¹ Among the best of these are Tatu, Michel, The Great Power Triangle: Washington- Moscow-Peking (Paris: Atlantic Institute 1970)Google Scholar; Gottlieb, Thomas M., Chinese Foreign Policy Factionalism and the Origins of the Strategic Triangle (Santa Monica: RAND R-1902-NA, November 1977)Google Scholar; Brown, Roger Glenn, “Chinese Politics and American Policy: A New Look at the Triangle,” Foreign Policy, No. 23 (Summer 1976), 3–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pillsbury, Michael, “U.S.-Chinese Military Ties?” Foreign Policy, No. 20 (Autumn 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Future Sino-American Security Ties: The View from Tokyo, Moscow and Peking,” International Security, 1 (Spring 1977), 142Google Scholar; Garver, John W., “China's Rapprochement with the United States, 1969–1971,” unpub. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1979)Google Scholar; and Garrett, Banning, “China Policy and the Strategic Triangle,” in Oye, Kenneth A., Rothchild, Donald, and Lieber, Robert, eds., Eagle Entangled: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Complex World (London and New York: Longman 1979), 228–64Google Scholar.

² I am taking what Graham Allison would call a “rational actor” approach, ignoring all but international payoffs. A country's foreign (or domestic) policy may be analyzed in terms of its constituent pressure groups, bureaucratic interests, resource constraints, and other internal determinants, just as an individual decision maker may be psychoanalyzed in terms of constituent drives and complexes. But the focus of this analysis is on the inherent logic of specific patterns of relationships among nation-states; the reasons motivating a particular nation-state to adhere to (or deviate from) any particular pattern is irrelevant to the validity of that logic.

³ The classic studies of exchange theory are: Homans, George C., Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World 1961)Google Scholar, and Blau, Peter, Exchange and Power in Social Life (New York: Wiley 1964)Google Scholar. For an application to politics, see Ilchman, Warren F. and Uphoff, Norman T., The Political Economy of Change (Berkeley: University of California Press 1971)Google Scholar. I am not aware of any explicit attempts to apply the theory to international relations, though it would seem particularly suitable to that context in view of the relative lack of institutionalization.

⁴ For an analysis of the failure of limited coercion in the Vietnamese case, see Thies, Wallace J., When Governments Collide: Coercion and Diplomacy in the Vietnam Conflict, 1964–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press 1980)Google Scholar.

⁵ Two recent such “revisionist” interpretations of this period are Reardon-Anderson, James, Yenan and the Great Powers (New York: Columbia University Press 1980)Google Scholar, and Chern, Kenneth, Dilemma in China: America's Policy Debate, 1945 (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press 1980)Google Scholar.

⁶ Cf. Bell, Coral, The Diplomacy of Detente: The Kissinger Era (New York: St. Martin's Press 1977), 138Google Scholar.

⁷ For a clear exegesis of the Maoist developmental model in all its pristine cogency, see Gurley, John G., China's Economy and the Maoist Strategy (New York: Monthly Review Press 1976)Google Scholar.

⁸ See Low, Alfred D., The Sino-Soviet Dispute: An Analysis of the Polemics (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses 1976)Google Scholar.

⁹ Cf. Neuhauser, Charles, Third World Politics: China and the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization, Harvard East Asia Monograph No. 27 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rubinstein, Alvin, ed., Soviet and Chinese Influence in the Third World (New York: Praeger 1975)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Dulles, Foster Rhea, American Policy Towards Communist China, 1949–1969 (New York: Crowell 1972)Google Scholar; Cohen, Warren, “American Perceptions of China,” in Oksenberg, Michael and Oxnam, Robert, eds., Dragon and Eagle: United States-China Relations, Past and Future (New York: Basic Books 1978), 77–79Google Scholar.

¹¹ Young, Kenneth T., Negotiating with the Chinese Communists: The United States Experience, ‘953–1967 (New York: McGraw Hill 1968)Google Scholar; see also Lall, Arthur, How Communist China Negotiates (New York: Columbia University Press 1968)Google Scholar.

¹² Young (fn. 11), 44–47, 58–59; see also Sutter, Robert G., China-Watch: Toward Sino-American Reconciliation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1978), 31–62.Google Scholar

¹³ See Schurmann, Franz, The Logic of World Power (New York: Pantheon Books 1974)Google Scholar; also Halperin, Morton, China and the Bomb (New York: Praeger 1965).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Dillon, Linda D., Burton, Bruce, and Soderland, Walter C., in “Who Was the Principal Enemy? Shifts in the Official Chinese Perceptions of the Superpowers, 1968–1969,” Asian Survey, XVII (May 1977), 456–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, detect a significant shift in Chinese perception of the superpowers between late 1968 and early 1969, illustrating the traumatic impact of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the Sino-Soviet border clashes of spring 1969. They conclude that fear of attack from the Soviet Union was the most important factor underlying a “new” post-Cultural Revolution foreign policy. For a qualification of these conclusions, however, see Garver (fn. 1).

¹⁵ The best-known advocate of this position is, of course, Johnson, Chalmers, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press 1962)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Horn, Robert C., “The Soviet Union and Asian Security,” in Chawla, Sudershan and Sardesai, D. R., eds., Changing Patterns of Security and Stability in Asia (New York: Praeger 1980), 63–99Google Scholar.

¹⁷ See An Tai, Sung, The Sino-Soviet Territorial Dispute (Philadelphia: Westminster Press 1973)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Johnson, Chalmers, “The Achievements of Chinese Foreign Policy,” unpub. paper presented at the Third Joint Soviet-American Conference on Asia, Santa Barbara, Calif., December 10–15, 1979Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Kalb, Marvin and Kalb, Bernard, Kissinger (New York: Dell 1975), 259–60Google Scholar; Bell (fn. 6), 15–16. According to Bell, The Soviet signals that they were contemplating a preventive war, perhaps including nuclear strikes, were so deliberate, clumsy and obvious that it is difficult not to believe that they were intended to be heard by the Chinese, who should be cowed into a more submissive attitude. They included, for instance, letters to Communist parties in the West that seemed to be asking for advance approval of a strike against China. . . . The Russians apparently offered, via the military attaches in Washington and Moscow, a clear hint if not an actual bid for American acquiescence in such a strike. They were snubbed by the U.S. policy makers concerned, and knowledge of the bid and the snub were conveyed to the Chinese government.

²⁰ Garver (fn. 1) offers evidence to this effect gleaned from content analysis of official statements and shifts in trade flows, as well as “Kremlinological” inferences.

²¹ For a perceptive analysis of post-Cultural Revolution Sino-Soviet relations, see Lieberthal, Kenneth, Sino-Soviet Conflict in the 1970: Its Evolution and Implications for the Strategic Triangle (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Report, July 1978)Google Scholar.

²² Tsou, Tang, “Statesmanship and Scholarship,” World Politics, XXVI (April 1974), 428–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Kissinger, Henry, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown 1979), 165Google Scholar.

²⁴ Ibid., 712.

²⁵ Van Ness, Peter, Revolution and China's Foreign Relations: Peking's Support for Wars of National Liberation (Berkeley: University of California Press 1971)Google Scholar; Low (fn. 8).

²⁶ Nixon, Richard, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap 1978), 878Google Scholar; Kissinger (fn. 23), 838.

²⁷ Kanet, Roger E., “The Soviet Union and China,” Current History, LXV (October 1973). 145–50.Google Scholar

²⁸ Lieberthal (fn. 21); Gottlieb, Thomas, “The Hundred-Day Thaw in China's Soviet Policy,” Contemporary China, III (Summer 1979), 3–15Google Scholar.

²⁹ Lowenthal, Richard, World Communism: The Disintegration of a Secular Faith (New York: Oxford University Press 1964)Google Scholar.

³⁰ See Japan External Trade Organization, China: A Business Guide—The Japanese Perspective on China's Opening Economy (Tokyo: Japan External Trade Organization and Press International, Ltd. 1979), 67–103Google Scholar.

³¹ A Chinese military official told a visiting Senate delegation that Beijing favored a countervailing U.S. naval buildup in the Pacific and would welcome port calls by the U.S. Seventh Fleet. When the Iranian revolution deprived the United States of its intelligence-gathering ground stations near the Caspian Sea, Deng Xiaoping suggested that the U.S. could set up facilities in the P.R.C. to monitor Soviet missile test launches in Central Asia. Talbott, Strobe, “U.S.-Soviet Relations: From Bad to Worse,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 58 (No. 3, 1980), 15–39Google Scholar.

³² Zagoria, Donald, “Into the Breach: New Soviet Alliances in the Third World,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 57 (No. 4, 1979), 733–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Lawrence Caldwell and Alexander Dallin, “U.S. Policy Toward the Soviet Union,” in Oye and others (fn. 1), 199–228.

³⁴ In internal debate lasting from 1974 to 1977, Soviet civilian politicians clearly laid down the line of superpower equality and the unthinkability of nuclear war. Brezhnev first went public with the new doctrine at the 1971 Congress of the CPSU, when he discarded earlier calls to “preserve the superiority” of Soviet weapons and defined the Soviet goal in the SALT negotiations as “the security of the parties considered equally.” He reaffirmed this statement in January 1977. In 1974, he termed the world's nuclear stockpiles excessive, asserting that “there is an immeasurably greater risk in continuing to accumulate weapons without restraint” than in reducing arsenals, as stockpiles were already “sufficient to destroy everything living on earth several times.” Soviet military resistance to such revisionism in the course of the debate indicates that these assertions were not merely a propaganda exercise to lull the West.

³⁵ Yanov, Alexander, The Russian New Right: Right-Wing Ideologies in the Contemporary USSR, Policy Paper in International Affairs, No. 35 (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of International Studies, 1978)Google Scholar.

³⁶ See Ray, Dennis M., “Chinese Perceptions of Social Imperialism and Economic Dependency: The Impact of Soviet Aid,” Stanford Journal of International Studies, X (Spring 1975), 36–83Google Scholar.

³⁷ Kissinger (fn. 23), 836–37.

³⁸ See Garrett (fn. 1); also Garrett, , “The China Card: To Play or Not To Play,” Contemporary China, in (Spring 1979), 3–18Google Scholar.

³⁹ One of the reasons for the deterioration of Soviet-American relations is to be found in recent changes in the nuclear balance, which have led some Western observers to infer that the Soviet Union is on its way to a disabling first-strike capability; these may plausibly have led Soviet observers to the reverse conclusion. Among the technological innovations that make the pre-emptive destruction of land-based hardened missile silos feasible are MIRV capability and the more recent improvements in missile accuracy (which have resulted from unanticipated advances in such areas as computer and engine microminiaturization, order-of-magnitude acceleration of data processing, inertial navigation, American Navstar satellite position fixing of submarines to within 10 meters in three dimensions regardless of weather, gravity and geodesy positioning, real-time satellite reconnaissance of ground information, preprogrammed terminal homing computers in warheads, terrain-matching, and rapid retargeting of both ICBMS and SLBMS). If either side were to achieve a unilateral breakthrough in laser defense against missiles, this could also radically alter the strategic balance.