“Playing a Game,” Finding a “Lever”
The Sino-Soviet conflict, which first surfaced in the late 1950s and degenerated into armed border clashes in 1969, proved to be the main catalyst for Sino-American rapprochement. The China question almost immediately entered into the dialogue of the Kissinger-Dobrynin channel. Publicly, the Nixon administration said it would pursue relationships with both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Privately, Nixon and Kissinger hoped to play the Soviets and the Chinese off each other—the concept of triangular diplomacy. Triangular diplomacy had less to do with the concrete and crude move of playing the powers off each other than it did with trying to influence the perceptions and emotions of Communist leaders. The documentary record suggests that it was only after Sino-American rapprochement had been set in motion in April-May 1971, with the Chinese Ping Pong diplomacy and the secret traffic through the Pakistani channel, that U.S. policymakers began to talk of playing the Communist powers off one another for American advantage.