1999

by Richard Nixon

  The leadership side of the equation is already taking shape.

  At a meeting of Western leaders many years ago de Gaulle said of a postwar Japanese Prime Minister, “Who is this transistor salesman?” It was a brutally revealing characterization. In 1967 Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore struck a similar theme when he said to me, “The Japanese inevitably will again play a major role in the world. They are a great people. They cannot and should not be satisfied with a world role that limits them to making better transistor radios and sewing machines, and teaching other Asians how to grow rice.”

  De Gaulle and Lee, both giants among world leaders, had hit upon an important point. With the exception of Yoshida, whose high-handed style brought derision from his left-wing opponents but gave a lift to his war-weary people at a time they desperately needed it, most Japanese premiers have been decidedly low-key. The “low posture” that Japan took in the world called for a low-posture style of leadership. In the last three decades Japan has had many outstanding leaders, all of whom faithfully followed the policies Yoshida set in place: free enterprise, economic growth, stable government, and close security ties with the United States. They were the policies and the leaders Japan needed for its first step toward recovering from war.

  During the five-year tenure of Yasuhiro Nakasone—the first former Foreign Minister to serve as Prime Minister in the postwar era—Japan took the second step. It began to take on more of the responsibility for its defenses. And for the first time a Japanese leader sought to be an active, outspoken member of the exclusive fraternity of leaders of major democratic powers. Nakasone served longer than any premier since the legendary Sato and Yoshida, and he moved his country forward just as decisively. He set a new standard for Japanese premiers. It is to be hoped that his highly skilled successor, Noboru Takeshita, will continue in the new Nakasone tradition.

  Since the end of World War II Japanese prime ministers have held formal governmental authority, while the role of the previously all-powerful Emperor has been strictly ceremonial. Still, the role the Japanese monarchy plays as a unifying force should never be underestimated. One of General MacArthur’s wisest decisions as he molded the new Japanese democracy was to permit the Emperor to remain. When Emperor Hirohito finally passes from the scene, Japan will have lost a spiritual leader who deserves great credit for the progress his country has made.

  Many people outside Japan have considered the Emperor just a pleasant nonentity, puttering around in his garden or indulging in his hobby of oceanography. No one who knew him could possibly have shared that view. I met him twice, in 1953 when I was Vice President and again in 1971 when I was President. I was deeply impressed by his gentle, courteous demeanor. But while his manner was low-key he showed a keen interest in and understanding of international issues.

  Hirohito was responsible for bringing the war to the earliest-possible end by urging his countrymen to lay down their arms after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus preventing a lengthy guerrilla war of resistance. His consistency and equanimity helped his people rebuild their country from defeat in war to the status of an economic giant in peace. He had a ready grasp of the challenges Japan faced and also of his responsibility to inspire his people to meet them.

  In the long run the health of any alliance depends not only upon the qualities of its leaders but upon the development of an alliance mentality. In the case of the Western alliance, what is needed is a more equitable relationship between its two most powerful members: Japan and the United States.

  Japanese and Americans have yet to find what is known in politics as a level playing field on which each can deal with the other as equals confident of their equality. Too many cultural obstacles and bad memories remain. In Japan there is still a residue of the fear of Western influences that kept it in isolation for centuries before Commodore Perry forced the door open. Even as they perfect the game of baseball in the summer, belt out choruses of the “Ode to Joy” in the winter, and eat hundreds of thousands of Big Macs each year, the Japanese resist any Western influences that seep very far below the most superficial level. In fact, their enjoyment of Western pastimes and fads is magnified by the constant awareness of their foreignness.

  For their part Americans have their own suspicions of the Japanese. Even if it were not for the memory of World War II, the vast cultural differences between East and West would remain. Fashionable young Americans know all about sushi but could not begin to fathom Shinto, the ancient faith still observed by millions of Japanese. American farmers are understandably resentful because the Japanese government restricts the importing of their $180-a-ton rice, but few Americans realize that the official doctrine of Japan’s ruling party is to restrict the importing of rice at least in part because rice grown from Japan’s own soil is “the core of our spiritual civilization.” The folkways of Japan remain so obscure to most Westerners that many businessmen bound for Tokyo feel they need to take courses to brush up on which topics of conversation are safe and which are risky and what is expected of a guest in a Japanese home.

  We often criticize the Japanese for keeping to themselves culturally and for pursuing their own economic interests too doggedly without regard to the rest of the world, but in many ways Americans are no different. Before the United States entered both world wars most Americans wanted nothing to do with Europe’s conflicts even though the forebears of most Americans had come from Europe. Until the end of World War II Americans had far less in common with the Japanese than with the Europeans. Since 1945, however, the United States and Japan have had the common ground of democracy and free enterprise upon which to build. These must be the foundations of the friendship between our two nations.

  Our European military and economic partners are our cultural partners as well. With the British we share language, while with the British and with the French and the Germans we have the common ground of ancestry, philosophy, literature, and music. But the finest element of our European heritage is political liberty. We did not invent it; we inherited it. And we have in turn shared it with Japan. One of the greatest challenges for the United States in the future is to recognize that because of our common commitment to liberty we have just as strong cultural ties with the Japanese as with the Europeans.

  But it is not just a one-way street. The Japanese must open up to us, too—not just their markets, but themselves. They must learn not to fear “Western contamination”; they must realize that the cultural and racial homogeneity that has been one of their greatest strengths may be a hindrance in their effort to become an integral part of a heterogeneous worldwide alliance of freedom and prosperity.

  We are different culturally, and those differences are not going to be removed—nor should they be. The cream does not come to the top in homogenized milk. In the long run, if each partner contributes his particular strengths in the common quest for peace and prosperity, both will emerge immeasurably stronger.

  Japan’s cautiousness toward America may be the result in part both of the residue of the war and of the regrettable fact that many American politicians find it far too easy to instruct the Japanese how to behave. As the most powerful member of our alliance we are apt to conclude mistakenly that we are also the most wise. Sometimes our military and economic power and our willingness to project it in the world have made us suspect among weaker nations, and often we project intellectual arrogance as well. From our commentators and congressmen and senators the advice to the Japanese comes fast and furious: “Spend more on defense. Inflate your economy to create more demand for our goods. Spend more on developmental aid in the Third World. Commit funds and moral support to our efforts in the Persian Gulf.”

  It would be good if the Japanese did all of these things. But they will not because we tell them to or because it is in our interest for them to take certain actions. Instead they may well have an agenda for us: “We will spend more money on your goods if you tackle your budget deficit. We will spend more on defense and venture into the Third World i
f you show that you too have a consistent foreign policy, a middle ground between ’in with both feet’ as in Vietnam and ’head in the sand’ as in the Vietnam syndrome.”

  The Japanese are shrewd, polite diplomats who would never publicly state their case in such a crude, tit-for-tat fashion. By the same token they will not react positively to receiving their marching orders in an equally crude way from us, in the form of statements by government officials, speeches in Congress, or newspaper editorials. In dealing with the Japanese we often forget that international affairs are a subtle art that is fraught with the potential for misunderstanding. We would never treat our European allies so cavalierly unless we were willing to face dire consequences, such as the years-long Franco–American chill that followed President Johnson’s public criticism of de Gaulle. And yet we are all too willing to lecture, cajole, even threaten the Japanese. What are they to conclude? That we take their friendship for granted? That we think we have the right to throw our weight around because we won the war? During the last forty years the United States has proved itself an enthusiastic friend of Japan, especially when U.S.–Japanese friendship has been in our interests. We have yet to prove ourselves a dependable friend in the long term—since forty years, to the Asian mind, is only a moment. To deserve and earn the trust not only of the Japanese but of all our friends and allies in the world, we must stop criticizing them solely for the sake of domestic political gain. And we must resist lecturing those whom we would not permit to lecture us.

  In the final analysis the greatest impediment to the development of a healthy alliance mentality between the United States and Japan is that the two nations are not yet equal members of the alliance.

  One observer in Japan said, “For Japan to be equal requires Japan to be separate. If Japan were not separate, it could only be inferior, and would soon be a colony of the West.” The irony of this statement is that because Japan depends upon another nation for its security it to an extent is a colony of the West; it is equal only as an economic power. Thus the Japanese have the opposite dilemma to that of the Soviet Union, whose status as a superpower comes only from its military strength. Just as the Japanese are self-conscious about depending on the United States for their security, the Soviets are self-conscious about their economic backwardness. The problem with the Soviet economy is communism. The problem with Japanese national security is Japan’s inability to protect itself as a result of both political and psychological constraints.

  What will help banish Japan’s fear of losing its individuality is a more activist role on the world stage—diplomatically, developmentally, and eventually militarily. The Japanese people have good reason to be repelled by the thought of war, and many do not want their nation to rearm. Americans are also repelled by war. The difference is that Americans support a level of national-security spending that is adequate to protect their country against any aggressor. The Japanese attitude will inevitably change, especially if Japan’s neighbors become less concerned about its reemergence. With the change will come a new self-confidence among Japanese, born of the certain knowledge that Japan is once again a truly independent nation. A more active and confident Japan will mean that the prospects for freedom and peace in the Pacific in the next century will be infinitely greater.

  8

  THE

  AWAKENED GIANT

  China’s twentieth century has been a crucible of revolution and suffering, of poverty and promise, of political and ideological upheaval, of order fashioned out of chaos and chaos forcibly thrust into the midst of order. Within sixty years China has been wrenched from ancient kingdom to infant republic to communist dictatorship. It has swung between angry rejection of any hint of Western influence and cautious acceptance of the benefits of good relations with the West. It is one of the world’s most homogeneous societies, but for most of this century it has been at war with itself.

  During its years of hostile isolation after the 1949 revolution China was distrusted and feared by many in the West. It was the mysterious, smoldering red giant of the East, preoccupied with imposing a punishing, fanatical code of ideological purity on its people at the same time the peoples of the West were enjoying an explosive postwar economic boom. Few Western leaders took the time to study China or its torturous history. One who did was Charles de Gaulle. To the surprise of some of his anticommunist supporters he recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1962. Asked why, de Gaulle answered, “Because China is so big, so old and has been so much abused.”

  When I was out of office during the 1960s, my own thinking about China had already begun to change as a result of the Sino–Soviet split and the advice of such statesmen as de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, both of whom told me it was essential for the United States to develop a relationship with China. But I will never forget a conversation I had with Herbert Hoover in New York City in 1963, when I went to see him on his eighty-ninth birthday. He gave me the opposite advice. We should not deal with the Chinese, because they were “bloodthirsty,” he said. He shuddered visibly as he described his experiences in China as a young engineer in 1900. It was the time of the Boxer Rebellion, a violent uprising by a small group of fanatics against Western exploitation. Both the Boxers and the government troops who smashed the rebellion committed horrible atrocities. Hoover and his wife recalled seeing thousands of bodies float past in the river that ran by their settlement.

  They were witnesses at the dawn of a savage century. Civil war came two decades later, when the forces of Sun Yat-sen brought down an empire that had ruled for two millennia. In the 1930s China suffered under a brutal Japanese invasion and occupation in which the Chinese government says 22 million people died. After World War II, more than 5 million died in another civil war and in the consolidation of the new communist regime following the victory of Mao Tse-tung’s forces over Chiang Kai-shek’s in 1949. Twenty-seven million people starved to death during the industrialization drive and forced collectivization of the late 1950s and early 1960s, ironically dubbed the “Great Leap Forward” by China’s leaders. A few years later Mao dragged his country through the ideological wringer of the Cultural Revolution, violently disrupting the lives of millions of his countrymen and leaving deep scars that still remain today among the educated classes. One of the casualties was Deng Pufang, the son of Deng Xiaoping. The fanatical Red Guards threw him out of a window, and he fell three stories to the ground. He is now confined to a wheelchair.

  Yet one of the miracles of our time is that China, which has endured the worst scourges of the twentieth century, is destined to be one of the world’s leading powers in the twenty-first century. One hundred and sixty years ago Napoleon said of China, “There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! For when he wakes he will move the world.” The giant is awake. His time has come, and he is ready to move the world.

  After a half century of war with others and with itself, China is united. In just fifty years it has grown from 400 million people to over one billion. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, one of the most remarkable statesmen of the twentieth century, it has moved away from doctrinaire Marxism. By lifting the deadening weight of total bureaucratic planning, Deng has freed the enormous potential of a fifth of the world’s people. If China continues to follow Deng’s path, our grandchildren will live in a world not of two superpowers, but of three: the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China.

  The China I visited for the first time in 1972 was not even a major power. It was, and to a large extent remains, a developing country. Some experts concluded at the time that the Chinese had responded favorably to our initiative only because they wanted access to Western markets and Western investments. One predicted that the first question Mao would ask me was, “What is the richest country in the world going to do for the most populous country in the world?” He was wrong. During over twenty hours of meetings I had in 1972 with Mao and with Chou En-lai, the Chinese did not raise economic issues. What mattered to China’s leaders was no
t American money but American muscle. China and the United States were brought together by the overriding imperatives of national security.

  Our rapprochement may have been the the most dramatic geopolitical event of the postwar era. But the most significant such event was the Sino–Soviet split during the early 1960s, after which China’s former ideological mentors and economic benefactors in Moscow became threatening adversaries. China’s unease about Soviet troops massed along its northern border, Soviet missiles targeted on its cities, Soviet aid to its antagonist India, and Soviet territorial ambitions elsewhere in Asia gave it no choice but to reach out to the Soviet Union’s most powerful adversary, the United States. China and the Soviet Union are communist nations; as a free nation the United States is a natural ideological adversary of both. But the Chinese knew that the Soviet Union threatened them, while the United States did not. As I told then party head Hua Guofeng in Beijing in 1976, there are times when a great nation must choose between ideology and survival. Hua agreed. In 1972, China had chosen survival.

  Just as a few hard-liners in Beijing were stubbornly opposed to relations with the capitalist United States, our decision to seek a new relationship with China was traumatic for some Americans who felt we would betray our democratic principles by dealing with communists. But like the Chinese we had no other practical choice. If we had not undertaken the initiative and China had been forced back into the Soviet orbit, the threat to the West of Soviet communist aggression would be infinitely greater than it is today. It was in the interests of both nations that we forge a link based not on common ideals, which bind us to our allies in Western Europe and around the world, but on common interests. Both sides recognized that despite our profound philosophical differences we had no reason to be enemies and a powerful reason to be friends: our mutual interest in deterring the Soviet threat.