trade agreement was signed. The border talks remained deadlocked, however, and the two sides continued to compete vigorously with each other in practically every region of the world, especially Asia, for which Brezhnev had proposed in -June 1969 a vague "collective security" system obviously aimed at China.

Moscow watched uneasily as Peking became increasingly receptive to American overtures while rejecting a secret offer of a nonaggression pact made by Brezhnev in February 1971. Soviet concern reached its height after the announcement on July 15, 1971, that Dr. Henry Kissinger had just visited Peking and that President Nixon had been invited to do the same in 1972. The Soviet Union then mounted a massive propaganda and diplomatic offensive against Peking, the two aspects of greatest concern to the Chinese being probably the Soviet-Indian friendship treaty of August 9 and the West Berlin agreement of September 3. Moscow probably believed, correctly, that Lin Piao, although bitterly anti-Soviet (contrary to later charges that he had pro-Soviet sympathies), was still opposing Chou En-lai's proposed opening to the United States, and that Peking was therefore in a potentially isolated and vulnerable position.

But after Lin fell in September, for reasons that very probably included his anti-American stand and his extreme and provocative anti-Soviet views, the improvement of Sino-American relations accelerated and culminated in the Peking summit of February 1972. In March 1972, Brezhnev accepted for the first time the principle of peaceful coexistence as applicable to relations between socialist (i.e., communist) countries, as the Chinese had been demanding for a decade, probably because the United States had just accepted the parallel Chinese concept of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence in the Shanghai Communique. Fortunately for Moscow, the Nixon administration was also anxious to improve Soviet-American relations, especially in an election year, and the result was a summit meeting in Moscow in May that neither side could afford to cancel over the tension in Vietnam. The American position was so strong, on account of the intensity of the Sino-Soviet dispute, that both Moscow and Peking evidently applied pressure to Hanoi later in 1972 to sign an agreement with the United States.

CURRENT TRENDS AND FUTURE PROBLEMS

There is no question that the tension along and over the Sino-Soviet border remains at a high, although not necessarily critical, level. There are occasional reports of incidents and clashes. Moscow has changed certain Siberian place names from Asian to Russian forms, and Peking has denounced it for doing so. The Soviet Union is obviously concerned over the security of Khabarovsk, a major city at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, and has probably written it off in the event of a Sino-Soviet war. The annual Sino-Soviet talks on border river navigation appear not to have resulted in an agreement since 1969. The Chinese nuclear and missile buildup continues, at an uncertain but | evidently significant rate; Soviet propaganda has charged that Peking aims at the nuclear domination of Asia.

Four Soviet naval vessels passed through the Taiwan Strait on May 12, 1973, an unprecedented maneuver probably designed as a psychological counterblow to the arrival of David Bruce in Peking two days later. Since February 1973 Peking has been claiming to feel serious concern over the possibility, which actually appears slight, that the leadership of the Republic of China might appeal for Soviet support. Moscow is rumored to be trying to organize another major international communist meeting, one of whose hallmarks would presumably be a condemnation of Peking. Soviet writers have occasionally suggested that stability along the Sino-Soviet horder would require the detachment of all territory north of the Great Wall from China and its domination by the Soviet Union; Chou En-lai heatedly and predictably denounced this idea at the recent Tenth Party Congress. On the whole, however, as Chou indicated in the spring of 1973 to the American journalist Marquis Childs, the Chinese leadership seems to believe that in view of the strength of its military and political position, including its seat in the United Nations, the Soviet Union is not likely to attack China.

Is this cautious confidence justified? No one, except possibly in Moscow, can say for sure. For all the Soviet concern over and detestation of the current Chinese leadership and its policies, the arguments against resort to war are very powerful. They evidently include disagreement within the Soviet leadership: Shelepin, for example, is almost certainly less anti-Chinese than Brezhnev, and it is by no means certain that the Soviet military would regard conventional,

as distinct from nuclear, attack on China to be militarily workable. The military risks to the Soviet Union of such a war would be enormous and would include Chinese cutting of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Chinese nuclear retaliation against Soviet Asian (and conceivably even European) cities, and American involvement. The strains on the Soviet domestic system might be immense, as the well-known dissident Amalrik has predicted. The cost of Moscow's international position, including its currently improving relationship with the United States, would probably be very great. Furthermore, the Soviet leadership, which in recent years has been making greater use of the considerable expertise on China available to it from within its own scholarly community, must know that any attack on China, either in the near future or after Mao's death, would postpone for a long time and perhaps render permanently impossible the improvement of Sino-Soviet relations that Moscow claims to want. On the other hand, it would be unwise and unrealistic to predict that there will be no Soviet attack on China.

If there is no such attack, the chances for an eventual Sino-Soviet accommodation appear a little better than even. The deaths of Mao and Suslov, and possibly the departure of Brezhnev, may be essential prerequisities, in order to reduce the elements of personal and ideological hostility to manageable proportions. The Soviet Union must stop bullying and threatening China, and it must be perceived in Peking as having stopped. This would involve a considerable re\duction of the current Soviet military presence near the Chinese border. It is worth remembering that as long as Peking perceived the United States as bullying and threatening China, this consideration alone was enough to rule out the possibility of establishing any positive Sino-American relationship. If the Soviet Union does reduce the level of its threat to China and agrees to some sort of compromise on the border question, it may find Chou En-lai or his successors more responsive than it imagines.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE UNITED STATES

The United States did not create the Sino-Soviet dispute, except to a degree and unconsciously by protecting Taiwan since 1950. Nor has the United States tried to exacerbate or manipulate the dispute to any great extent, although President Nixon said in a conversation with Howard K. Smith on July 1, 1970, that Moscow's difficulties with China should render it more manageable and that the United States proposed to improve its own relations with Peking with this in mind. The United States, it is true, is suspected in both Peking and Moscow of trying to play on the dispute, but the United States government is not well equipped either theoretically or practically for such an exercise, especially in view of Congress' current active role in foreign policy and its dislike of Machiavellian diplomacy and crisis management, to say nothing of war.

But the United States has benefited greatly from the Sino-Soviet dispute, and especially from the acute form that it has assumed since 1969. Its own relations with each adversary are better than the latter's are with its opponent. In effect, Peking and Moscow have been bidding against each other for American favors, political and economic. The administrations' domestic political position was probably helped somewhat during the 1972 election campaign by the aura of the Peking and Moscow summits, and continued good-or at least outwardly smoothrelations with both the two major Communist powers appear to be regarded by the President as more essential than ever in view of his current serious political difficulties. The atmosphere in Europe and Asia (except for the Sino-Soviet frontier) has grown less tense as a result of the Sino-Soviet dispute, with the result that the United States has had, or has thought that it had, greater freedom of action in reducing the level of its military commitments. Neither Moscow nor Peking is particularly anxious to see the United States withdraw from Asia at present, because such a withdrawal might create a vacuum that would benefit the other.

On the other hand, the American emphasis on, and success in, improving relations with Moscow and Peking has had its costs. Perhaps the most serious has been the difficulties in our relations with our European and Asian allies and a tendency to push them, objectively ready or not, into accommodations of their own with the Soviet Union and China. A more subtle problem is a premature belief that "the Cold War is over," whereas in reality the reports of its death are at least somewhat exaggerated. It is notable that Moscow is paralleling its external détente with the United States with a severe crackdown on its own

dissidents and is continuing its anti-American propaganda without being compelled by the United States to pay any sort of penalty for doing so, except marginally in the case of the Soviet Jews.

If the Sino-Soviet dispute has been advantageous to the United States on balance, as it has been, it seems to follow that a Sino-Soviet reconciliation would not be in the American interest. For one thing, it would remove much, although not all, of the United States leverage on the two current adversaries. On the other hand, any realistically imaginable Sino-Soviet reconciliation would not restore the comparative harmony of the late Stalin years and would almost certainly be a development with which the United States could learn to live.

This comforting conclusion does not appear to apply to the opposite scenario, a Sino-Soviet war. At whatever cost to itself, the Soviet Union would presumably win such a war and in the process would inflict defeat and serious dislocation on China and badly destabilize the power balance in Asia. For the past century, China's weakness and Chinese defeats and humiliations at the hands of foreign powers have been the most important single source of tension and war in Asia, as the authors of the Open Door Policy seem to have understood. There does appear to be a danger that the Soviet Union may decide that American domestic problems and the stabilization of Europe have progressed to the point of reducing to manageable proportions the risks to itself of an attack on China. A Soviet decision to attack China would be a serious embarrassment to the United States, which would have no effective means of coping with it short of the impracticable one of threatening to retaliate against the Soviet Union, and in the process the credibility of the United States and the value of its good will would be eroded below their already none-too-high level. Only China itself has a greater interest than the United States that no such scenario materializes.

The United States, which may be in the process of becoming number two in the international military balance, something that Peking is anxious not to see happen, ought to try harder to prevent such a deterioration in its position and to render more credible to Moscow the idea that an attack on China would cost the Soviet Union an unacceptable, although not necessarily an explicitly specified, price. To do otherwise might be to increase the chances of an eventual Soviet attack, not merely on China, but on the United States itself, or even of a Chinese realignment with the Soviet Union followed by some sort of joint move against the United States.

Mr. Nix. Doctor, I would like to have you assess some of the reasons why you believe that the relationship between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union will maintain the existing balance over a period of time.

I would like particularly to have you discuss the reasons why you think that relationship will continue.

Mr. HINTON. Well, there is no evidence that in the near future either side intends to make the sort of concessions to the other that would be necessary to produce an accommodation. I think this is because, as I mentioned in my oral statement, there are both personal and ideological hostilities at a very high level on both sides.

I certainly don't rule it out, but there is simply no evidence that it is contemplated by either side at the present time; and of course, the reasons why they got themselves into this confrontation are many and complicated. If you would like me to go into them more than I have, I would be glad to do it.

They go well back close to 20 years, about the time of the death of Stalin, and many books have been written about them. These things, of course, are not easily wiped away; the leaders on both sides remember better than we do the issues they have had with each other, each with regard to the other, with a mixture of fear and aggressive hostility that has built up over the years as a result of this record to which I merely referred.

I don't see any way in which this can be settled in a short time without major personnel changes on both sides.

Mr. Nix. Conceding the hostility existing between the two countries, my point is this: There is no pressing reason, either on the part of the People's Republic of China or the Soviet Union, to precipitate a struggle between those two countries? I ask whether you think there is or

is not.

Mr. HINTON. No; there is no reason, from the standpoint of a presumably rational third party, why either side should take the otherlet me put it differently: The disadvantages of doing so would be so great for whichever one initiated the clash that it does not seem to make sense from the standpoint of an outsider.

On the other hand, people have said this about wars that then broke out. The British writer Norman Angell said on the eve of the outbreak of World War I that modern economics and technology had made war impossible among modern nations. So a very rational man would say: Because it does not make sense for two countries to fight, they won't do it.

Mr. Nix. Now, what I am thinking about the present instability in the Government of the People's Republic of China would indicate to me that, unless some extraordinary occurrence comes about, there is no reason to suppose that they would become involved with the Soviet Union.

Mr. HINTON. Yes; I think that is true, except I think it is easy to overrate the instability of the Chinese leadership. The recent party congress can be interpreted in various ways, but it seems to me to show rather more stabilization of their political system than most of us had believed to be occurring before that time.

Mr. Nix. Considering the Age of the Christians and the Brahmans and the People's Republic of China, it would seem reasonable to me to assume that there is a degree of instability, because you can't expect that leadership to survive, let us say, through the ordinary course of events 10 or 12 years and no people with the different ideology would likely assume power; and, because of the reason that I am just stating, I am prompted to say that there is instability in that leadership. Do you agree with that?

Mr. HINTON. Not entirely, because I would say that new people with a different ideology had been-that is slightly overstating the case, but there had been a trend away from extreme ideology and extreme Maoist leadership for the last 4 or 5 years. And it seems to me that the party congress just held is another milestone in that process indicating a clear put-down for the more extreme radicals.

And I think, in other words, that we are seeing already in embryonic form what is likely to be the situation after Mao's death, which is exactly like you say, but I don't think it will come suddenly, or that it will have to be an unstable situation. At least they are working very hard to try to make sure that does not happen.

Mr. Nix. What, in your opinion, is the relationship between the development of nuclear weapons by the People's Republic of China and the Communist cold war which now exists between the People's Republic and the Soviet Union?

Mr. HINTON. I think there is a very close relationship. I would say that the Soviet Union first began to regard the Chinese as a threat and not merely as a nuisance about the time the Chinese showed a serious intention to go into not only the nuclear weapons field but

specifically into the field of ICBM's and thermonuclear weapons, and that was in the mid-1960's, about 1965.

One quite clearly sees on the Soviet side certain responses which were certainly tied to this perception of the Chinese as a thermonuclear power with ICBM's, and the Sino-Soviet relationship has never been the same since.

Mr. Nix. Of course, conflicts between nations historically arise because of fear on the part of one nation, because of greed on the part of one nation; but in any country in which there is a leadership that is to any degree balanced, is it your opinion that conflicts will not arise unless there is this greed or fear?

Mr. HINTON. That is a very difficult question. I think the answer is probably that your assumption is correct that they will not arise, very probably, unless there is some degree of fear on the other side or an active desire to get something that the other side has; but wars can also occur through miscalculation and accident and other things. Mr. Nix. Yes, of course they can. But, of course, it is to be recognized that there are modern devices available to practically every country in the world today that boasts any advance designed to prevent the accidents that we have known in the past; that, of course, you agree to?

Mr. HINTON. Yes.

Mr. Nix. Now, what advantages, as far as you know, are there in Asia that the United States give up in return for improved relations with the People's Republic of China?

Mr. HINTON. I would prefer to put that a little differently if I may. It is not necessarily things that we had that we gave up that are so important so much as things that we might have gotten if we had not improved our relations with the Chinese.

One thing that we have gotten that is disadvantageous is an antidemocratic trend in the non-Communist Asian countries. This is not directly tied in a 1-to-1 relationship to our decision to improve our relations with China and to disengage from Asia, but I think there is a distinct relationship between those trends. As long as we had a major military presence in the region and gave every sign of intending to stay, the governments of the region, because they needed us so badly thought they would please us if they looked to us to be democratic. The trend lately has been in the opposite direction. At the same time that they are getting less democratic, by and large they are also attempting to make their accommodations with Peking more slowly or less slowly, as the case may be. This may not necessarily be a bad thing. It is a process over which we have no control, which we are not in a position to caution them against to any degree in good faith, but something that is, I think, at least unsettling and disturbing and leads to some undesirable consequences.

Other than that, it is hard to think of anything else equally explicit. Our relations with certain specific allies have been considerably weakened by our dealings with the Chinese. This is true with the Japanese, but only briefly in 1971; it is no longer a very serious issue. It is a much more serious one with the Nationalist Government of China and to a lesser extent with the non-Communist governments in Indochina and Thailand.