Countering Soviet Encirclement } 325
while the United States seemed to be withdrawing into isolationism, leav-
ing power vacuums into which the Soviet Union expanded. China faced the
stark possibility of becoming surrounded by the Soviet Union, or so Mao
concluded. Powerful Soviet forces remained posed all along China’s northern
borders, from Manchuria through Mongolia to Xinjiang. New, mobile, solid-
fuel and nuclear-armed intermediate range missiles, plus advanced Backfire
bombers and ever more armored forces, were being deployed there by the
mid-1970s. To China’s south, starting in 1975, quick on the heels of Hanoi’s
absolute victory over Saigon, VWP-ruled Vietnam moved away from China
and into alignment with the Soviet Union. Across Southeast Asia, coun-
tries began adjusting to the utter collapse of the US position in Indochina
by moving toward accommodation with the powerful and very well-armed
united Vietnam and its backer, the USSR. China was being placed between
northern and southern jaws of a Soviet vice.
In South Asia, China’s strategic partner Pakistan had been partitioned
by Soviet-backed India, and India became a nuclear power in 1974 as part of
what Mao saw as an Indian drive to achieve hegemony in South Asia with
Soviet backing. In the Middle East, Iraq and Egypt, both major regional pow-
ers, signed friendship and cooperation treaties with the Soviet Union in 1972.
Soviet naval construction programs launched after the Cuban crisis of 1962
were beginning to come on line by the late 1960s, and the Soviet naval pres-
ence in all the oceans of the world was growing rapidly. By 1968, the Soviet
navy surpassed the US navy in terms of days of surface combat ships deployed
in the Indian Ocean, and by 1972 it far exceeded the US navy in terms of
number of port calls in the that ocean.^22 The Soviet navy had become preem-
inent in the Indian Ocean.
The breakup of the Portuguese empire in Africa in 1974–1975 and a Marxist
military coup in Ethiopia in 1974 created opportunities that Moscow and its
ally Cuba seized upon. Cuban military forces were deployed to Africa with
Soviet support to bolster new Marxist allies there. By 1977, Cuba, with Soviet
support, was the major extra-regional military power in Africa, with Cuban
contingents supporting pro-Soviet governments in Ethiopia, Angola, and
Mozambique. In Europe, NATO countries that had traditionally been bul-
warks against the Soviet Union were shrinking defense budgets and military
forces under the influence of détente mentality, or so it seemed to Beijing.
European publics and governments were increasingly deluded, Beijing
believed, into believing that concessions to the Soviet Union would render
it more amicable. In fact, West European weakness would tempt the Soviet
Union and make it more aggressive. All this was the Chinese view.
The seeming recession of US influence was the other half of the shift in
the global correlation of forces perceived by Mao. The utter failure of the
United States to support its client South Vietnamese state in 1974–1975 when
Hanoi launched a large-scale conventional attack across the DMZ which