Sino-Russian notes

By albertobor on March 23, 2023 • ( 0 )

“The creation of the North Atlantic military alliance and the location of numerous military bases around the world lead us to consider the United States as anything but a pacifist country. This is also demonstrated by Washington’s rejection of all the proposals…”

The Chinese president nervously repeated the phrase of the Russian foreign minister, “American imperialism is a paper tiger”, while the Moscow diplomat concluded that “Americans like to boast of their economic potential, but that until they receive the visit of a terrifying specter, the specter of economic crises”.

Again from what we read from the Russian minister’s notes, we discover that a year later the political crisis in the Far East had seriously worsened. The United States showed that it wanted to guarantee Taiwan’s status quo at all costs at the cost of a conflict with communist China.

The Chinese leadership argued that not a single concession could be made to the Americans at the cost of a nuclear war, a prospect that frightened the Russians. It is understood, continued the Chinese leader, that the actions of China and Russia should have been coordinated in achieving the defeat of the Western enemy at any cost.

Another interval of a few years for the Russian minister himself to declare to the Chinese: “We believe we must always look at the prospects for the development of relations between our countries. Of course, today the international situation is very complex. The forces of imperialism aim at world supremacy, in order to be able to impose their will on other countries from this position.”

The notes in question are not secret recordings of Lavrov’s meetings with Xi Jinping or Wang Yi. It would be the desire of any Western intelligence service to know the contents of their recent meetings, but they are taken from the published memoirs of Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in the book Memories, published in 1989.

What Gromyko reports seems to have been written today. The Chinese leader whose name I omitted was Mao Zedong and the words referred to concern meetings held in November 1957 in Moscow and the more belligerent ones in Beijing the following year.

The last declaration on the prospects for an alliance and collaboration between the two countries came several years later and dates back to 1984, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, during two meetings held with Chinese Foreign Minister Wu Xueqiang.

Mutatis mutandis, it seems that matters of great power politics evolve, but do not change in substance. Large backward countries aspiring to replace the biggest and richest for the creation of a new world order. To see it with an entomologist’s lens, an ethological conflict for domination declined to a great nation.

It is a great critical exercise to re-read the memoirs of the old Gromyko, who in life was an actor in the great season of Soviet diplomacy, of which he was foreign minister from 1957 to 1985 for 28 years. Gromyko was known as Mr. No, he was so difficult to deal with.

He was highly prepared and to say of the western counterparts he was a person capable of honoring his word and aware of the responsibilities of the role. It is said that the loss of his three brothers during the Second World War marked him to the point of formulating the phrase: “better ten years of negotiations than a single day of war”.

In the memories we find images and elements that are also useful in our times.

The warning of the formula of John Watson Dulles, former secretary of state of the Eisenhower administration, who in 1953 affirmed that the only American foreign policy could be “balanced on the verge of war” and the hope of the “breeze of détente” of Charles De Gaulle, who knew how to smooth out any roughness in conversations and who did not lack a frank character inspired by good intentions.

He would seem like a warm veil, but Gromyko seems sincere in recognizing his balance and the common will for a confrontation without the risk of a war. Perhaps this is the biggest difference from so distant times. De Gaulle, Gromyko and Eisenhower himself had known the horror of war and were able to keep it away from our lives.

This article was previously published in Italian language on the site http://www.altriorienti.com