Secret Deals in an Open Society

The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top-Secret Talks with Beijing & Moscow bears on several long-running and current controversies concerning U.S.-China relations and the conduct of American foreign policy more generally. One controversy concerns the role of secret diplomacy in a relatively open, democratic society. For years, critics of the Nixon-Kissinger style of diplomacy have argued that it has a fatal flaw. The alleged flaw is that relationships negotiated and managed in secret lack the kind of public (and bureaucratic) support necessary to sustain them in a democratic polity when the relationship encounters difficulties, as was the case when U.S.-China ties hit the rocks of the June 4, 1989 violence in Beijing. A second and related criticism of the Nixon-Kissinger style has been its primary emphasis on the “strategic” (balance of power) rationale, rather than a more symmetrical tripod of economic, human rights, and strategic considerations. Finally, as the American debate over technology leakage to China and allegations about espionage by Beijing heat up, it should be with considerable interest that members of Congress and critics of Clinton’s China policy read about the Nixon administration’s “strategic cooperation” with Beijing.

The Kissinger Transcripts probably strengthens criticisms of the Nixon-Kissinger approach. Yet, two facts loom over all the rest. First, the Nixon-Kissinger rationale for improved U.S.-China relations lasted relatively uninterrupted from 1971 to 1989, a longevity record that few other rationales for controversial relationships can match. Second, in the twenty-eight years after the Nixon-Kissinger initiative toward China, there were no direct conflicts between American and Chinese armed forces, whereas in the twenty-two years preceding their initiative there were two—Korea and, to a much more limited extent, Vietnam.

The volume, edited by William Burr, is a landmark along the route of piecing together the inner workings of the U.S.-China and U.S.-Soviet relationships during a critical period of the Cold War. It consists of memoranda of conversations and transcripts recorded by a range of notetakers (often Winston Lord and Peter Rodman) obtained by the National Security Archive as a result of the statutory declassification of older materials and under the Freedom of Information Act. It presents only a part of the flood of material coming out of the National Security Archive project. Additional information is presented in James Mann’s About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China, From Nixon to Clinton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999) and in recently declassified conversations between President Nixon and then premier Zhou Enlai.

While the documents provided in The Kissinger Transcripts are fascinating and advance our understanding of the development of relations between Washington and Beijing, Washington and Moscow, and the triangular relationship among the three, the volume suffers from a sloppy editing job. The book is riddled with transliteration errors and misspellings, only some of which may have been in the original documents. Even in those cases, the editor had an obligation to note the errors and parenthetically correct them where possible. The most serious problem in this regard is that names of participants in meetings are so botched that one is occasionally hard-pressed to identify some of the Chinese participants unless one happens to know the individuals involved. It is a shame that a volume of so much value has such an obvious (though not fatal) defect. William Burr would have been well advised to employ a skillful and knowledgeable proofreader.

The documents (with only occasionally adequate and often biased background commentary) provide a unique body of information concerning discussions with both Beijing and Moscow from late-1971 through the transition to the Carter administration in January 1977. With respect to Moscow, the conversations are of most interest and value in three respects. First, they reveal a Leonid Brezhnev that was both more humorous and quick-witted than his popular image in the West. Second, one learns a great deal about the...