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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27454 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Henry Kissinger died today. I knew he was a popular punching bag for the left, but seeing the barrage of over-the-top reactions gives me the feeling that I’m missing something. My impression is that Kissinger was a brilliant diplomat who laid the foundation for total American victory in the Cold War. Even if you’re a bleeding-heart internationalist who thinks he’s bad for killing foreigners in Indochina, his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed. What is the steelman “Kissinger is evil” position? What am I missing?

his role in normalizing relations with China

I'm sort of confused about exactly what this means. I'll admit my knowledge of history for this era is very weak, but I'm still genuinely confused about this sort of statement.

Some assumptions I have:

  1. China had nukes
  2. "normalize" means to not be on a war footing against them, or maybe even be trading with them.
  3. China was poor
  4. China's military was unimpressive for offensive purposes, but defensively could bury an attacker in bodies
  5. China was mostly internationally isolated. They were just coming out of their shell. Russia was the main Empire force in Asia.

This leads me to believe that:

  1. No possible war between the US and China could ever be beneficial for either country. They'd nuke each other. If they didn't use nukes, either side would lose an offensive war and win a defensive war against the other one.
  2. China had lots to gain from trade with the US, because more wealth.
  3. The US had lots to gain from china, because raw resources and more consumers.
  4. China couldn't afford an empire back then.

Therefore it was in both countries best interest to have a "normalized" relationship. The fact that they didn't have a normalized relationship was probably a result of internal politics on the part of one or both countries. If it was internal politics, do you get to call yourself an impressive diplomat for getting two countries to not be dumb about their foreign policy towards each other? Maybe I am insufficiently cynical about the capabilities of state departments, but that seems like they were due for normalized relationships just due to changing circumstances.

No possible war between the US and China could ever be beneficial for either country.

"The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9,600,000 square kilometers. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system."

"If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist; in a number of years there would be 2,700 million people again and definitely more."

Both of those quotes are attributed to Mao Zedong. Yes, I firmly believe nuclear war was a tactic Mao would have implemented; this was a man whom had experienced WW2 through China's eyes, with all it's horrific casualties on the Chinese people.

There's a reason Nixon and Mao coming together to hash stuff out face to face was a huge deal. Don't fall into the historian trap of thinking that 'Great Men of History don't matter, greater factors come into play that determine how history plays out.'

There's also a number of nuclear history books that describe early meetings between US and Chinese military officers as very carefree and bombastic until, when wargaming, the Chinese side would give claims for how many casualties that they would proudly sacrifice in defense of their homeland, the US side would bring out then-classified nuclear calculators and give casualty estimates, and the difference between the first numbers and the second numbers would leave everyone at the table in very morbid moods.

I'm not sure how much I trust these claims -- China pledged to no-first-use in 1964, even if Americans (not unreasonably) believed the policy to have some flexibility, those early meetings necessary come from a tiny number of original sources who were more than a little biased.

I'd love a source for the wargaming story if you have one. I don't recall similar stories from my reading of nuclear history books.

From "Nuclear Warfare 101" by Stuart Slade:

Aha, I hear you say what about the mad dictator? Its interesting to note that mad, homicidal aggressive dictators tend to get very tame sane cautious ones as soon as they split atoms. Whatever their motivations and intents, the mechanics of how nuclear weapons work dictate that mad dictators become sane dictators very quickly. After all its not much fun dictating if one's country is a radioactive trash pile and you're one of the ashes. China, India and Pakistan are good examples. One of the best examples of this process at work is Mao Tse Tung. Throughout the 1950s he was extraordinarily bellicose and repeatedly tried to bully, cajole or trick Khruschev and his successors into initiating a nuclear exchange with the US on the grounds that world communism would rise from the ashes. Thats what Quemoy and Matsu were all about in the late 1950s. Then China got nuclear weapons. Have you noticed how reticent they are with them? Its sunk in. They can be totally destroyed; will be totally destroyed; in the event of an exchange. A Chinese Officer here once on exchange (billed as a "look what we can do" session it was really a "look what we can do to you" exercise) produced the standard line about how the Chinese could lose 500 million people in a nuclear war and keep going with the survivors. So his hosts got out a demographic map (one that shows population densities rather than topographical data) and got to work with pie-cutters using a few classified tricks - and got virtually the entire population of China using only a small proportion of the US arsenal. The guest stared at the map for a couple of minutes then went and tossed his cookies into the toilet bowl. The only people who mouth off about using nuclear weapons and threaten others with them are those that do not have keys hanging around their necks. The moment they get keys and realize what they've let themselves in for, they get to be very quiet and very cautious indeed.

An email exchange doesn't strike me as a great source for a claim like this. It would be fantastic if Stuart Slade was an army colonel who participated in this exchange, but I don't know who he is or why he should be an authority on this topic. The email is also written as a retelling of someone else's story rather than like a primary source.

Thanks. I could have sworn I'd seen a version of it in print, but the closest book I have on the material was Age of Radiance, and it's not in that book.

It's tempting to read this Mao quote as chest-beating propaganda, not real doctrine. Was there any evidence he intended to follow through?

He launched a skirmish with the Soviet Union (over a worthless island in a river), in 1969. Hundreds were killed. He was an incredible risk-taker.

These quotes were supposedly attributed asides to no-name ambassadors outside of the great powers of the time.

If he was trying to intimidate people, he picked the wrong targets to do so.

Mao saw combat during WW2 in China. I imagine he had a very different view of death and permissive causalities. While per capita China's deaths were not the worst, they were certainly up there. I don't think it's wise to underestimate just how this shaped his outlook.

To me it seems that the man who orchestrated the great leap forward, cultural revolution and pushed the Korean war to stalemate was not what one would consider a chest beater. He was committed and he had a very high tolerance towards Chinese casualties.

What I'm saying is, it would be prudent for Mao to say "eh the bomb is no big deal, they won't dare use it, and if they do they won't kill all of us and if they do then in any case socialism will win" whether it was true or not. That's what I mean by chest-beating.

To be fair he would also say stuff like this to his allies, in private. There was some transcript of a conference of socialist countries I think in the 50s where Mao is like "well, China will naturally be the leaders of the socialist revolution because we have so many people that we'll best survive the inevitable nuclear war," and all the other countries would be like "inevitable nuclear war? Come again?"

I was wondering if sun_the_second was referencing the old Mao story about Italians. I've seen it in a couple forms and I think the main source is Khruschev's memoirs.

Mao: In the worst case, half the people would die, but the other half would survive, and imperialism would be wiped off the face of the earth, and the whole world would become socialist.

Italian Communist: How many Italians will survive?

Mao: None at all. But why do you think Italians are so important to humanity?

That must have been what I was thinking of since it's from the 1957 Moscow Conference of Communist countries. I read it first in Julia Lovell's "Maoism: A Global History". I do remember it having a little more, or maybe just her having some specific commentary, but unfortunately I've only got the physical book and can't search through it.

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