Chinese visit rattles USSR

One of the odder sights in the winter, in fine weather and knifing winds, has been a long queue lining up every morning down the steps and along Fifth Avenue outside the Metropolitan Museum, the majestic pile and, let's face it, a treasure house, that stands on the edge of Central Park.

There have popular and splendid exhibitions in the past but I don't remember one that had people lining up early, very early, every day of the week, earlier than they do for the big movies on Saturdays and Sundays. This one is the Tutankhamun show. Nobody has given it a bad notice, in fact everybody's so bedazzled by it that they develop a yen to have some part of it for themselves, something, so to speak, to put on the mantelpiece. 

This urge was happily anticipated by all sorts of commercial firms and the stores are awash with Tutankhamun scarves and jewellery, both junky and precious, and reproductions of the goddesses who guarded his tomb done in painted wood and metal. At one of the leading department stores, you can buy a head, several heads if you like, of Tutankhamun done in porcelain and covered with gold leaf at $2,000 a head. 

I've not heard of anyone's boycotting the show on anti-Egyptian grounds, on the ground that Mr Sadat is asking more of Israel than she can safely give up but this thought is by no means as philistine as it may at first sound. Not even national museums stage tributes to an ancient or modern culture without a second thought about the political popularity of the subject. And anyone who knows the weird and twisting bypaths that marketing research can get into these days would not expect a big American department store to manufacture in large quantities just now, say, cushions, scarves, chocolate boxes or T-shirts emblazoned with the likeness of the Shah of Iran. 

Pretty soon, however, I imagine that we shall all be sipping soup out of Chinese bowls and some glittering Dallas store – no stores are more glittering – will get out Christmas presents of chopsticks in solid gold inscribed 'His' and 'Hers' for $4,000 the pair. 

The first, big positive effect of Mr Deng's visit is the signing, drafting at least, of contracts with soft drink companies, with tractor manufacturers, computer makers, purveyors of industrial raw materials, airplane parts and, no doubt, airplanes. He did visit Seattle, the great Boeing plant, but all this on the firm understanding – which the president kept making firmer every time Mr Deng talked about Russia – on the understanding that nothing is to be used for, or converted to, military use. Well, considering how quickly the Chinese got busy ordering steel and aircraft parts and tanks from Britain and France, nobody believes, least of all the Russians, that the Chinese are not capable of putting two and two together, two peaceful items and two adaptors, and coming up with a weapon. 

I don't think there's any question that the administration is worried about this. The president said very loud before Mr Deng arrived that whatever else the Chinese got from America they would not get any arms and the president and the Secretary of State, Mr Vance, became more and more edgy and worried every time Mr Deng went on about the Russian bear and how wonderful it was that China and the United States were united in their view of the Soviet threat. 

I'm convinced that there was no... no fakery in this embarrassment and no duplicity on the part of the president and Mr Vance. In fact Mr Vance had the Soviet ambassador in twice, I believe, to try and calm down the Russian fury and their understandable fear that Mr Deng went to Washington, in the main, to conclude a military alliance. 

Now, if this is true, which I believe it to be, I mean if the administration was embarrassed on this score, every place Mr Deng got up to make a speech and tout his anti-Soviet line, we're bound to ask: what did Mr Carter and his advisers think they were doing when they invited Mr Deng? Was there intelligence (I mean their diplomatic reporting) from Peking so uninformed that they didn't know how Mr Deng felt and couldn't guess that the new drive in China for modernisation and technology, not to mention MiGs and missiles, was bound to agitate the Russians? 

I really don't know the answer, except to say, yes, American intelligence out of China must have been pretty inept because surely Mr Carter would not otherwise have imagined that Mr Deng could go charging about America glorifying the new Chinese-American stand against the Russians? Surely Mr Carter wouldn't have assumed he could then sit down in sweetness and light with the Russians and sign the long, impending treaty to limit strategic arms. 

There are emerging two schools of thought, both of them gloomy, about the SALT treaty. One says that the Russians will punish the United States for her craven hospitality to Mr Deng by refusing to sign a SALT treaty. The other school says, 'No. Things are worse than that. The treaty will be signed which will only go to prove that it's worth even less than all the other treaties we've signed with the Russians, whether on SALT No. 1, or on human rights at Helsinki, that the Russians will sign and then go about their business of strengthening their already incomparable conventional forces – which is a bland, neutral phrase and means a colossal army, a great navy, an unmatched fleet of submarines, both conventional and nuclear – and will proceed with the furthest reaches of the nuclear weapons' race. 

I hope... I hope that when Mr Deng was in Washington getting off his cute little Chinese proverbs that he didn't mention the late President Kennedy's favourite, the saying of some sage – maybe it's all right now to quote Confucius again – that the best prayer a Chinese can send up is a prayer to live in interesting times. Mr Carter, who confessed early in his administration that he prays on an average over 30 times a day – well, that's one prayer that's been answered before he made it. 

He must feel pretty rueful these days when he considers, I think it was the most recent national poll, the one that the New York Times and the Columbia Broadcasting System do together, which showed that while people are not satisfied with the way Mr Carter has been handling domestic policy, he has been commended by a majority of Americans for his conduct of foreign policy. That favourable percentage must be dropping day by day for, I'd say, Americans have been fascinated into despondency by Iran and while they enjoy the rush of happy feeling over the new relationship with China, the ecstasy of it was pretty brief. 

Maybe Mr Carter and his advisers suspected the coming anti-Russian line of Mr Deng and thought they could ride it out but didn't guess at his being so publicly belligerent about Vietnam, let alone practically announcing that he might have to go into Vietnam to punish the Vietnamese for invading Cambodia, making no bones about the fact that it was the Vietnamese who did it and that they are considered lackeys or running dogs of Moscow. 

And so, on Thursday night, we read from Tokyo that the Chinese were massing hundreds of MiG fighter planes on the Vietnam frontier and, from Singapore, that Russian warships were sailing into the South China Sea. And in Washington, we read that Mr Brown, the American Secretary of Defence, had gone to Saudi Arabia to try and persuade the Saudis that though they are hemmed in with Russian-dominated countries on the south, east and west, and Iran in turmoil on the north, all is not lost and America is at their side. 

The shaky position of our main oil supplier was advertised the morning that American papers reprinted the second of two articles by Dr Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, attacking the Carter administration on a wide front for its foreign policy. These reprints have received some unfortunate newspaper headlines abroad as well as in America. One I saw flatly saying that President Carter was responsible for the fall of the Shah of Iran. 

Dr Kissinger is never quite so simple, or so unfair. What he did say was that while the Shah's government was un-progressive and noticeably flagrant in its abuse of human rights, American indecision and the badly timed human rights policy made the collapse of the Shah inevitable and that the next regime might be worse than his. 

Dr Kissinger's main accusation is that Mr Carter leaves an embattled or wobbly ally in doubt about how far it can depend on the United States. He's afraid that these doubts have spread to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf and may spread to other trouble spots so that, as he puts it, there may be a growing perception of the potential irrelevance of American power to the most likely dangers that these countries face. Dr Kissinger warns that if this goes on, if necessary allies come to feel America is not a sheltering power, then they will seek reassurance in Moscow. 

He also went after the president on the very thing for which, six months ago, Americans were most ready to praise him, namely the Camp David agreements. Dr Kissinger says they ought to have been carried to a conclusion rapidly and in a more dominant fashion. Since they have not, maybe the Egyptians and the Israelis too will conclude that, quote, 'the United States is incapable of shaping events'. That is the most damning and I'm afraid to a lot of Americans the most persuasive of Dr Kissinger's criticisms. 

It is the burden of the song of the several Republicans who are now beginning to make signs of running for the presidency in 1980. The other day a national magazine printed a bleak piece with the title, 'If America Goes the Way of Britain'. It wasn't lurid; it was a depressing but pretty factual account of domestic disorder and productive paralysis. I doubt it made a very wide or fearful impression. Americans just now are wondering where America is going, especially whether she is any longer being looked on as the effective protector not of the whole free world but of those parts of it that affect her vital interests.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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