This week marks the 50th anniversary of the US withdrawal from Vietnam, a conflict that cost the lives of more than 58,000 Americans. Just six years after the US left the Southeast Asian nation, another country entered the Indochina fray.
In February 1979, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) invaded Vietnam on the heels of securing official diplomatic recognition from the United States, overturning America’s three-decade policy of acknowledging the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan as the sole Chinese government.
That diplomatic triumph and the Sino-Vietnamese War demonstrate how Beijing used American cooperation to wage an aggressive peripheral conflict against its neighbors. While the war did not spill over into a global crisis, China used force to cement its strategic position in Southeast Asia with the tacit acceptance by the US.
More than 40 years later, China’s focus shifted to its other disputed border, with India.
Despite Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s recent statements admitting his country’s vulnerability to Chinese attack, US President Joe Biden is repeating former president Jimmy Carter’s cooperative rhetoric with China as the threat of conflict grows.
Given the PRC’s wider strategic goal to use limited wars to remake the regional geopolitical landscape in its favor, Biden is risking the possibility of another limited war in Asia that could spill over into something more disastrous.
Jimmy Carter made human rights a “fundamental tenet” of US foreign policy. However, practicing realpolitik, the Carter administration diplomatically recognized a country that had starved and murdered at least 45 million of its own people by 1978.
‘Counterbalance’ theory
Carter’s reasoning for official normalization, best stated by his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, was: “It is the Soviet Union – not China – that threatens us militarily, [thus] our effort to attain security in a world of diversity parallels the current Chinese desire for a stable, non-hegemonical world order.”
Using Beijing to counterbalance Moscow had been a staple of American Cold War policy since Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit thawed relations between the two nations. The subsequent Shanghai Communiqué established “liaison offices” in both countries, each acting as a de facto embassy.
Building on Nixon’s China policy, Carter decided to deter Soviet aggression with official Sino-American diplomatic recognition, a policy he believed would advance the “cause of peace in Asia and the world.”
Additionally, Carter saw the PRC as key to the “international framework of cooperation” among the “key nations of the world.” Thus the US viewed China as valuable to maintaining a status quo of transnational collaboration.
Deng takes advantage
However, Deng Xiaoping used diplomatic recognition and the burgeoning Sino-American alliance to disrupt the international system to meet his national-security aims. As China’s paramount leader, Deng understood he needed Sino-American normalization to wage war against Vietnam.
The Sino-Soviet split and deepening relations between Moscow and Hanoi throughout the 1970s worried the Chinese leader. Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 only confirmed his fears that China was being “encircled” by hostile powers and needed to “punish” the Vietnamese in a preventive war.
Deng demonstrated his political acumen by visiting the United States to secure indirect support for his war against Vietnam. In his January 1979 meeting with Carter, Deng emphasized that China had to teach Vietnam a “lesson” for invading Cambodia, aligning with the Soviets, and endangering China.
To link Beijing’s and Washington’s security interests, Deng argued that “the Soviet Union will make use of Vietnam to harass China.… Our general view is that we must disrupt Soviet strategic dispositions.… We need your moral support in the international field.”
Despite this admission, Carter still proved conciliatory toward Deng’s concerns, replying, “I understand you cannot allow Vietnam to pursue aggression with impunity.”
Carter’s response signaled to Deng that their mutual suspicion of the Soviet Union and Vietnam meant that he could launch a brief, limited war against Hanoi without losing the US as a partner. By winning the diplomatic front with Washington, Beijing could focus exclusively on the Indochina war without fearing an American response.
Two weeks later, 300,000 Chinese troops and 400 tanks invaded Vietnam. The Carter administration pushed Deng’s national-security aims for a Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia in the United Nations while halfheartedly condemning the Chinese invasion.
Showing its support, the US opened an embassy in the PRC while the Sino-Vietnam War raged on, demonstrating that the Carter administration did not view the conflict as a threat to the status quo or American hegemony.
And just two days after hostilities broke out, Carter’s cabinet considered a “security relationship” with China if the Soviet Union got involved and prioritized its “bilateral relations” with Beijing over any strong condemnation for the blatant act of aggression.
After all, the Vietnam War was still fresh in the administration’s mind and China’s invasion would disrupt Soviet power in Southeast Asia. And since the war was confined to a regional border conflict, Carter “acquiesced” to the view of China as a non-threat to the international order.
Deng came out of the 1979 war the clear winner. He successfully “punished” Vietnam, headed off a Soviet encirclement, and made a new economic and strategic partner in the United States. The US-China partnership gave Beijing the opportunity to focus on economic modernization with the support of a superpower as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.
By positioning himself as an ally willing to cooperate with Washington against the USSR, Deng secured his eastern flank to fight a peripheral war against Vietnam.
As the Chinese leader later admitted, “If we look back, we find that all of those [Third World countries] that were on the side of the United States have been successful [in their modernization drive], whereas all of those that were against the United States have not been successful. We shall be on the side of the United States.”
Failure to move on
More than 40 years after normalization and the Sino-Vietnamese War, cooperation remains a credible foreign-policy decision within the current US administration. Despite acknowledging that China is the only nation capable of challenging American hegemony, Biden’s 2022 National Security Strategy reiterates that it will “always be willing to work with the PRC where our interests align.”
Even as Chinese spy balloons violated US airspace, President Biden told the international community that he was “committed to work with China where it can advance American interests and benefit the world.” The administration’s China rhetoric shows that Biden believes he is dealing with the China of 1979 rather than the China of today.
Deng Xiaoping purposefully made his war with Vietnam a limited one that would not spiral into a global conflagration, reassuring Carter that “the lesson will be limited to a short period of time. Thus the problem of a chain reaction is mainly the question of the North.… It is not conceivable for the Soviets not to react at all. But we do not expect a large reaction.”
By avoiding disruption of the status quo, China secured America’s indirect support for peripheral wars to strengthen Beijing’s regional hegemony. The fact that Carter acquiesced in Deng’s punitive campaign is precisely what Biden should learn from and prevent.
China’s border conflicts have not destroyed the world order but still threaten America’s national-security interests. The 1979 Vietnam War instigated the People’s Liberation Army’s modernization that continues to this day while allowing Deng to restructure the Chinese economy to make it the second-largest in the world.
Targeting India
Now that China is a global power capable of challenging the US, Biden should reorient his rhetoric to deter future limited conflicts. Alongside Vietnam, India fought a deadly border war with the PRC in 1962 while fending off PLA incursions that have only strengthened China’s position in the region as a credible military threat.
And like Vietnam in 1979, current US-India relations are tenuous over New Delhi’s enduring partnership with Moscow in the midst of the Ukraine war and desire for “strategic autonomy” from both the US and China.
The present situation on the Line of Actual Control makes it ripe for China to launch another “punishment” attack against India as it did in 1962. The LAC, the unrecognized and disputed border between the two nations, witnessed several violent clashes over the past three years including the June 2020 Galwan Valley incident that killed 20 Indian troops.
Last December’s violence in the Arunachal Pradesh region in southern India underscores the tenuous threat of another deadly border war.
A recent Indian security assessment even admitted the PLA “would continue to build up its military infrastructure and skirmishes would also get frequent which may or may not follow a pattern. If we analyze the pattern of skirmishes and tensions, the intensity has increased since 2013-2014 with an interval of every two to three years.”
Furthermore, these border skirmishes are part of a strategic and concerted effort to take over disputed territory aggressively, according to a geospatial study conducted by Northwestern University in the US.
As the report’s senior author V S Subrahmanian stated in an interview, “China grabs a little bit of territory and then a little bit more until India accepts that it’s Chinese territory. China takes small pieces of land but keeps it under the threshold of where India would counter-attack. But, over time, it becomes a bigger piece of land.”
But unlike 1962 or 1979, limited war is not the sole danger. China and India are nuclear powers with the largest populations in the world. The chances of spillover from a regional border conflict to all-out nuclear war are greater than ever as China’s aggression forces India to invest more in its national defense.
Given Beijing’s historical precedent of using American cooperation to fight limited conflicts, Biden should heed the mistakes of his predecessor by taking a firmer stand against Chinese aggression.
The peripheral wars in 1962 and 1979 did not erupt into a global catastrophe but the geopolitical stakes are too high to risk one now. The US cannot afford a recapitulation of the Carter administration’s deference to China.
If Biden wants to deter the next Chinese war, he needs to realize he can no longer pursue détente with Beijing. America’s Second Cold War will require unflinching leadership in defeating the greatest threat to the international order since the Soviet Union.