Kissinger Video Interview
3. Could you talk about how Dubrinin described to you the gory details of what had been happening to the poor Soviet soldiers on the Chinese border? What was he getting at?
Henry Kissinger: Well early on we started out believing the conventional wisdom, namely that the Chinese were rabid ideologues and extremely aggressive. Then one day Dubrinin came in and briefed me about a clash they had had I think near the Yusuri river, and spoke about the possibility jointly of getting this under control or getting the danger under control. And this was so uncharacteristic of the Soviets that they would brief us about disagreements they had with third parties, that he actually vastly overplayed his hand. And if I recall my correction correctly I sort of was opaque in my response in order to start him to worry. But I still believed it likely that the Chinese had been the ones who started it. And so he came in two or three more times with reports of other clashes. And we plotted those on a map and a few months later when I was in San Clemente I asked somebody from the Rand Corporation - I think his name was Alan Whiting, to come down and talk to me in general terms about China. And he said that in his view it was the Soviets who were the aggressors and not the Chinese. And then when we looked at how we had plotted it on the map a light went out up in our mind, which - because they all happened close to Soviet railheads and far from Chinese railheads. And so we concluded that probably the Soviets were the aggressors. Once that was established in our mind we concluded that in a conflict between two communist giants the rules of equilibrium which Americans usually don't recognize, but the rules of equilibrium required that we back the weaker against the stronger. It's no great insight for Britishers but in America that is not the way foreign policy is usually perceived. And then we started from then on we started moving actively and took measures to find means of contact with the Chinese.
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