When the War Was Over (76 page)

Vance wanted to contain the fire and keep it from spreading. He got Brzezinski to modify his remarks immediately. Brzezinski did, in public, but he did not change his opinion. He feared that if Vietnam got the upper hand in Indochina then America's global position would be weakened; Vietnam would be the stalking horse for Soviet expansion in Southeast Asia.

This initial disagreement between Vance and Brzezinski flared into a full-scale dispute over U.S. policy in Asia. Unfortunately, the issue of how to handle the war between Cambodia and Vietnam became subsumed by the growing importance of a greater power—China.

Among the disappointments of Carter's 1977 diplomatic offensive was the failure to improve U.S. relations with China. In August of that year Vance visited Beijing. Before his trip, he took the precaution of delivering a major address to quiet Soviet fears that a U.S.-China entente would be directed against them. He promised improved relations with Beijing “will threaten no one. It will serve only peace.” Moscow was pleased. But on arrival in China, Vance discovered that Beijing was disappointed. The pragmatic successors to the late rule of Mao Zedong and his “Gang of Four” retained the Maoist suspicion of Soviet intentions. They saw the post-Vietnam War period as a boon for the Soviets in Asia, which they declared publicly when they asked the United States to keep its military bases in Southeast Asia.

The Chinese made it clear they wanted an entente with the United States to stop what they saw as Soviet gains made from an American retreat around
the globe. They opposed early Carter promises to defuse crises and reduce Soviet-American competition, particularly through the SALT II negotiations. Their stance was close to the standard cold war analysis in the United States. When Vance reiterated Carter's policies in Beijing the Chinese took them as a challenge. Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping said prospects for full normalized relations were dimmer with Carter than with Ford.

Then the Chinese inaugurated a campaign to regularly remind the United States of their disappointment in the policy shift toward the Soviet Union. “. . . if the Soviet Union plunges Western Europe into a blitzkrieg, no one can be sure what the U.S. reaction will be,” was the summary of one Beijing Review article. A stronger
People's Daily
newspaper analysis accused “advocates of appeasement” of trying to “divert the Soviet Union to the East [China] so as to free themselves from this Soviet peril at the expense of the security of other nations.”

China's historic rapprochement with the United States in 1972 had been predicated on the perception that the Soviet Union was its greatest threat. The Chinese gambled away their prestige with some communist and third world countries—particularly Vietnam—because they felt they needed U.S. protection against Moscow. Now, under Carter, the Americans were acting as if they had forgotten the Soviet challenge, or so it seemed in Beijing.

In 1978, Brzezinski championed Beijing's arguments. They followed his long-held conviction that the Soviet Union is an expansionist power whose conquests jeopardize American interests and therefore must be countered. Brzezinski proved at least as preoccupied with the Soviet threat as his predecessor Kissinger. But whereas Kissinger mined the Soviet-Chinese-American triangle to win concessions from both communist powers, Brzezinski was willing to alter the triangle into a Chinese-American entente against the Soviet Union.

Brzezinski became an advocate for China just as Vance was becoming disillusioned with Vietnam. And unlike the Vietnamese, the Chinese rewarded Brzezinski for his attention, providing him with the diplomatic successes the Vietnamese had denied Vance. This was of more than polite interest in the Third Indochina War that was about to break out. By publicly humiliating Carter in his quest for normalized relations, Hanoi created sufficient mistrust to allow China to neutralize America in the upcoming war. And in the months after the war China skillfully moved the United States toward active hostility against Vietnam.

The tide turned in May 1978 when Brzezinski made an official visit to China. There Brzezinski added America's powerful voice to the bitter disputes breaking out in Asia, always on China's side.

For all of Asia the year 1978 proved to be a watershed. A series of superficially unrelated crises were igniting severe political disputes, much as the warning fissures that herald an earthquake. The U.S. government knew by May that Vietnam planned to invade Cambodia. The American embassy in Bangkok had sent an urgent cable the month before, quoting a friendly source in Hanoi that the Vietnamese were saying that the Cambodian communists “had taken the wrong line, had gone astray . . . and this was totally unacceptable.” That information, along with Vietnam's treatment of the ethnic Chinese and other information, led the embassy's Indochina watchers to conclude that war would break out by year's end. The embassy wanted to know how the Chinese would react—would China actively defend Pol Pot's Cambodia?

Brzezinski did not have to raise the question of Vietnam during his China visit. The Chinese were anxious to present their case against Hanoi. (Beijing pointedly did not discuss the merits of Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia.) Brzezinski was visibly impressed. “Of course I knew relations between China and Vietnam were miserable but I didn't have a strong feeling for what they [the Chinese] saw in the Vietnamese, the threat the Vietnamese presented to them,” he said. “Vietnam had become an outpost of Moscow on China's southern border.”

This was a major overstatement of the case in May 1978. But it was confirmation of Brzezinski's “proxy” thesis. It also laid the foundation for China's request that the United States drop its plans to normalize relations with Hanoi. Michael Oksenberg, Brzezinski's China expert on the National Security Council, said: “We knew the Chinese had obviously soured on the Vietnamese but it was much worse than we had thought. Earlier we had told them we were thinking of normalizing with Vietnam and they had said, essentially, it was our business. This time they were vehement against the Vietnamese and normalization.”

Brzezinski was quick to approve of China's position. With gusto he broke the established bounds of U.S.-Chinese relations and in word and deed joined his Chinese hosts in condemning the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Brzezinski the tourist bounded up the flights of massive stone stairs at the silent Great Wall and shouted against the “polar bear,” the Soviet Union. At the decorous official banquet, Brzezinski, the serious representative of the United States, said Washington shared “China's resolve to resist the efforts of any nation which seeks to establish global or regional hegemony.” He used the Chinese shorthand for the Soviet Union and Vietnam, respectively, and appeared to put the weight of the United States behind Chinese warnings against those two countries.

The United States could have remained aloof from the disputes, particularly at this stage when it was entirely between communist states. It is impossible to judge the immediate effect Brzezinski's statements had on Vietnam. Hanoi had already decided to go to war with Cambodia. But it is certain that the trip inaugurated a campaign by Brzezinski to put the United States solidly in China's camp during the next round of Indochinese wars, and that was to have a profound impact on American policy for years to come.

The Chinese reacted immediately after Brzezinski left Beijing. They issued their first direct criticism of Vietnamese treatment of the ethnic Chinese. Charges and countercharges by Hanoi and Beijing followed, and some 170,000 ethnic Chinese fled Vietnam to China until Beijing closed that border in the summer. China suspended its aid projects to Vietnam, Vietnam joined the Soviet bloc's economic organization COMECON, and by July Vietnam had sent over 150,000 troops to the Chinese border along with enough weapons and ammunition to fight a prolonged border war.

Brzezinski's trip had an equally stunning effect back in Washington. Vance was furious but he avoided a direct confrontation with the buoyant Brzezinski and instead only “discussed” his differences. Vance was in a delicate position. Brzezinski's trip had been a success, whereas Vance's trip to Beijing and Holbrooke's negotiations with Vietnam had been failures. Brzezinski was the better infighter. Perhaps as crucial, he had the Chinese on his side. Vietnam was still insisting on aid to improve relations. Moreover, in the interim, the case of David Truong came out into the open.

Truong, an anti-war figure in the United States, had been arrested on the last day of January 1978 and charged with spying on the U.S. government for Vietnam during the 1977 negotiations for normalized relations between the two countries. Truong was born in Vietnam, the son of a respected figure of the third force of the south that was neither communist nor anticommunist. Truong first came to the United States as a student and eventually settled in Washington, where he was a reasoned spokesman for the cause of Vietnam's third force.

Truong and his American codefendant Ronald Humphrey allegedly passed classified cables to the Vietnamese that covered a wide range of political issues of interest to Hanoi—from a summary titled “U.S.-Viernamese Relations: Woodcock Commission” written by the U.S. embassy in Malaysia in April 1977 to an analysis titled “Vietnamese External Relations” composed by the American consul in Hong Kong in May 1977. Most of the cables were marked “confidential,” the lowest security classification of the government, and the
two men's attorneys questioned how crucial these cables were for U.S. national security But the two men were convicted and the Vietnamese government implicated in the affair. The first Vietnamese ambassador to the UN was forced to return to Hanoi. Hanoi called the case a “blatant fabrication” and said it represented “continuing hostility toward the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”

The upshot for U.S. policy in Indochina was that discussions with Vietnam over normalization of relations were frozen until the Truong case was settled. Vance's policy plans for achieving peaceful, normal relations with all of these communist countries were coming to naught. Vietnam was not cooperating and China was using Brzezinski to scotch any idea that the United States remain aloof from the brewing war in Indochina.

Worse, Brzezinski was taking over what was originally Vance's policy of advocating improved relations with China, and turning it into an anti-Vietnam policy. Vance had first advocated full normalized relations with Beijing, but not at the expense of undercutting stability on the Asian continent. In 1978 Vance wanted to continue negotiating with Vietnam in order to offset the growth of Soviet influence in Hanoi. But Brzezinski claimed Vietnam was already in the “enemy camp” and a client of the Soviet Union. Brzezinski wanted any discussions with Vietnam put on hold until full normalization had been reached with Beijing.

The middle ground was disappearing. Vance's hands were tied, as much by unfolding events in Indochina as by Brzezinski's maneuvers. By 1978 Carter's mood had changed. Brzezinski was taking credit for pushing ahead normalization with China and altering history to make it appear as if normalization with Vietnam was an idea cooked up by the liberals at the State Department—not Carter's policy Carter did not dispute Brzezinski. The president wanted successes, and Brzezinski said he could deliver China.

But Carter hedged his bets and never told Vance to end his discussions with the Vietnamese. When the Truong spy case was disposed of, Vance issued an invitation to Vietnamese experts to visit the Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu. The delegation from Hanoi arrived in Hawaii on July 11, 1978. They toured the army facility in downtown Honolulu and then visited an outdoor park with Fred Brown, a foreign service officer. They chose that moment to deliver to Brown a special message: Vietnam was dropping its demands for economic aid—normalization could proceed.

The offer was taken seriously, and two weeks later Vance issued an invitation to the Vietnamese, through their mission in Paris, to join another round of talks. It was agreed that Holbrooke would meet with Nguyen Co
Thach, another Vietnamese deputy foreign minister, in September at the opening of the UN General Assembly in New York.

Although barely one year had passed since Phan Hien's aborted talks with Holbrooke, Thach went to New York with different instructions to reflect the different situation. Vietnam was preparing to invade Cambodia. Thach's assignment was to neutralize the United States, to complicate Chinese relations with Washington. But the United States was aware of Vietnam's war preparations. Holbrooke's instructions were the same as in the May 1977 negotiations, with the added stipulation that he should report back to Vance, who would then confer with Carter on the merits of the case. Holbrooke was to ask Vietnam about its war preparations and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who were fleeing the country as boat people.

The boat people had caused considerable concern in the United States. One year earlier Vance had raised the issue, and foreign service officers in the region were instructed to give him a detailed accounting of the sad phenomenon. The refugee boats were landing in Thailand, Malaysia, and even Indonesia and the Philippines. The countries of ASEAN were pressing the United States to normalize relations with Vietnam in hopes this would calm the Vietnamese and stem the flow of refugees. ASEAN also hoped that normalization would reduce the prospects of a Vietnamese-Cambodian war. But ASEAN had far less clout with Washington at this point than China had. And according to Brzezinski, China was pressuring the United States not to reach an accord with Hanoi.

Holbrooke was also told that the United States was unlikely to make a big move toward Vietnam until after the 1978 congressional elections in November.

Holbrooke met Thach at the Vietnamese UN delegation's quarters at Riverside Plaza, a gray concrete complex bordered by the East River. Holbrooke says he was of two minds at this session. He did not fancy another public failure and ordered no publicity. His experts at the East Asia bureau had cautioned him that Vietnam appeared ready to strike Cambodia toward the end of the year: They predicted a Vietnamese attack to the east bank of the Mekong River to give them enough Cambodian territory to set up an alternative Cambodian communist government.