What Brzezinski Sees

When Energy Secretary James Schlesinger saw China's Chairman Hua Kuo-feng in November, he was asked to relay greetings to only two men in Washington: Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski, The President's National Security Adviser, who made a diplomatically crucial visit to China last May, has long been the most forceful advocate within the Administration of normalizing relations with Peking. Last week TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott interviewed Brzezinski on his thoughts about the changing Sino-American relationship:

Some Brzezinski critics have accused him of unseemly haste in seeking to normalize relations with China and of an obviously anti-Soviet motivation for wanting to do so. Brzezinski vigorously denies the charges.

"The U.S. has a longterm, common strategic interest in the improvement of our relationship with the People's Republic," he says. "This is not motivated by some tactical 'China card.' It stems from an interest, jointly shared with China, in a world of many centers of power--what we call diversity, or what the Chinese occasionally describe as non-hegemony."

Moscow views China's opening to the West as potentially threatening and sees Brzezinski as the principal villain in a plot to set up an anti-Soviet alliance involving China, Japan and NATO. Brzezinski rejects that view: "A China that is increasingly modern, increasingly capable of dealing with its large number of people, increasingly a factor in stability both in its region and in the world as a whole--a China that is strong and secure--that is a China we would like to see. We do not see cooperation among China, the U.S., Western Europe and Japan as a hostile design against the Soviets. In different ways and on different issues, this same cooperation should also involve the Soviet Union. We see no fundamental incompatibility between a better relationship with China and a better relationship with the Soviet Union."

Finally, in an oblique dig at former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who attached primary importance to Soviet-American detente, Brzezinski adds: "What we are doing in our relations with China should have been done anyway, whether our relations with the Soviet Union were much better or much worse."

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