EASTERN APPROACHES
The decisions of the Chinese and American leaders that President Nixon should visit Peking within the next twelve months are to be praised without equivocation. To agree to meet and to talk represents for both sides a very great shift. That shift is in the right direction, away from the striking of moral attitudes based upon ideological differences, and towards the recognition of political powers. Both sides have had to swallow a lot of words to get as far as they have now got; and if the agreement to meet is to lead to an orthodox diplomatic relationship more words will have to be eaten. Whatever transpires at the talks, it is already the case that the agreement to meet represents a maturing of outlook by the United States of America and the People's Republic of China alike. The childish anti-American propaganda of China's Cultural Revolution will doubtless be swept aside, at least for the time being; and the equally childish American determination to exclude Red China from her proper place at the United Nations must now be regarded as at an end, and for good. At the very least, the world is entitled to expect that the resumption of Sino-American relations will see Mao's China rather than Chiang Kai-shek's Formosa sitting on the Security Council; will put an end to the United States embargo on trade with China; and will assist to some extent in making as orderly as possible the American withdrawal from Vietnam. Further by-products may well be the upgrading of Sino-British diplomatic relations to the ambassadorial level, and the introduction of a greater degree of stability in Hong Kong.
The Spectator has advocated the present initiative for a considerable time. In February 1969, in considering the question of a new balance of power in the light of the Sino-Soviet conflict over their common border of seven thousand miles, Mr Tibor Szamuely wrote in these pages:
Here, then, we have the makings of a classical Balance of Power situation. The US faces two enemies, who are in turn rent by an even more serious quarrel of their own. One of them is immensely powerful, nearly as strong as the US itself, and poses a constant threat to the heart of the western alliance. The other although potentially strong, is still undeveloped, and presents no real threat to the West. Every elementary rule of power politics should indicate a rapprochment, even an entente between the US and enemy number two, that is, China, against enemy number one — the USSR.
The time has come for the US to seek an accommodation with China—an accommodation desirably leading to friendship and collaboration. There is no need to repeat the mistakes committed so often with regard to the USSR: the Chinese communists should not be depicted as democrats or liberalisers or secret believers in the virtues of private enterprise. They should be accepted for what they are: nationalistic communists, bitterly hostile to Russia. Despite the profound differences in ideology, there is, an overriding common interest: to make the world, the West as well as the East, safe from Russian imperialist expansion. The establishment of this new Balance of Power would,. for one thing, transform the whole situation in Eastern Europe—it might even induce the Russians to disgorge some of their spoils. At the very least, such a policy would open up new possibilities for the West—for the first time in twenty years.
Those new possibilities are now in fact opening up. President Nixon has now taken that opportunity—and so, let it never be forgotten, have Chairman Mar. and Premier Chou En-lai. No one can safely predict what the possibilities will become. But it is quite obviously the
intention of the President to play his part in bringing China into the comity of nations and it is equally Obviously the intention of the Chinese leaders that China should play the full role in the affairs of the world that her size and power entitle her to play. China is coming in from the cold; and it is the United States that is doing the welcoming.
Not only the balance of power is affected by this diplomatic revolution, which represents the first major shift in world affairs since the Iron Curtain was rung down in Europe, and the Communists led by Mao Tse-tung won control over China, in 1947. The pattern of trade will now, inevitably, consequently, and correspondingly shift too. The great markets of the future will increasingly become, ineluctably now that China prepares to cast off her traditional isolationism, the markets of the developing nations of the east. These markets, of the Indian sub-continent, of South-east Asia, of Indonesia and Australasia, and now of the greatest of all of these, of China herself, are vast and growing. The trade routes to them are the open seas. No industrialised western nation is better placed to take advantage of the rapidly shifting and developing scene than is this country; and none has greater useful experience at its disposal. These are the markets, far greater and far more suited to our economy and our skills than any European market, from which in any foreseeable long-run we have most to import and to which we have most to export. It is in these markets that the bulk of our future trade cannot but lie, provided we, for our part, seize the opportunities, look outwards and not inwards, and abandon before it is too late the pretence that a European continental entanglement offers us anything but a political and economic future as the poor relation of a closed community whose centre of gravity, in economic and in the last resort in political terms, lies along the Rhine and in the Ruhr.
It is very fortunate that the American and Chinese leaders have started coming to terms with each other now, and not six, twelve or eighteen months later, when it might have become too late for the United Kingdom to reverse policies which, if pursued, would hamper us from freely playing an appropriate part in the changed diplomatic and trading world which is coming. All manner of new calculations should now be made. It is to be hoped that the hitherto fixed positions adopted by many of the leaders in politics, business, manufacturing, administration, and opinion-forming will realize that a diplomatic revolution is upon the world; that our poSition in that shifting world must shift This is a time for keeping options open, not for entering into irrevocable commitments.
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