On October 1, 1970, China’s People’s Daily published a picture on its front page showing American writer Edgar Snow standing next to Mao Zedong on the Tien An Men gate tower. Snow, the author of the acclaimed “Red Star Over China”, had met Mao in Yenan in 1936, and while not himself a Communist, never hid his sympathies both for China and its new regime.
Coming at a time when relations between Washington and Beijing were beginning to thaw, the picture was supposed to convey a powerful message to the US political establishment. By appearing in public with an American, Mao showed that he personally endorsed a resumption of bilateral relations. But it was all for naught.
In Mao’s eyes, Snow was an American. But in the eyes of the American establishment, he was just another Communist sympathizer. Thus, while the writing was on the wall, the message never got through because the intended recipient did not know how to read. It thus took more time and effort to convince Washington that China was ready to talk.
Reading one’s counterpart, be it an opponent, an ally, or even just an interlocutor, is not something that governments normally excel at. And, generally, the stronger the government, the more it is tempted to impose its own views and the less it is inclined to actually understand, not to say disregard, those of the party it is dealing with.
In this regard, the United States’ record is no different from that of the imperial powers that once held sway in the international arena. Starting from the Second World War, the United States’s power was so overwhelming that it could, within its sphere of influence, operate practically on its own terms.
But there were hiccups, and Vietnam proved one of them. In the spring of 1965, as the war in Vietnam escalated, the ruling Politburo of the Vietnamese Communist Party asked the North Vietnamese military to assess the chances of winning a military confrontation with the United States. The military set up a working group, and its conclusions were unequivocal.
Not only were the chances of the Vietnamese defeating the United States militarily at exactly zero, but they should not even try. Conversely, if the aim of the war was to ensure that the United States pulled out its forces from Vietnam so as to enable the Communists to confront their foes directly in Saigon, this could be achieved not by winning battles or occupying ground but by eroding America’s will to fight.
In other words, America could not be defeated, but it could be worn out. This, the Vietnamese military felt, could be achieved if, year after year after year they could ensure that the Americans suffer an average casualty rate of some one thousand dead per month.
This, they assessed, was a casualty rate that the American social ecosystem could not sustain, thus forcing the political establishment into a negotiation process that would result in Washington withdrawing its troops from Vietnam.
As for the cost of the endeavor, this was estimated at some 150,000 Vietnamese dead per year, including both civilians and military. This was a cost that the military in Hanoi felt the country could bear and the war thus became, for all practical purposes, a contest between Vietnamese resolve and its related birth rate and American firepower.
What followed is history but not necessarily to Vietnam’s advantage. In 1977, two years after the fall of Saigon, US President Jimmy Carter offered Hanoi normalization without preconditions.
But Hanoi’s ruling Politburo, under the leadership of its Secretary General Le Duan refused. Le Duan was a doctrinaire Marxist who had taken a hard line during the war years and it had paid off. Now he demanded some form of economic assistance from Washington as a precondition for normalization. But the war was over and Vietnam had nothing to offer Washington.
Granted, the Americans still wanted some accounting of their Missing In Action (MIA), but after their humiliating defeat, neither Congress nor public opinion was in the mood to pay for what looked like reparations to Hanoi. Finally, in the fall of 1978, Le Duan relented and instructed vice foreign minister Nguyen Co Tach to inform Washington that Vietnam was now ready to normalize relations with the United States without preconditions. But it was too late.
With Vietnam poised to invade Cambodia and Hanoi having signed on November 3 of that year a treaty of Alliance with the Soviet Union, Washington was no longer in the mood to normalize its relations with its former foe. By misreading the Unites States, Le Duan had missed the boat and had set back by some 20 years the normalization of relations between the two countries.
Reading the enemy does not belong to the realm of spycraft. It consists, in essence, of putting oneself in the situation of one’s opponent, analyzing the parameters that determine their perceptions and taking action accordingly.
Ultimately, it is more an art than a science that requires an open mind and acceptance of the notion that the opponent one is dealing with maybe, just maybe, does 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 perspective, the expansion east of NATO was only the tip of the iceberg of an 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.
President Putin was a progeny of the KGB. Plots, sedition and subversion were his lifeblood. From that perspective, he was correct in his conviction that Russia was drifting away from its core values. That these had not evolved from the fall of the Tsarist order was incidental to him.
His Russia was imperial and to be ruled with an iron fist. 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.
Putin’s Munich speech made it clear that the international order as promoted by the United States was of no interest to his Russia. As such, it was for all practical purposes 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.” Had Putin’s speech not been scoffed at but rather taken seriously it could have led to two undertakings.
First, the Europeans, and in particular the Germans, might have drawn some contingency plans to address a potential crisis with Russia. These should have focused on how the West, led by Germany, would react were a crisis with Russia to erupt without the upshot becoming a self-defeating exercise. Such a plan should have concentrated on essentials such as energy rather than on confiscating a handful of yachts belonging to Russian oligarchs.
Second, Washington should have set up a mechanism through which Putin would be engaged in a frank but confidential ongoing dialogue. Such an interchange should have been based on the American assumption that while Russia was on its knees, it had the hallmarks of an empire that could potentially bounce back and whose concerns, if not addressed, must be at least listened to.
Such an endeavor should have been conceived on the American side as a multipartisan effort spanning several administrations as an example of a long-term foreign affairs engagement that would not be held hostage to the vagaries of successive administrations.
Whether the American political system can accommodate such an endeavor is a moot point. 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.
Read Mearsheiner and remember Nuland at our State dept. They ignored Russia bc it was weak then+ they thought they’d expand NATO easily. Merkel,Sarcozy, + our old diplomats warned against the encroachment.
It is a matter of preconceived notions–hearing what one wants to hear. That is called “tone deaf.”