Alternative U.S. Strategies with respect to China and the Implications for Vietnam

Abstract

This article begins and ends Vietnam, starting an analysis of a China policy devised by the Nixon Administration in the 1970s to enable the United States to withdraw from Vietnam with honour, and ending an assessment of the implications of post-Cold War thinking in the United States about China for Vietnam today. It commences a brief history of the debate in the United States about policy towards China, and then analyses in turn three alternative U.S. strategies: Realist Engagement, Offshore Balancing, and Co-operative Security. The article concludes an assessment of the implications of each of the three strategies for Vietnam. The China Policy Debate in the United States The recent debate about China policy in the United States has focused on whether Washington should seek to or to China. The debate, however, has missed the point, because U.S. policy through six administrations (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton) has sought to do both: engage and contain China. It is true that, for more than twenty years, since the end of the war in Vietnam in 1975, the dimension of U.S. policy towards China had not been tested until China began missile exercises around Taiwan in 1995 and 1996. Then, it took not just one but two aircraft carrier battle groups, both the USS Nimitz and the USS Independence, to make the point that the policy was still intact.(1) The debate in the United States about containing China has a long history. In the late 1960s, American specialists on China debated about whether the U.S. Cold War policy of containing Chinese communism, firmly in place since the Korean War, should be modified from a strategy of containment and isolation to one of containment without isolation. For some analysts, a policy of and engagement was being proposed as a formula designed, among other things, to help extricate the United States from the Vietnam War. Once elected President in 1968, Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, took a series of steps to convince Mao Zedong and his colleagues that they sought an accommodation Beijing. They wanted to engage China, and thereby provide a deterrent to a possible Soviet attack on China, in return for Beijing's help in pressing the Vietnamese communists to accept a face-saving formula for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. By a coincidence of history, the United States and China at that time were each facing a crisis that could be resolved only the help of the other. By 1968, protests against the Vietnam War had divided the United States to the extent that political stability was endangered, while Soviet hostility towards China had reached a point at which observers were convinced that Moscow was seriously considering launching a so-called surgical strike against China's emerging nuclear capability. The accommodation endorsed by Mao during Nixon's unprecedented trip to China in February 1972 provided both deterrence for China against a possible Soviet attack, and a decent interval in Vietnam for the United States between the American withdrawal and an inevitable communist victory. Of course, the opening to China also gave Washington a wonderful opportunity to play the two major communist powers against each other. From this fortuitous beginning, the United States has continued, step by step, to engage China more deeply: beginning as committed ideological foes, they then became partners in an informal strategic alliance against the Soviet Union, later established formal diplomatic relations, and finally became partners in interdependent development.(2) The relationship between the two countries has been built on principles agreed upon and published in three joint communiques: the Shanghai Communique of 1972, signed by President Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai; the Joint Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations of January 1979, concluded under the Carter Administration; and the U. …