Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [165]
Still, I told Putin that I thought it was conceivable that if Russia continued developing freer political and economic systems and accepted NATO’s expansion along its borders, the United States and NATO could welcome Russia into a more stable relationship with the West. I’m not sure my response satisfied him, but I thought it was unrealistic to expect a warm relationship with NATO to blossom overnight, given the attitudes of the Warsaw Pact nations that had so recently joined.
Later that evening, I learned how far America and Russia still had to go to fully understand one another. At a dinner with Ivanov and senior Russian military officials, General Yuri Baluyevsky, then the country’s second-ranking military officer, regaled us with a fascinating “fact” I suspect he may have learned from the internet. The brains behind the U.S. missile-defense system, he declared, as if he had unearthed an embarrassing secret, was “an economist named Lyndon LaRouche.” LaRouche, of course, was well-known in the United States as a political extremist and conspiracy theorist. He inhabited the murky zone where the far left and far right wings of politics bend toward each other. To my knowledge, his influence on the American missile defense program was nil.
I made an effort to correct the record for the assembled Russians. But the encounter was troubling. It was not in either of our interests that Russian military leaders should lack such basic knowledge about the United States and the ways American officials think and operate.
If Russia loomed large in early discussions in the Bush administration, the rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its implications for American strategy in Asia was perhaps an even greater and more delicate issue. I had some familiarity with the PRC going back to the 1960s. I was not an early admirer. In Congress, I had been a supporter of the Committee of One Million—a bipartisan organization “in opposition to any concessions to Communist China.”7 After Nixon’s historic opening, I traveled to China with Henry Kissinger in 1974 to continue normalization talks with the then vice premier, Deng Xiaoping, who later became the country’s paramount leader.*
I returned to China in 1999 as part of a delegation of former national security officials sponsored by the American Foreign Policy Council. The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of Mao Zedong’s victory over the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-Shek and the founding of the PRC. By then, Beijing’s streets were more congested, its air much denser with smog than before, as automobiles had largely replaced bicycles. To commemorate the occasion, the Communist Party had set up a series of exhibitions with cultural displays depicting each of China’s many diverse provinces. As befit what the Chinese thought of as a “renegade” province, the Taiwan exhibit was light on culture. In the center of the large room was an enormous diorama of Taiwan under siege. Models of Chinese warships and bombers were attacking the island, while Chinese troops stormed its beaches and missiles landed in its cities. Though the tragedy of Tiananmen Square in 1989 had opened the eyes of some in the West to the Communist regime’s capacity for ruthlessness, the prevailing sense was that China would not flex its growing muscles for the foreseeable future. After seeing that Taiwan display, I was not so sure.
Unlike many Western policy makers, the Chinese made a practice of thinking several moves ahead while they looked to take advantage of current events. Kissinger once remarked to me that the game the PRC plays is