The Cold War and the New Rising Power (China)
The Cold War is one of the best documented parts of the world’s recent history. The amount of primary source material available on all sides of the Cold War is astronomical, and historians deal with the unique problem of having to dig through too much primary information for most topics, rather than too little. Many of the weekly staff meetings, phone calls, memos, travel reports, letters, and every other type of document imaginable have been recorded and are widely available to the general public. Even many of the previously classified documents in the United States have become declassified. Because of the amount of information available on the Cold War, many obscure, but important, documents are overlooked in preference for the more popular or cited ones. Luckily, with the invention of searchable databases that now contain literally thousands of documents, the searches of historians can be limited to only documents containing certain phrases or words instead of to the thousands of volumes in a library. Because of this, new documents over the period of a few months or years are able to be found and topics analyzed more effectively. When looked at closely, some of these documents bring out an interesting but hidden plot that occurred between the two major superpowers of the world near the end of the Cold War during 1966 and 1967 when analyzed together and placed side by side.
The standoff of these two superpowers in the world during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, has captured the minds of historians. Because of the vast amount of primary information available most of the writings on the time have been focused on comparatively few aspects of the war. The creation of nuclear weapons in the 1940s and the eventual policy of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) have become favored topics of the cold war. In addition, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and what led up to the Vietnam War has also received a significant amount of attention. It is widely unknown, however, that after the beginning of the Vietnam War in the mid 1960s that the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States did not see each other as the main threat. Instead, the main threat to these two major superpowers became the “Paper Tiger” also known as the People’s Republic of China. In addition, this new major threat caused discussions of an alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, two powers who, over the last twenty years, had built up thousands of nuclear weapons which they were ready to fire at each other if the need ever arose.
Regardless of the public appearance that China was doing very little in the Vietnam War during 1966 and 1967, the president of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, along with other international policy makers in the United States, Taiwan and the Soviet Union clearly saw China as the greatest threat to both the United States and the Soviet Union. It was this rising danger to the two world powers which caused preparations and discussions of an uneasy alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union against China.
Throughout the 1960s, the threat that Communist China posed to both the Soviet Union and the United States increased. It was because of China that the United States never invaded North Vietnam. It was their new nuclear abilities that put China on equal footing with the Soviet Union. The Chinese clearly understood their position, and used it effectively against both the United States and the Soviet Union. Even though China initially saw the United States as the major threat, they eventually shifted their focus more on the Soviet Union. On the other hand, U.S. policy makers had it pointed out to them frequently by the Taiwanese and the Vietnamese that the real enemy of the United States in Vietnam was China, not the Soviet Union. Eventually the U.S. policy makers came to the same understanding. In the Soviet Union, the immediate threat of the Chinese and the old border disputes in Manchuria caused the leaders of the Soviet Union to consider an alliance with their greatest enemy up until that time, the United States. Although discussions of the alliance did occur, the alliance was never actually formed, but an increase in détente did occur.
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