On October 1, 1970, China’s People’s Daily published a portrait on its front page showing , British author Edgar Snow standing second to Mao Zedong on the Tien An Men gate tower. Snow, the creator of the lauded” Red Star Over China”, had met Mao in Yenan in 1936, and while not himself a Socialist, not hid his affections both for China and its new program.
The image was intended to convey a strong message to the US social establishment at a time when Washington and Beijing were starting to melt. Mao showed that he personally supported a resumption of diplomatic ties by speaking in public with an American. But it was all for perfect.
In Mao’s eye, Snow was an American. But in the eye of the British creation, he was just another Socialist sympathizer. The intended victim did not understand how to read the message, so even though it was written on the wall, it previously passed. Therefore, it took more time and effort to persuade Beijing that the country was prepared to communicate.
Reading one’s rival, become it an opponent, an alliance, or even just an speaker, is not something that governments typically excel at. And, usually, the stronger the state, the more it is tempted to establish its own opinions and the less it is inclined to really know, not to say disrespect, those of the party it is dealing with.
The American history in this regard is comparable to that of the royal forces that once had dominance abroad. Starting from the Second World War, the United States’s authority was so enormous that it could, within its sphere of influence, run virtually on its own words.
But there were difficulties, and Vietnam proved one of them. The Vietnamese Communist Party’s Politburo asked the North Vietnamese defense to assess their chances of winning a military conflict with the United States in the flower of 1965 as the conflict grew. The government set up a working class, and its opinions were unequivocal.
The Asian should not even test because their chances of defeating the United States militarily were at a wholly improbable level. Contrary to what the war intended, if the goal of the battle was to force the United States to withdraw its forces from Vietnam so that the Communists had challenge their foes straight in Saigon, this could be accomplished by eroding America’s resolve to fight.
In other words, America could not be defeated, but it could be worn outside. The Taiwanese military believed that this could be accomplished if they managed to ensure that Americans received an average monthly fatality rate of around one thousand.
According to them, this was a fatality rate that the British social system could not support, putting pressure on the political elite to reach a deal that may lead to Washington’s withdrawal from Vietnam.
As for the price of the effort, this was estimated at some 150, 000 Asian dead per month, including both residents and defense. The defense in Hanoi felt the nation could support this price, so the battle evolved into, for all practical purposes, a conflict between Taiwanese solve and its related delivery rate and British firepower.
What followed is past but not necessarily to Vietnam’s benefits. In 1977, two centuries after the fall of Saigon, US President Jimmy Carter offered Hanoi normalization without assumptions.
But Hanoi’s ruling Politburo, under the command of its Secretary General Le Duan refused. Le Duan, a dogmatic Marxist, had a successful hard line against the war. He then demanded some form of financial support from Washington as a prerequisite for quantization. However, Vietnam had nothing to sell Washington and the battle was over.
Although the Americans still wanted some information about their Missing In Action ( MIA ), neither Congress nor the general public were willing to pay for what appeared to be reparations to Hanoi following their humiliating defeat. Le Duan relented and gave instructions to evil foreign secretary Nguyen Co Tach to Washington in the fall of 1978 to let them know that Vietnam was now ready to resume normal relations with the United States without conditions. But it was too soon.
Washington was not long in the mood to restore its relations with its original adversary, with Vietnam poised to enter Cambodia and Hanoi signing a treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union on November 3rd that time. Le Duan had missed the boat and had delayed the standardization of relations between the two countries by about 20 years by misinterpreting the United States.
Reading the army is certainly a matter of spycraft. It consists, in fact, of putting oneself in the situation of one’s player, analyzing the characteristics that determine their opinions and taking actions correctly.
In the end, it is more of an art than a science that necessitates an open mind and acknowledgement of the idea that the opponent one is dealing with may, just maybe, have a point. To say that it is an art in short supply is an understatement.
On February 10, 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin, in what will be remembered as one of his keynote presentations, expressed in no uncertain terms all the frustrations, fears and humiliations that had bedeviled Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
In his opinion, the expansion east of NATO was only the tip of the iceberg of a existentialist threat to the Russian soul. It was the vanguard of a Western liberal order that was everything Russia, his Russia, the Russia he stood for, abhorred.
A descendant of the KGB, President Putin was. Plots, sedition and subversion were his lifeblood. From that perspective, he was right to say that Russia was abdicating its core values. He thought it was incidental that these had not developed as a result of the fall of the Tsarist order.
His Russia was powerful and lacked iron fists. In this perspective, the perceived enemy was more than NATO, which at the time was slowly drifting into irrelevance. Rather, it was the likes of Gucci, Louis Vuitton and McDonald’s, riding on the crest of the wave of a consumer society that was, in essence, the harbinger of a liberal social order that made room for greater tolerance, individual creativity and political diversity.
In his Munich speech, Putin made it clear that his Russia was not interested in the international order promoted by the United States. In all practical terms, it was a declaration of war.
While it did produce some misgivings among some of those in attendance, it was essentially overlooked with one of the participants, then-US defense secretary Robert Gates, dismissing it as” spy talk”. Putin’s speech might have had the power to spark two undertakings had it not been taken seriously rather than scoffed at.
First, the Europeans, and in particular the Germans, might have drawn some contingency plans to address a potential crisis with Russia. If a conflict with Russia were to arise, they should have focused on how the West, under the leadership of Germany, would react without the outcome being a self-defeating exercise. Instead of seizing a few yachts owned by Russian oligarchs, such a plan should have focused on things like energy.
Second, it would have been better to establish a mechanism for Putin to engage in a sincere but secret ongoing dialogue. Based on the assumption that Russia was on its knees but also had the characteristics of an empire that could potentially recover and whose concerns, if not addressed, must be at least be heard, would have led to this interchange.
As an example of a long-term foreign affairs engagement that would n’t be held hostage to the whims of successive administrations, such an endeavor should have been conceived on the American side as a multipartisan effort spanning several administrations.
It is questionable whether the political system in America can support such a venture. And so is the question, had it been undertaken, as what impact, if any, it would have had on Putin’s legitimate or illegitimate concerns. In the meantime, the world has to contend with Putin’s paranoia, Washington’s hubris and a manipulative Ukrainian former comedian.