Strategy of aiding China’s rise has come back to bite Washington and its allies
Henry Kissinger’s biggest diplomatic achievement — orchestrating America’s opening to China — led to a 45-year U.S. policy of aiding Beijing’s economic rise which, in turn, created the greatest strategic adversary Washington has ever faced.
The costs of this approach included empowering a more aggressive and expansionist China and perpetuating Communist Party rule.
When strongman Deng Xiaoping brutally crushed a student-led, pro-democracy movement in Beijing in 1989 through the military assault that came to be known as the Tiananmen Square massacre, Kissinger opposed imposing sanctions on China.
“China remains too important to U.S. national security to risk the relationship on emotions of the moment,” the former secretary of state wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “The U.S. needs China as a possible counterweight to Soviet aspirations in Asia, and needs China to remain relevant in Japanese eyes as a key shaper of Asian events.” He added a prediction: “China will exercise a moderating influence in Asia and not challenge America in other areas of the world.”
By that point, Kissinger had accumulated not just influence with the Chinese leadership but also personal financial interests.
Shortly before the fateful events of June 4, 1989, he had established a $75 million investment fund together with Chinese state-owned group CITIC. In addition, his private advisory company, Kissinger Associates, had already then been working in China on behalf of American businesses for seven years.
More fundamentally, the flawed policy initiated by Kissinger led the U.S. to continue strengthening China even after the Cold War had ended with the Soviet Union’s disintegration in 1991. By the time the U.S. began reversing course during the presidency of Donald Trump, its relative decline had already set in.
Kissinger’s foreign policy was based on the rampant exercise of American power but was devoid of concern for human lives. Across large sections of Asia, Kissinger’s legacy still rankles because of disastrous decisions that resulted in the deaths of countless numbers of people and destruction across vast regions.
As national security adviser to then-President Richard Nixon, Kissinger extended the Vietnam War by derailing a planned peace conference and ordered the carpet-bombing of Cambodia and Laos. The U.S. dropped more than7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, twice the amount dropped around Europe and Asia during World War II.
Under the following administration of President Gerald Ford, Kissinger aided Indonesia’s bloody invasion and occupation of East Timor as secretary of state.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, right, and U.S. President Joe Biden in June: Despite an improved relationship, U.S. strategic objectives still diverge from core Indian interests. © Reuters
The corrosive legacy of this modern Machiavelli has long weighed on U.S. policy in Asia. Nowhere is this truer than in America’s relations with India, the world’s largest democracy.
Developments during 1971 had a profound impact on the bilateral relationship and India’s strategic calculus. That year, the Pakistani military brutally resisted Bangladeshi efforts to seek independence, slaughtering up to 3 million people, holding 200,000 women in rape camps and forcing 10 million to flee to India.
Kissinger and Nixon were more than complicit in the Pakistani military’s rampage. They provided political cover for then-military dictator Gen. Yahya Khan to continue the massacres. With the help of Khan’s regime, Kissinger then made a secret trip from Pakistan to China in July 1971, paving the way for a Sino-U.S. rapprochement.
The opening to China thus came at a fatal cost to untold numbers of Bengalis while others were forced to flee to India. But that was not all. To try to prevent Bangladesh from breaking away from Pakistan, Nixon and Kissinger even urged China to take military action against India.
In December 1971, after the massive refugee influx led India to intervene in the final stage of the nine-month independence conflict, the U.S. deployed a nuclear-capable naval task force led by the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise off the southern tip of India in a show of force.
Anticipating Sino-U.S. collusion, India’s then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had concluded a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union barely four months before Indian forces midwifed the birth of Bangladesh. The friendship treaty signed with Moscow in August 1971 helped deter China from military action against India.
The developments of that year cast a long shadow over U.S.-India ties. The U.S. tilt toward Pakistan and its opening to China not only spawned Indo-Soviet strategic cooperation, but America’s gunboat diplomacy also spurred India into conducting its first underground nuclear test just two and a half years later. This, in turn, led the U.S. and China to help Pakistan build its own nuclear bomb.
For the following quarter century, India remained under U.S.-led technology sanctions, as America cozied up to China and Pakistan, New Delhi’s regional adversaries.
The U.S.-India relationship has been dramatically transformed in this century. But Kissinger’s legacy has not been fully purged from the relationship.
In India’s neighborhood, U.S. strategic objectives continue to diverge from core Indian interests, especially in regard to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and counterterrorism.
The U.S. maintains close ties with Pakistan’s domineering military, condoning its current indirect rule over the country. Under a $450 million deal, it is modernizing the cash-strapped country’s fleet of Lockheed Martin F-16 fighter jets, which will make the aircraft more lethal to India.
There may be a greater convergence now of U.S. and Indian interests on China. Yet Kissinger’s China fantasies, to some extent, persist in U.S. policy, complicating the pursuit of a clear-eyed strategy to deter Chinese President Xi Jinping from moving against Taiwan.
For over 42 months, Indian and Chinese troops have been locked in a standoff along the two countries’ Himalayan frontier, but U.S. President Joe Biden has yet to utter a word about the confrontation, despite fatal clashes. This is a reminder that a lingering Kissingerian mindset still crimps U.S. policy toward an increasingly muscular China.
With the Kissinger-initiated rapprochement with Beijing having paved the way for China’s rise to dominance over parts of Asia, only India and Japan are today in a position to forestall Beijing’s hegemony across the continent. It did not have to be this way.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
Stagecraft and Statecraft 