The Island That Changed History  Sergey Radchenko

There was once an uninhabited islet lying close to the Chinese side of the Ussuri River, which marks the border between Russia and China in the Far East. “Was,” because it has since begun to attach itself to the Chinese bank in a defiant act of geographic irony. But during the turbulent spring of 1969 this little islet — called Damansky in Russian and Zhenbao Dao in Chinese — was the stage for a game-changing encounter.

It was on this islet that on March 2 the Chinese set up an ambush, killing 31 Soviet border guards. The daring provocation was an effort to deter the Soviets from invading China, something that seemed only too possible after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

The fighting resumed two weeks later. The Soviets deployed tanks and bombarded the Chinese positions with BM-21 rockets, killing (in their estimate) up to a thousand Chinese troops. After several months of uneasy quiet, another skirmish broke out on Aug. 13, this time along the Western section of the border, in present-day Xinjiang. Twenty-one Chinese and two Soviets lost their lives.

The conflict was not entirely a surprise. Relations between the two Communist giants had been tense for a decade, with each accusing the other of betraying Marxism. The ideological quarrel obscured a more fundamental divergence: Mao Zedong was unwilling to subordinate himself to the Soviets in the rigid hierarchy of the Communist world. The Soviet leaders accused Mao of “great power chauvinism,” without recognizing that the label suited them equally well.

At least until 1969, the Soviets and the Chinese had avoided shooting at each other. Now, Moscow was weighing harsher retaliatory measures, even contemplating a pre-emptive nuclear strike on its former ally — and, through Soviet diplomats in Washington, probing the American reaction to the idea.

With tensions spiraling out of control, Mao called together a group of senior military officials to work out what China should do in response to the crisis. The head of the group, Marshal Chen Yi, came up with an unorthodox conclusion: Facing an implacable enemy in the North, China had little recourse but to consider mending fences with the United States, after two decades of mutual nonrecognition and deep hostility.

It took two years of secret contacts to get there — a short time, considering that Mao was about to do something unthinkable: embrace the vilified leader of the imperialist world. In December 1970, Mao asked Edgar Snow, his biographer and a left-leaning journalist, to pass along to Richard Nixon an invitation to visit Beijing. Snow — by no means a Nixon fan — was taken aback. “A good fellow! Nixon is a good fellow!” Mao reiterated. “The No. 1 good fellow in the world!”

The Chinese leader then had the transcript of his talk with Snow circulated to lower party organizations for discussion and debate. The record of these discussions showed that even the Chinese party faithful were dumbfounded by the chairman’s stand, with many wondering why Mao would call “reactionary” Nixon “the No. 1 good fellow in the world,” and why, with so much tolerance being extended to Americans, China could not improve relations with the U.S.S.R.

The rank-and-file party members did not understand the chairman’s global strategy, nor his abiding fear of the Soviet Union. He repeatedly compared the Soviets to Nazi Germany, and felt that both the Americans and the Western Europeans had been weak in the face of Moscow’s expansionism.

Mao now proposed to build a united front — a horizontal line, he called it — against the Soviet Union. The line would join the United States, Japan, China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Western Europe in a quasi-alliance aimed at frustrating Moscow’s global ambitions. Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing in February 1972 fit in with that vision.

Mao now proposed to build a united front — a horizontal line, he called it — against the Soviet Union. The line would join the United States, Japan, China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Western Europe in a quasi-alliance aimed at frustrating Moscow’s global ambitions. Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing in February 1972 fit in with that vision.

This leverage showed when in the spring of 1972 Nixon briefly escalated the war in Vietnam and triggered only lame responses from Hanoi’s two most important allies. The United States was in an auspicious position, especially after the border war of 1969 showed just how much Beijing and Moscow feared each other.

The game only worked well, however, as long as the fear remained. After a decade of tensions, China and the Soviet Union began to rethink their relationship. Relations were normalized with Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing in May 1989, and China and Russia have become much closer in recent years, under Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. The remaining border issues were settled in 2004. On the 50th anniversary of the Zhenbao/Damansky clash, only faint memories remain of the confrontation that brought China and Russia to the brink of a nuclear war.

Russia may no longer be a Communist country, the Cold War may be over and China may now be an economic powerhouse, but the old Beijing-Moscow-Washington triangle is still in place. China and Russia have not become allies, and there is lingering mistrust in the relationship, punctuated by Moscow’s worries over Beijing’s growing economic clout. But Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi recognize that a bad Sino-Russian relationship would only benefit the United States, and they are trying hard to avoid putting themselves at a strategic disadvantage. In this sense, both have learned the lessons of 1969.

But what, if anything, did the American policymakers learn? In 1969, Nixon and Kissinger were acting in line with the ancient Chinese adage: “sitting on a mountaintop, watching two tigers fight.” Fifty years later, the American strategists are getting off the mountaintop and fighting each tiger on his own turf. There is no Chinese adage for this, perhaps because it’s not a viable strategy.

If triangular diplomacy is a game, America has forgotten how to play it.