World: If Moscow and Peking Make Up

A decade ago, most Western analysts thought a split between the Soviet Union and China inconceivable. Today, the analysts find the notion that Moscow and Peking will make up any time in the foreseeable future equally inconceivable. Indeed, even in agreeing to hold border talks with the Soviets, the Chinese spoke of “irreconcilable differences” with Moscow. Yet what if the inconceivable should occur once again, and Moscow and Peking were able to reach a genuine reconciliation? Among the possibilities:

∙IN CHINA AND THE SOVIET UNION: Along the 4,500-mile Sino-Soviet frontier, where both sides have been feverishly building up forces since bloody Ussuri River clashes earlier this year, tensions relax quickly. Moscow withdraws many of the thousands of men who guard Central Asia and the Soviet Far East. The Chinese start to redeploy forces dug in along the frontier, moving them into political and civic action work inside China to help heal the wounds caused by Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution. The Soviets resume a degree of aid to China, mainly in industrial credits, but offer no assistance to China’s burgeoning nuclear program.

∙ASIA: Though both Moscow and Peking have supported North Viet Nam with military equipment all along, the settlement results in a new unity of action. Such coordination keeps Hanoi from playing off the two Communist giants against each other. But it also enables the North Vietnamese to stop their breathless balancing act and devote undivided attention to the war. What follows is a further stiffening of their posture on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, compelling the U.S. to consider slowing down its withdrawal—difficult though that may be. Beyond Viet Nam, Moscow quietly concedes Southeast Asia as a Chinese sphere of influence. Peking steps up subversion and support of local Communist insurgent movements. Unless Asian nations coordinate their defenses, perhaps in a regional pact extending from Korea to Pakistan, they eventually confront a painful choice: 1) accommodation with Peking, or 2) greater military and economic reliance on the West.

∙THE MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA: Communist pressure grows in the Middle East, where the Soviets have in the past been far more active than the Chinese. Competition between the two Communist powers in Syria ends. In Africa, where Moscow and Peking have also been rivals in the courtship of established governments and extremist groups, Guinea, the Sudan and several other countries find it difficult to cope with unified Communist pressure. The Soviets, certain that their back door is safe, are willing to take slightly greater risks in the Middle East, but still want to avoid outright war.

∙WESTERN EUROPE: Soviet troops and sophisticated equipment pulled out of Asia are redeployed in Europe, generating increased pressure there. The U.S., which has actively considered pulling some of its 288,000 troops out of Western Europe, is now forced not merely to maintain its presence but to increase it. However, the steady growth of the Communist parties of Italy and France is stunted. Both flourished when Moscow, in urgent need of support against the Chinese, conceded them considerable independence. With new unity between Moscow and Peking, the Italian and French Communists again become more subservient to Moscow and have trouble persuading the non-Communist left that they are truly independent of Kremlin control.

∙EASTERN EUROPE: There is no return to monolithic unity within the Communist camp; after all, the Sino-Soviet split was but a symptom, not the cause, of divisions. In Albania, long a Chinese ally despite its geographic position within Moscow’s sphere of influence, the Enver Hoxha regime falls and is replaced by a pro-Soviet government, which quickly grants the Russians direct naval access to the Mediterranean. The drive against liberalization elsewhere in Eastern Europe gets tougher. Peking, hardly known for liberal precepts, condones the crackdown; when the Chinese condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia last year, they did so not because they objected in principle, but because it was a convenient weapon with which to lash Moscow’s “revisionists.” After a Sino-Soviet reconciliation, it may be a long while before a future Dubček makes his appearance in a Communist-run country.

∙THE U.S.: As part of the settlement, the Chinese demand an end to Soviet-American “collusion.” That puts a damper on hopes for strategic arms limitation talks and further progress in the Geneva disarmament negotiations, but does not entirely destroy them, since both Moscow and Washington are alarmed at the expense and danger of the arms race. In the U.S., anti-Communist hardliners, long on the defensive, enjoy a revival by underlining the threat posed by the renewal of Chinese-Soviet chumminess.