The Aesthetic of Analysis: National Intelligence Estimates and Other American Appraisals of the Cold War Triangular Relationship

On November 12, 1970, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on China which declared: “There are no indications that Peking expects to bring about an early major improvement in Sino-US relations.”1 A few months later, American National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger returned triumphantly from Peking with news of the Sino-American rapprochement. Talks with the Chinese, Kissinger reported, had been “searching, sweeping and significant.”2 The very nature of Cold War alliances had been transformed; as Kissinger told President Richard Nixon, “If we can master this process, we will have made a revolution.”3 There was surprise and shock—among Americans both liberal and conservative, among American allies such as Taiwan, and among the members of the very branch of government which was supposed to provide the intelligence that led to such changes. Why did the NIE—like many others before it—fail to predict a Chinese opening to the United States?

Existing scholarship has shown that in spite of the conception of communism as monolithic which dogged the China lobby and much of the body politic, there were American policymakers and analysts at all levels of government who were alive to the possibility of dividing the Soviets from the Chinese, although generally with an eye to creating a Soviet-American front to deter Beijing, rather than a Sino-American détente. Gordon Chang, among others, has shown that “at no time since 1949, when Mao Zedong's armies triumphed on the Chinese mainland, have the top policymakers of the United States ever assumed that communism was monolithic, that China was irretrievably ‘lost’ to the Soviet Union, or that the United States was not without means to encourage Sino-Soviet frictions, if not an eventual split.”4