The Strategic Triangle } 403
Deng worked out two main policy responses to this strategic problem.
First, China scrapped China’s support for revolutionary anticapitalist move-
ments, as discussed in an earlier chapter. Second, China tilted sharply to-
ward the United States within the strategic triangle, transforming the PRC
into Washington’s strategic partner in countering Soviet advances. This is not
to say that Deng was not deeply concerned with Soviet advances in the late
1970s. He was. By the late 1970s, Deng was concerned with Soviet advances in
Afghanistan, Africa, Iran, and especially Indochina. But alignment with the
United States to deal with those security concerns also served developmental
purposes. Like Mao, Deng did not compartmentalize foreign and domestic
issues.
Deng was more willing than Mao to enter into active and substantial co-
operation with the United States. Deng seems to have been less obsessed than
Mao with the possibility of US betrayal of the PRC to the USSR. Mao had been
reluctant to enter into active cooperation with the United States to counter
the Soviet Union. Under Mao, Beijing had been content to deliver policy sem-
inars for visiting US dignitaries, supplemented by polemical broadsides in
China’s media. The one effort by Zhou Enlai to actually work together with
the Americans—arranging a Sihanouk-led Cambodian coalition government
in 1973—had collapsed because the Americans did not do what they said they
would do, resulting in a great loss of credibility by Zhou. He was a scapegoat;
the effort must have been approved by Mao, but when the scheme collapsed,
Zhou bore the blame.
Underlying Mao’s reluctance to actively cooperate with the United States
was, in Henry Kissinger’s estimate, a suspicion that the United States would
ultimately strike a deal with the Soviet Union against China. Deng, on the
other hand, believed that US interests in containing the Soviet Union were
essentially the same as China’s, and consequently was much more willing to
act in unison with Washington.^2 Strategic partnership with the United States
on the basis of those common interests would create a favorable macroclimate
for China’s effort to draw broadly and deeply on the assets of the global cap-
italist economy. Deng’s domestic and international objectives dovetailed in
the late 1970s. Partnering actively with the United States would counter Soviet
expansionism while persuading the Americans that the PRC was a friendly
power whose development efforts should receive generous treatment.
Strategic cooperation between the PRC and the United States against the
Soviet Union from about 1978 to 1982 was so close that the Western media
and analysts took to calling that partnership a quasi alliance and the PRC
a quasi-member of NATO. Beijing would distance itself somewhat from the
United States starting in 1982, but partnership with the United States against
the Soviet Union would continue throughout the Cold War. This created a
favorable macroclimate for the explosive growth of China’s cooperative ties
with the advanced capitalist countries led by the United States. China under