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The Strategic Triangle
and the Four ModernizationsNew Economic Wine in Old Strategic Bottles
The term “strategic triangle” is a useful concept referring to the pattern of
cooperation and conflict between the USSR, the United States, and China
during the Cold War. The basic idea is this: locked in a global protracted
confrontation over power and ideology, both the Soviet and the American
superpowers saw China as a significant factor, positive or negative, in that
alignment. Each superpower feared China’s alignment with the other super-
power, and each sought China’s alignment with itself. China’s leaders, for
their part, understood well China’s role in the Soviet-US balance and sought
to exploit it to China’s advantage.
China’s relatively substantial capabilities were the basis for its role in the
strategic triangle. China played a major role in Japan’s defeat in World War II
by tying down about a million Japanese soldiers, helping to make feasible the
Europe First strategy adopted by the Big Three Allied powers. Moreover, until
the last year of the Pacific War US war planners envisioned Chinese forces,
armed via a reopened Burma Road and organized and led by US military
officers, providing the muscle to drive Japanese forces out of north China,
opening the way for an eventual US invasion of Japan from the North China
coast.^1 After Japan’s defeat, as we saw in an earlier chapter, Stalin appreci-
ated the potential for Chinese revolutionary offensives in Asia to tie down US
forces in Asia, diverting US strength away from the more crucial European
theater. During the 1949 interregnum, US policy sought to court “Chinese
Titoism” away from close alignment with Moscow. China’s willingness to go
to war with the United States in Korea added to its weight in the strategic
balance and paid off well in terms of the scale of Soviet assistance to China’s
1950s development effort. After the Sino-Soviet split, Moscow was haunted by
the possibility that China might align with the United States, while starting