The Impact of Watergate
At a point when
American and Chinese strategic thinking was striving for
congruence, the Watergate crisis threatened to derail the progress
of the relationship by enfeebling the American capacity to manage
the geopolitical challenge. The destruction of the President who
had conceived the opening to China was incomprehensible in Beijing.
Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974, and the assumption of the
presidency by Vice President Gerald Ford led to a collapse of
congressional support for an activist foreign policy in the
subsequent congressional elections in November 1974. The military
budget became controversial. Embargoes were placed on a key ally
(Turkey); a public investigation of the intelligence community was
launched by two congressional committees (the Church Committee in
the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House), hemorrhaging
classified intelligence information. The American capacity to
prevent Soviet adventures in the developing world was reduced by
the passage of the War Powers Act. The United States was sliding
into a position of domestic paralysis—with an unelected President
facing a hostile Congress—producing an opportunity for the Soviets
that some Chinese leaders were tempted to believe had been our
design in the first place. In early 1975 the congressional action
that stopped a joint U.S.-China effort to establish a coalition
government in Cambodia came to be interpreted in Beijing as
weakness in the face of the Soviet encirclement of China.22 In that atmosphere,
in the Chinese view, the policy of détente threatened to turn into
what Mao called shadowboxing, creating the illusion, not the
reality, of diplomatic progress. Chinese leaders lectured the
Americans (and many other Western leaders) about the dangers of
appeasement. The Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation
was a special candidate for Chinese criticism on the grounds that
it created the illusion of stability and peace.23
The basis for the
quasi-alliance had been the Chinese conviction that the United
States’s contribution to global security was indispensable. Beijing
had entered the relationship looking to Washington as a bulwark
against Soviet expansionism. Now Mao and Zhou began to hint that
what looked like feebleness in Washington was in reality a deep
game—trying to set the Soviets and Chinese against each other in a
war designed to destroy them both. Increasingly, however, the
Chinese accused the United States of something worse than
treachery: ineffectualness. This is where matters stood when, at
the end of 1973, China’s domestic travail began to parallel our
own.