Peking Is Worth A Ballet

By Ed Magnuson

At this moment, in 1984, Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially, Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. --1984, George Orwell

THE scene in Peking's Great Hall of the People last week certainly had to be one of history's great ironies. There, while a Chinese army band played America, the Beautiful, a U.S. President merrily clinked mao-tai glasses with his Chinese hosts, long considered the true "baddies" of the Communist world. Nor was it just any American President either; it was a conservative Republican who has long had a reputation as being the perfect cold warrior. The Chinese people must have been deeply startled by the change in their own leaders' attitudes, but they, after all, live under a system not too distant from 1984's state-manipulated memory control. Subject to no such constraint, however, the American public could be excused if it found its neck wrenched and its equilibrium upset by the surprising spectacle of Nixon chumming it up with his former enemies and sitting patiently through a revolutionary ballet in Peking.

That the public seemed to have taken it all fairly calmly is due in large part to the fact that in their lifetime most Americans have lived through so many sudden reversals of policy, so many deviations from previously stated principle, so many changes in institutions, that they have come to regard such turnabouts as part of modern life. While swift changes in policies and positions have been commonplace in history, they seem to have occurred in the past two or three decades with dazzling frequency. Noting this phenomenon, Nixon's old rival, President John Kennedy, said in 1963: "However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors."

One of the most surprising switches in modern times was the dramatic Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact of 1939, which not only stunned the world but even split many of the world's Communist Parties, which could not stomach a pact with Hitler. Later, after Hitler turned on Russia and the U.S. entered the war, the notion of accepting the Soviet Union as an ally shocked many Americans, who had considered the Bolsheviks archvillains ever since the revolution.

There have been other dizzying reversals in recent times. After World War II, victorious Americans suddenly found themselves not only aiding their hated enemies of World War II, the "Nazi murderers" and the "yellow-bellied Japs," but accepting them as trusted allies and friendly trading partners. In only a relatively few years, the British saw their empire reduced from a global network that embraced 25% of the world's population into little more than the home islands. The French had to adjust first to a pullout from their Vietnamese empire, and later, when Charles de Gaulle abruptly switched policy on Algeria, to the abandonment of the colony that had long been considered an integral part of France. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer led the French and Germans toward a new amity after the enmity of two world wars. -

Perhaps most bewildering to Americans have been the turnabouts in how they were expected to regard Communists. Up through the McCarthy era, all Communists were seen as evil. But gradations of villainy developed as Marshal Tito pulled Yugoslavia away from Moscow, and Czechoslovakia and Hungary flirted with liberalism and became martyred under the steel tracks of Soviet tanks. The Russians, of course, personified evil, but the rise of Nikita Khrushchev, who never seemed as demonic as Joseph Stalin, softened U.S. policy and American views of the Russians. Obviously, the most menacing Communists were the Chinese, particularly after they killed American boys in the Korean War. For a while, the Russians actually seemed to be the "good," reasonable Communists, the Chinese the vicious and unpredictable ones. Then came the Sino-Soviet split and, well, maybe China deserved a reassessment. Now the danger is that the pendulum of sympathy may swing too far toward China.

Such bewildering zigs and zags are not, of course, unique to modern times. They occurred often in the Middle Ages, when cynical princes made devious deals to acquire more land and power. Alignments throughout the Holy Roman Empire spun like a windmill as Popes fought emperors and emperors battled each other. Religious wars not only set Catholic against Protestant, but Catholic against Catholic in a confusion of shifting allegiances. France was so torn by such strife that King Henry IV, who had twice been a Catholic and twice a Protestant, converted again to Catholicism to assume the throne, explaining: "Paris is worth a Mass." Austria's Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa shattered a whole gaggle of alliances in 1756 by embracing one of the archrival Bourbon kings of France, Louis XV, and thus touched off a "diplomatic revolution" that plunged the chancelleries of Europe into a frantic game of musical chairs under the influence of such grand schemers as Kaunitz, Talleyrand and Bismarck.

What distinguishes the changes of modern times is that even more than in other ages they have ranged far beyond politics and swept aside cherished beliefs and values in science, social institutions, mores and even religion. Vatican Council II shook the Roman Catholic Church to its foundations by changing the Mass, diffusing papal authority, and opening new areas of theological speculation and cooperation with Protestantism. Americans have lived through the prohibition of liquor, then its legalization. Gambling is at the same time a crime and an increasingly popular form of revenue for states. Abortion, considered by many to be sinful as murder, has been legalized by some legislatures and is winning increasing acceptance. The venerable ideal of rearing a large family is suddenly seen as a threat to the survival of civilization. The blanket condemnation of drugs has been swiftly undermined by the widespread acceptance of marijuana, especially among the young.

Americans have also watched their once-hallowed principle of governmental nonintervention in the marketplace give way under the pressure of a depression to wide acceptance of New Deal intervention. Outright regulation of wages and prices remained a blasphemy to be endured only in wartime --until Richard Nixon abandoned one of his own political creeds and abruptly imposed controls. He even adopted Keynesian deficit budgets and seemed not at all appalled by the biggest deficit since World War II.

Each of the multiple shocks entails substantial, although immeasurable, psychic costs, even though those costs may not be visible. Especially when those changes touch people personally, as in the case of religion, morality and money matters, a sudden shift can be rudely disorienting. "The acceleration of change does not merely buffet industries or nations," contends Alvin Toffler in his bestselling Future Shock. "It is a concrete force that reaches deep into our personal lives, compels us to act out new roles, and confronts us with the danger of a new and powerfully upsetting psychological disease."

To every change there is always a lingering, sometimes highly emotional resistance. The reforms of Vatican II angered and alienated many traditional Roman Catholics. The U.S. political right is up in arms over Nixon's journey to China. France verged on civil war over the Algerian settlement, and at least two assassinations of De Gaulle were attempted. The intensity of the cultural conflict between generations in the U.S. testifies to the agony of rapid change in living styles.

The agony seems to be growing less painful in the field of foreign affairs. One explanation for this may be the general decline in the influence of ideology everywhere, but especially in America. "We don't really have an ideology--any structured, systematic, historic set of deeply rooted values," contends Political Scientist James MacGregor Burns. What Americans do have is an almost visceral, passionate feeling about national friends and enemies, especially in wartime, when each conflict is seen as a crusade. They tend to involve themselves deeply in world affairs when the issues can be posed in simplistic moral terms. There must be villains and heroes, nations to hate or to adulate.

Some of that all-or-nothing fervor is fading as the pragmatists take over and ideology dwindles. A Secretary of State such as John Foster Dulles, who could not bear to shake the hand of China's Chou En-lai in 1954, has been replaced by a Nixon, who seems able to embrace anyone and any idea if it looks historically or politically profitable. Few modern leaders have turned themselves about so completely as has Nixon to meet what seems to him the practical demands of the times. Pragmatism, in fact, is fast becoming America's own "ism," an attitude that its defenders would like to exalt to the status of a systematic philosophy.

The decline of ideology, the rise of pragmatism, perhaps even the globe-shrinking ability of modern communications that help people view the world more realistically, all can account in part for the wide acceptance of --or at least resignation to--the age's swift reversals of governmental policy. Yet there may be a further explanation for the readiness of most Americans to applaud Nixon's outreach to the Orient. However passionate they may feel about a friend or foe at one moment, Americans as a people find it hard to carry a grudge for long. They are quick to forgive and forget a past wrong. Says Author-Historian Barbara Tuchman: "Americans want to live at peace with the next fellow. They'd like to like the Chinese. China was once one of our greatest allies, and that's not so long ago. I may be sentimental, but I think the American people remember that fondly, and would welcome a return to those days." -

The credibility of a President may well suffer, notes Yale Historian John Blum, when he asks Americans to switch their image of China--virtually from Fu Manchu to Charlie Chan--almost overnight. When a leader seems to turn against his own once passionately stated views, he may not be taken too seriously when he adopts an emphatic new stance; that, after all, may also soon change. Yet it is also refreshing and reassuring to find that world leaders are proving flexible enough to change their attitudes toward each other at a time when change in so many other spheres of life swirls about them.

Perhaps the lesson for Americans in all of this is that less passion and fewer moral absolutes ought to be applied to global affairs. If the U.S. in the past had not so vehemently condemned all Communists, and most especially the Chinese, today's surprise would have been less unsettling. If the moralistic fervor of a Dulles--and yes, at one time, a Nixon--had not been so readily emulated, Chinese and U.S. leaders might have been talking to each other in unpolemic terms long ago. Nor would such U.S. allies as Japan and Taiwan have been quite so outraged by the Nixon odyssey. Neither would there have been such a temptation to spring the surprise so dramatically. Perhaps passion and emotional rhetoric are vanities that powerful nations can no longer afford in a nuclear age. Ideally, the raised glasses in Peking might even have symbolized a mutual reach for a new rationality and maturity among the world's major powers. qedEd Magnuson

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