, so they thought, had been enemies for too long, and the war in Vietnam remained to keep them apart. As a result, when Nixon pressed for an early summit with Brezhnev the Soviets procrastinated. Nixon needed it more than they did, they assumed, because an improved relationship with the Soviet Union would help his chances of re-election. They also hoped, by withholding the summit, to get major concessions from the Americans on West Berlin (still an issue between East and West) and on SALT, the major arms control talks going on in Geneva.
A month before his secret trip to China, Kissinger had a meeting with Dobrynin, who, yet again, was evasive on setting a date for a Soviet–American summit. ‘It was comforting’, thought Kissinger, ‘to hold cards of which the other side was unaware.’ As he was on his way towards China, Kissinger got word that the Soviets had postponed the summit yet again. That freed him up to press for an early meeting between Nixon and the Chinese leadership. When Chou expressed a desire that Nixon should come to China after he had been to Moscow, possibly because the Chinese did not want to anger the Soviets unnecessarily, Kissinger was able to explain that, if Nixon visited Beijing before Moscow, it was not the Americans’ doing but the Soviets’.4
Kissinger’s secret trip and, even worse, the announcement that Nixon himself was going to visit China came as a complete shock to most of the top Soviet leadership. (Their knowledge of the world outside the Soviet Union, said Dobrynin pityingly, was understandably limited since it came mainly from the columns of Izvestia and Pravda.) The mood in the Kremlin, where suspicion and fear of China ran deep, was one of confusion and, indeed, almost hysteria. Initial comment in the Soviet press talked darkly about anti-Sovietism and hinted that somehow the Israeli lobby in the United States was pushing American policy towards a rapprochement with China. The official reaction was terse and warned the United States against using its new contacts against the Soviet Union. Georgi Arbatov, the Soviet Union’s leading expert on North America, urged his superiors to remain calm. With their approval, he published an article which argued that an American–Chinese summit was nothing to worry about in itself as long as the Americans were also intending to improve their relations with other socialist countries. If the United States was willing to work on such issues as arms control and settling regional conflicts, then the opening to China was a good thing. The message, as was intended, was heard by the Americans – who had, in any case, no intention of alienating the Soviets, merely of pressuring them.5
On his return from China, Kissinger immediately called Dobrynin to pass on a message from Nixon to Brezhnev: the United States remained committed to improving the relationship between their two countries. Nixon’s trip to China was not directed against any third country. A few days later, Kissinger invited Dobrynin to dinner at the White House to discuss his trip and its implications. Kissinger was reassuring: the Chinese, he said, not entirely truthfully, had said very little about the Soviet Union and appeared to be more worried about the Japanese. Dobrynin asked, ‘almost plaintively’, said Kissinger, whether Soviet dithering over their summit with Nixon had persuaded the United States to take the initiative towards China. Kissinger did not answer directly but pointed out that the Soviet response to repeated American requests for a summit had been ‘grudging and petty’. Dobrynin, who secretly agreed, was, in Kissinger’s description for Nixon, ‘almost beside himself with protestations of goodwill’. The Soviet leaders were very serious in wanting a meeting. Could it happen before Nixon went to Beijing? Kissinger was firm; the summits should take place in the order in which they were announced. The most that Dobryni
n could get was an agreement that the announcement for the Moscow summit would be made before Nixon’s trip to China.6
Although Nixon and Kissinger later claimed that the announcement of Kissinger’s trip brought the Soviet Union into a more accommodating frame of mind in other areas, the evidence is mixed. The negotiations over West Berlin (primarily about its political and actual links to West Germany) were virtually concluded by the time Kissinger went to Beijing. The SALT negotiations were going to move ahead significantly after July 1971, culminating in the final treaty which was signed in Moscow in May 1972, but agreements on certain key areas had already been reached in the spring of 1971. The most that can be said, perhaps, is that the Soviet Union became more aware of the need to work with the United States and even more sensitive to perceived slights. When Nixon gave his toast at the opening banquet in Beijing, he referred to the United States and China together solving the world’s problems. ‘That cut to the quick,’ Brezhnev’s personal interpreter remembered. ‘Where was the Soviet Union in this equation?’7
The Japanese were also shocked by the new direction in American foreign policy because it threatened a bargain Japan had made with the United States in the early 1950s. When Japan regained its independence in 1952 after the American occupation, it agreed to be a part of the American Cold War coalition in Asia, promising, for example, to sign a treaty with Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Taiwan. It also accepted continued American control of the island of Okinawa and allowed American bases on its own islands. At the same time, Japan would renounce its militarist past. The new Japanese constitution of 1946 specifically ruled out the use of force to settle international disputes. In return, the United States guaranteed Japan’s defence with the Security Treaty and allowed Japanese industry access to American markets. Although China was a more natural market for Japan, the ruling political party, the Liberal Democrats, bowed to what they felt was inevitable, at least for the time being, and accepted American limitations on trade with China and an outright ban on recognizing it. Asakai Koichiro, the Japanese ambassador in Washington in the late 1950s, had a recurring nightmare, though, that one day he would wake up and find that the United States had reversed its policy on China without telling any of its allies.
By the end of the 1960s, Japan was much stronger and more confident than when the bargain with the United States had first been struck. Vietnam had shaken Japanese confidence in American power, and the American control of Okinawa was becoming an increasingly tricky issue for Japanese public opinion especially when there were, from time to time, highly publicized incidents of rape or brutality against Japanese by American servicemen. On the American side, Congress and the American public were going through one of their periodic fits of antipathy towards Japan. An American ally, no matter what its constitution said, should lift some of the burden from the American taxpayer and do more to defend itself. Not only that, Japanese manufacturers, once a byword for shoddiness, were now cutting into American markets as American consumers snapped up well-made Japanese electronics and textiles.
Nixon quite liked Japan; he had visited there often and knew many of the leading Japanese politicians. He watched its dramatic recovery from defeat, though, with a mixture of admiration and apprehension. ‘The Japanese are all over Asia like lice,’ he told Edward Heath. ‘What must be done is to make sure we have a home for them.’ A Japan going off in its own direction, as it had done before the Second World War, could only be dangerous to its neighbours and to American interests.
Kissinger, with his focus on Europe and Soviet–American rivalry, had never had reason to know much about Japan. Although in his memoirs, which he wrote in the late 1970s, he waxed lyrical about its mist-covered mountains and green valleys and its complex and subtle inhabitants with their unique society, in the early 1970s he was capable of the crudest generalizations. ‘The Japanese’, he told Chou, ‘are capable of sudden and explosive changes. They went from feudalism to emperor worship in two to three years. They went from emperor worship to democracy in three months.’ Kissinger was also bored by Japanese issues. He is said to have described Japanese officials as ‘little Sony salesmen’. Moreover, since neither he nor Nixon was interested in economics, a power whose chief strength lay in its economy rather than in its military did not strike them as needing to be taken seriously. And, with the Middle Kingdom beckoning, Japan seemed, if not expendable, certainly less important than it had once been. Lack of attention rather than positive malice explains much of what went wrong with American policy towards Japan in the first years of the Nixon presidency.8
Sato Eisaku, who was Prime Minister from 1964 to 1972, remained convinced that it was in Japan’s best interests to foster the relationship with the United States and prepared to renew the Security Treaty for another ten years. Nixon, for his part, recognized that the status of Okinawa was an unnecessary irritant, and negotiations over its return to Japan started in 1969. It was agreed that the Americans could continue to have bases there. Two other issues, unfortunately, got mixed in: whether the United States could station nuclear weapons there (a very sensitive issue in the only country in the world to have suffered a nuclear attack) and whether Japan would limit its textile exports. Kissinger persuaded Nixon that the two could be profitably linked, with the Americans giving up the nuclear weapons in exchange for a voluntary Japanese quota on its textile exports to the United States.
The deal appeared to have been struck by the time Sato arrived in Washington in November 1969. The Japanese Prime Minister had also made an oral commitment, which he repeated in Washington, to accept the limits the Americans wanted on textiles. Nixon promised to return Okinawa by 1972 and to withdraw nuclear weapons from American bases, and Sato had agreed in a secret letter that the Americans could bring them back to Okinawa in an emergency. There is a curious story, still not completely verified, that Nixon also hinted that the United States would be understanding if Japan decided to develop its own nuclear weapons. Another, equally curious addendum is that in their discussions in Beijing, according to Seymour Hersh, first Kissinger and then Nixon used the threat of allowing Japan to become a nuclear power partly as a way to pressure the Chinese to work with the United States against the Soviet Union and to protect Japan. ‘We told them,’ Nixon apparently also said, when he testified to the Watergate Special Prosecution Force in 1975, ‘if you try to keep us from protecting the Japanese, we would let them go nuclear.’ If such stories are true, it shows a deeply ambivalent attitude on the part of Nixon and Kissinger towards a country which, they repeatedly said, was thoroughly capable of becoming an aggressive military power all over again.9
Sato was, it turned out, promising more than he could deliver on the textile issue in the face of furious opposition from Japanese textile manufacturers and their allies in the government. The Okinawa treaty moved ahead, but Nixon did not get the quota he wanted. Comments came out of the White House, perhaps from Nixon himself, suggesting that the United States was worried about Japan sliding back into militarism or going Communist. In private, Nixon talked about Jap betrayal’. As Kissinger prepared to leave on his secret trip to China in the summer of 1971, the United States’ relations with Japan were already strained.10
For fear of leaks Nixon and Kissinger had decided not to inform their allies (or indeed their own State Department) about the trip until the day of Nixon’s televised announcement. Alexis Johnson, who was Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, was summoned to San Clemente on 15 July where he found a frantic Rogers, ‘left behind as usual by the President’, trying to track down ambassadors in Washington, where the working day had already ended. When Johnson finally managed to get hold of the Japanese ambassador, Ushiba Nobuhiko cried out, ‘Alex, the Asakai nightmare has happened.’ In Japan, Sato had three minutes’ warning, and the American ambassador was lying in a barber’s chair when he heard the news on an American armed forces broadcast. The Japanese were furious and humiliated. In Washington, the normally calm Ushiba had a stormy in
terview with Marshall Green at the State Department in which he accused the United States of betraying a lack of trust towards Japan. Sato tried to put a brave face on it but he tearfully unburdened himself about the Americans to the Australian Prime Minister. ‘I have done everything they asked but they have let me down.’ Sato’s own political position was seriously undermined and, in Johnson’s opinion, the Japanese and American governments never recovered the trust and confidence they had formerly had in each other.11
The Japanese probably should have guessed that something was in the wind. The signs of a thaw between China and the United States were clearly visible by 1971 and American diplomats had tried to tip the Japanese off to expect more developments. ‘If I had only listened more carefully to what you were saying,’ a Japanese diplomat said disconsolately to Charles Freeman of the State Department, ‘this would have not been the surprise that it was.’ Chou had also apparently hinted that spring to a Japanese trade negotiator that the two countries were about to start serious discussions. For the Japanese, it was as much the way the Americans handled the announcement as the trip itself. A new word entered the Japanese language – shokku.12
And there were more to follow. On 15 August 1971, Nixon announced a package of measures to deal with inflation and with a growing American trade imbalance with the world. The United States stopped backing the dollar with gold, effectively devaluing its currency, and placed a surcharge on imports. Nixon knew that both measures would hurt Japan. ‘We’ll fix those bastards.’ The second shokku led to the yen going sharply upwards against the dollar and to restrictions on Japanese exports to the United States. Then, in October, while Kissinger was on his second trip to China, Japanese delegates at the United Nations found themselves committed to support the American delegation in resisting Taiwan’s expulsion at a time when the American government itself was abandoning the struggle. Sato’s government, reasonably under the circumstances, decided that, given the American example, the time had come to push ahead to expand Japan’s trading and diplomatic relations with mainland China.13
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