Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 22
May 31 – Why did Brzezinski come back from Peking so emboldened? What enabled him to deliver such a vitriolic, anti-Soviet attack last Sunday? And why did President Carter follow up on the anti-Soviet attack made by Brzezinski at the opening of the two-day meeting of NATO in Washington on May 30?
Carter’s attack differed little in form and in substance from the hard line enunciated by Brzezinski the day before.
After all, it is only a year since May 22, 1977, when Carter delivered a commencement address on foreign policy at Notre Dame University. That speech was hailed in all the capitalist world as imparting a new, moderate tone and perspective in relation to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. The speech generally was considered to lay the groundwork for reining in the military and pulling back from military adventures abroad.
“Being confident of our own future,” he said, “we are now free of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear. For too many years we have been willing to adopt the flawed principles and tactics of our adversaries [meaning mostly the USSR, of course! – SM} ... We fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better fought with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty.”
At that time, just a year ago, the Carter administration was looking forward to what it thought would be victories in Africa. First and foremost it was expecting to reverse the Ethiopian Revolution. It was secretly supporting a Somali invasion of Ethiopia, which it thought would begin the process of dismembering the Revolution. It was also looking forward to a counter-revolutionary coup inside the Ethiopian leadership, and this was openly speculated on in the Western imperialist media.
Now that the Revolution has consolidated itself to a substantial degree, the imperialists, with the U.S. at their head, are feverishly working to poison the relationship between the Ethiopian revolutionary government and its principal supporters, Cuba and the USSR.
At the same time, they are seeking to sow internal dissension and are preparing the groundwork for a possible Kronstadt-type rebellion in the interests of the counter-revolution. That would give a blow against the Revolution the necessary leftist coloration and make it acceptable to bourgeois liberal opinion in the imperialist countries and their radical, anti-Soviet hangers-on.
But back last May, Washington was pursuing a different tactic that called for a more pacific-sounding approach.
Revolutionary Marxists long ago learned that whenever the chieftains of an imperialist state speak in sugar-coated phrases about peace and moral values and “not fighting fire with fire,” etc., etc., that is merely a cover for war preparations. Even more so, when the head of an imperialist state and his principal cohorts and advisors begin to beat the war drums, the working class should not regard it as mere verbal gymnastics, but should take their words seriously and prepare as best they can for the criminal launching of imperialist adventures.
Carter’s Notre Dame speech, sad to say for those who actually believed in his words, was soon followed by a record-breaking defense budget and actions in relations to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries which belied the peaceful rhetoric of the administration’s foreign policy. For even as the president was speaking at Notre Dame University, the neutron bomb was already in the works and plans for strengthening NATO militarily were already in progress. American soldiers were still in bases all around the world and the strength of the armed forces was being increased, not decreased, in south Korea and even more in Europe.
But Carter’s militarist position reached new heights in his saber-rattling Wake Forest University speech this March 17 and was reinforced only last week at his Chicago press conference. His second speech yesterday following Brzezinski’s unprecedented attack on the USSR marked a new stage of hostility by the Pentagon and the White House, not only against the USSR and Cuba but against all the national liberation movements, most particularly those on the embattled African continent.
The suddenness with which Brzezinski launched his attack and the manner in which Carter followed it up, and for all practical purposes endorsed it, can be understood best if one sees it in the light of the U.S. relationship with Peking.
Brzezinski came back emboldened from his visit to China. The reason for it can be seen by a study of the speech made by Huang Hua, the foreign minister of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), at the UN General Assembly on May 29.
The speech is so thoroughly reactionary and so totally devoid of any progressive, let alone revolutionary, class content, as to make it almost unbelievable that it is an authentic representation of the viewpoint of a socialist government. Nevertheless, it is entirely in harmony with the pronouncements from the Chinese leaders for the last several years, except that it carries its reactionary foreign policy further than before so that in some vital aspects it is identical with the position of U.S. imperialism.
Almost at the outset of his talk Huang Hua states, “The people of Zaire, after successfully repelling last year an invasion engineered by the Soviet Union and executed by a force of mercenaries, are now valiantly repulsing a new invasion of mercenaries engineered by the Soviet Union and Cuba.” This could only be regard as music to the ears of Brzezinski, Carter, and the Pentagon. In fact, it goes much further than what either Carter or Brzezinski said.
Who is repulsing whom in Zaire? Was it not the Belgian paratroopers who invaded the country and began indiscriminately shooting up the rebellious people? Is it not the French who have occupied Shaba Province and are using the Foreign Legionnaires to mercilessly exterminate the people who are struggling for national liberation from the yoke of imperialism?
Under whose yoke has Zaire been all this time? It seems that the Chinese CP leaders once knew well what the situation was. Back in 1963 they wrote the following about the struggle in what was then called the Congo:
“On July 10, [1961] Belgium launched armed intervention in the Congo. Three days later the UN Security Council adopted a resolution under which a ‘United Nations force’ arrived in the Congo to put down the national liberation movement there. ... The ‘United Nations force’ serving U.S. neocolonialism continued its suppression of the Congolese people. Early in 1961 Lumumba, national hero of the Congo, was murdered by the hirelings of the U.S. and Belgian imperialists and on their instructions. From September 1961 to the end of the following year, the U.S.-manipulated UN force mounted three armed attacks on Katanga, which was under the control of the British, French, and Belgian imperialists.” (Quoted in “Workers of all Countries, Unite, Oppose our Common Enemy!”, Peking Foreign Language Press, 1963.)
That’s how the Chinese CP leaders understood the situation in 1961. There has been no change in the status of the Congo except the change of name and the installation of the puppet Mobutu.
Both Cuba and the USSR have categorically denied that they either have troops there or have in any way intervened in the situation. But what if the Congolese people had asked for and received fraternal material and military assistance? Is this a crime for a rebellious people in the struggle against what the Chinese leaders once well understood? Who was it who coined the slogan, “Dare to struggle, dare to win”?
To get around all this, the Chinese Communist Party leaders invented the theory of “social-imperialism” to justify their treacherous support to imperialism.
Thus Huang Hua tosses off a single sentence concerning the liberation struggle of Zaire as though it were some isolated minor skirmish. But the struggle in Zaire is of central significance on the African continent and has worldwide importance for the oppressed and the international working class. By taking an identical line on it with that of the imperialists, and in fact going further, the Chinese leaders serve the predatory aims of the multi-national corporations, cover up for them, and aid them on a mass scale to deceive world public opinion. And this at a time when the world imperialist press is carrying on the most rabidly racist attack against the Congolese people, which to this day has not let up.
The value of China’s position on Zaire to U.S. imperialism is enormous because, aside from the imperialists, there is virtually no other regime in the world which would dare repeat the canard about the Soviet Union engineering the intervention and the Cubans being used as so-called mercenaries.
The identity of political position between the U.S. and the PRC on the Zairian liberation struggle is of key significance. It points to the emergence of a Sino-U.S. alliance against the USSR. This has been reinforced by Brzezinski’s visit to Peking and is affirmed in the speech by Huang Hua.
There can scarcely be a world political issue that is more clear-cut than the character of the brutal, neocolonial regime in Zaire. Nor can it be in any way denied that the Zairian (Congolese) people have the right to rebel and to take assistance from wherever they possibly can in order to liberate themselves.
Is this not what China herself did in the course of the struggle against the Chiang Kai-shek regime? And for years after the Revolution, China received aid from the Soviet Union to ward off imperialism.
Everything else in Huang Hua’s speech points in the same anti-Soviet and pro-imperialist direction. Praise for Egypt, now completely under the thumb of the U.S., is made all the more offensive by the deliberate omission of any word regarding the Palestinians. Praise for Sudan and Somalia for abrogating their treaties with the Soviet Union is equally offensive and downright reactionary.
Where once they used to attack Japanese imperialism for its unbridled militarism, the Japanese people are not being praised for – what? For “putting up a strong opposition to Soviet hegemonist behavior,” as though Japan were not the imperialist ally in Asia which, in alliance with the U.S., sought and continues to seek to rob, plunder, and exploit all of Asia.
Western European imperialism comes in for flattery for its growing tendency towards unity – against whom? Hegemonism – a code word for the USSR.
Whereas in earlier years one of the first tributes to be paid by the chairman of the Chinese delegation to the UN was to praise the “brilliant victories of the Indochinese people,” of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, no mention of this is made at all in the talk of Huang Hua. Since this session of the UN is devoted to disarmament and a great deal of Huang Hua’s talk deals with it, it would be all so pertinent to point out how the people of Southeast Asia disarmed one of the “super-powers” in the face of nuclear threats and half a million U.S. soldiers. But not a word.
The omission is not accidental. China’s foreign policy has done much to injure its relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, so much so that the SRV was obligated to characterize the attacks made by the People’s Republic of China on the matter of ethnic Chinese in Vietnam as “sheer fabrications utterly contrary to the policy of the Party and the Government of Viet Nam.” This was in response to a hostile move by the PRC on May 24, 1978, when it authorized the State Council of the PRC to release through the Chinese news agency a report that Vietnam was “ostracizing, persecuting, and expelling” Chinese nationals from Vietnam.
Even the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was not mentioned in Hua’s speech, although in previous UN presentations by the PRC the U.S. was always attacked as an imperialist aggressor and occupier of south Korea. This is particularly important now because the U.S. under the Carter administration is brazenly lying about withdrawing troops from south Korea when at the same time it is reinforcing its fire power all around the peninsula.
The Chairman of the PRC only recently visited the DPRK and renewed a pledge of support to the DPRK. In its struggle to unify the country and rid it of imperialist occupation, the DPRK sorely needs worldwide public support of the kind particularly fitting in a UN forum, if the UN is to serve any useful purpose at all. It would have been all the more appropriate for Huang Hua to make the pledge in his UN address.
But that would have meant a direct attack against the U.S. at a world forum where all ears were attuned to what was being said about the U.S. role as an imperialist aggressor. Its omission is therefore significant and confirms what the imperialist press has been hinting, that the Korean pledge by China’s leader during his visit there was not much more than ceremonial.
When Brzezinski returned from Peking to the U.S., the New York Times of May 28 reported that he and his aides “gave Chinese officials an unprecedented, detailed briefing on the status of Soviet-American strategic arms talks and explained at length the contents of some secret White House memorandums on American security goals,” meaning of course war preparations. Brzezinski is quoted directly as having said, “the basic significance of the trip was to underline the long-term strategic nature of the U.S. relationship to China.”
The phrase “long-term strategic nature” is another of their diplomatic euphemisms for relations with the USSR. Ordinarily when a presidential aide goes to a foreign country and gives a detailed briefing on American strategic arms talks, he takes a great risk of being called to order by the ultra-right for divulging such secrets or perhaps for making secret agreements without consulting Congress. In this case, however, there was not a whisper against Brzezinski from that point of view.
The eagerness of the American ruling class for an alliance with China with whom it has “parallel” interests, to quote Brzezinski, is of the most far-reaching importance. The only question they have is whether it is really achievable.
There can be no question, however, that taken all together, the Brzezinski visit, the Huang Hua speech at the UN, Brzezinski’s violent attacks against the USSR, and the follow-up by Carter indicate, at least in some measure, the emergence of a Peking-Washington axis against the USSR, Cuba, and the world revolutionary struggle of the oppressed people.
Last updated: 11 May 2026