Our enemy's enemy

George Gale

Relations between Labour left-wingers and the country's civil and military defence chiefs have never been worse. They are never much good; but last week the Prime Minister encouraged his leftwingers (his red militants as I would like to call them) by suggesting that somebody at the Ministry of Defence was making mischief by leaking details of the number of officers seeking to leave the services. There was the curious business of the Chiefs of Staff exercising 'their rarely used right to seek an audience with the Prime Minister being told that such

meting did not fit Mr Callaghan's time 0140.What it did not fit was Mr Callaghan, liot,this timetable, for he had no desire to appear to come under pressure from the 'generals just as he was about to announce a forces' pay settlement which comfortably breached the Government's guidelines. Now we have something even more curious: the remarks made in China by Sir Neil Cameron, the airman who is at present Chief of the Defence Staff and thus the country's senior serving officer, holding five star rank. What Sir Neil said in China has further incensed Callaghan's red militants.

What he said was clear enough: he told the Chinese, 'We both have an enemy at the 'door whose capital is in Moscow.' He delivered his remarks toasting the officers of China's Sixth Tank Division, up in the hills

• near the Great Wall: that prodigious work of ancient China which asserted to the savages who came down from the high lands of the north and west to pillage the great Chinese plain, 'This is China: enter at your peril.' ' Sir Neil had seen a display by the Chinese ' tanks: inferior to the Russian tanks which ' face them. 'Some of our problems,' he told 'the Chinese, 'are different but one thing is absolutely clear to me and that is the grow

ing strength of the Soviet tank force, with the T-64, the T-62 and the T-80 on its way, which will possibly be the most advanced tank in the world. We must share, I believe, our common tank experience so that we shall be in the best possible position to take on the Soviet tank force if this should ever be required.'

Chinese meals, when high-ranking vis • itors are being entertained, are elaborate; : and the toasting and drinking can be very

. heavy indeed, and competitive too. But : there is no suggestion that Sir Neil was so

• overwhelmed by Chinese hospitality that he

. spoke carelessly. He was not speaking on , behalf of NATO. Technically, he may not have been speaking on behalf of the British Government. But he was speaking officially, and his words will, I hope, be taken by the Chinese as official and representing

• British policy.

It is most certainly to be desired that the Chinese should take his words seriously as an aecurate statement of Britain's — and NATO's — position, and not as Moscow would have them be regarded, as the words of a temporarily 'drunken hare', or of someone 'mad as a March hare' as we might say. On Tuesday in the Commons the Prime Minister, in a somewhat tricky position, endeavoured to reassure the Russians while in no way suggesting to the Chinese that Sir Neil Cameron's words were being repudiated. He did this by stating that British policy towards the Soviet Union and China should not be regarded as changed in any way by what the Chief of the Defence Staff had said outside Peking. The response of the British Government has thus been cool and offhand and embarrassed. But it is very much to be hoped that the Chinese listen and accept what Sir Neil had to say to them, and brush aside the remarks of Mr Callaghan, which may have had the effect of weakening the Chief of Defence Staff's forthright statement.

The West needs China and China needs the West. Nothing is to be gained from pretending that Moscow is not a common enemy. The only military threat to Western Europe and the United States is posed by the Soviet Union and its alarming and potentially overwhelming superiority in conventional arms and particularly in tanks, where it now enjoys a three-to-one advantage, as Sir Neil told the Chinese. Likewise, now that the United States has pulled its troops out of South-east Asia and seeks a full accommodation with China, the only threat to China is posed by the Soviet Union. If the West, and in particular Western Europe, were, by spurning China, to cause Peking to revert to its earlier ideologically-based policy of friendship with the Soviet Union, Moscow would then feel very much freer to launch an attack upon Western Europe.

We are not at war: the talk of 'enemy' is the talk of what might be. This said, we should never let it out of our minds that our only potential enemy is the Soviet Union and its allied dependencies in the Warsaw Pact (together with its Cuban satrapy and whatever other friends it might scrape up in Africa and Asia given a new outbreak of war). China is not allied with the West, and is nowhere near becoming so. There is, in peace, no need for such an alliance. But with China friendlily disposed towards Western Europe because of China's enmity with the Soviet Union, the possibility of war between the West and the Russian empire is greatly diminished. Since there is no conceivable advantage to the West in embark

ing upon war with the Soviet Union — the dismantling of the Russian empire, although much to be desired, is certainly not worth the death and destruction of pursuing that objective by war — the constant hope must be that the Soviet Union, in its calculations, sees no certainty of victory over the West.

The strategic value of China's enmity with Russia, and its consequent convenient friendship with the West cannot be exaggerated. Therefore, nothing should be done to disturb that enmity or that friendship, and everything should be done to strengthen them. This was the fundamental proposition behind the visit of the Chief of the Defence Staff to China. That China recognised the value and importance of Sir Neil Cameron's visit is more than adequately demonstrated by Sir Neil's ninety-minute audience with Chairman Hua.

But there was also a specific purpose behind the visit, and that was to persuade China to buy British military equipment. The discussion of 'defence philosophy' which has been the officially stated purpose of his visit is all very well, and may have produced some useful exchanges of views about, say, the nature of deterrence and the likely calculations of the men in the Kremlin. The Chinese are hard-headed calculators and Sir Neil may well have found some useful thinking going on. But talks about 'defence philosophy' and detailed exchanges on tank warfare are unlikely to have provided the substance of the talks. You do not necessarily send a Chief of Defence Staff to talk about defence philosophy and you certainly don't send an airman to talk about tanks. You do, however, send an airman to talk about supplying China with aircraft; and you do send a Marshal of the RAF and Chief of the Defence Staff to tell China that we both have an enemy at the door whose capital is Moscow. Mr Callaghan may huff and puff about Sir Neil speaking on defence matters with the support of the Government, but that when he speaks of political matters 'it is for him to support the policy of HMG'. But I believe that what he said represents the policy of Her Majesty's Government. Certainly I hope it does, and I trust that the Prime Minister has privately assured China

that his huffing and puffing was nothing but a window-dressing to calm down the Krem

lin and his own red militants in whose eyes Russia can do no wrong and can never pose any threat. The ever-present danger to the West is of a reconciliation between Moscow and Pek ing. China's unstable internal history, and the instability of its relations with Moscow, suggest more forcibly that we cannot depend upon such a reconciliation not tak ing place. Since it is pre-eminently to our advantage that China remains the enemy of

our enemy, we ought to do everything in our power to encourage it to become and remain our friend — and our very powerful friend at that.