The Strategic Triangle } 427
Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s. The grave weaknesses of the Soviet
economy were certainly the most important factor. At the international level,
the reinvigoration of US containment policy during the second half of the
Carter administration and during the Reagan administration, including the
latter’s Strategic Defense Initiative, were probably the most important inter-
national factors inducing the shift in Soviet approach. But confrontation with
a very real Sino-American security partnership, which Moscow had long
dreaded, was one weighty factor persuading Soviet leaders that a change of
course was necessary. The quasi alliance between the People’s Republic of
China and the United States was one factor convincing Soviet leaders that the
Brezhnev-era push to achieve a fundamental shift in the global correlation of
forces to the advantage of socialism was simply beyond Soviet capabilities and
was bankrupting the country.
The hemorrhaging of Soviet treasure and blood in the wars in Afghanistan
and Cambodia also helped persuade Soviet leaders that a new approach was
necessary to extricate the USSR from its crisis. Parallel US and Chinese secu-
rity guarantees to Pakistan and Thailand underpinned the risky decisions of
those two countries to provide territorial sanctuary that made possible pro-
tracted resistance wars. Parallel PRC and US diplomacy in international fora
helped isolate Moscow and Hanoi over their aggressive policies. In the case
of Vietnam, Beijing’s tenacious insistence that an end to Soviet support for
Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia was the necessary price for normaliza-
tion of Sino-Soviet relations played an important role in persuading Moscow
to pressure Vietnam to withdraw. In sum, the Sino-American strategic part-
nership of 1979–1982 (or perhaps 1972–1988) helped produce the dramatic shift
in Soviet policy under Gorbachev.^59 Simply stated, the second Sino-American
alliance, like the first, helped change the course of history.
The fact that there were deep rifts in the PRC-US partnership over Taiwan
does not negate the reality of the strategic partnership. Many, perhaps all,
alliances have internal conflicts of interest. The issue of Indian indepen-
dence and decolonization, for example, divided Washington and London
throughout their World War II partnership. The Sino-Soviet alliance of the
1950s was, as we have seen, wracked by conflicts over Soviet air support for
China’s intervention in Korea, Soviet assistance to China’s nuclear weapons
program, and many other factors. Eventually, those conflicts tore the PRC-
USSR alliance apart, but there was an alliance to be torn asunder. In the case
of the close Sino-American strategic partnership of 1978–1982, the two sides
managed the conflict over Taiwan so as not to destabilize the larger partner-
ship that thwarted Soviet expansionism.