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is now an opening-up of movement among the super powers and
China, a potentially great power, and it's an interesting game. But
at the moment nothing tangible has happened, except the beginning
of the process of normalizing our relations. And even this is very
limited, because in view of the unsettled status of Taiwan, we are in
no position of exchanging ambassadors.
CHOMSKY: I don't really disagree that much. Let me add something
though. Just from the point of view of logic, you asked how this event
relates to our various theories. It's sort of irrelevant to mine. That is,
the proposal that I made predicts nothing either way about whether
President Nixon should take a trip to China. So it has no bearing on
that theory. During a period when the United States thought it was pos–
sible for a rollback in China, of course it made very good sense to
try to build up pressures to create that rollback and to open up this
area once again to American economic penetration. But I think that
any rational person knew by the late sixties that that was hopeless.
And it took what Mr. Morgenthau said, an unprincipled politician, to
carry out the rational act of a member of the American ruling class.
I should say furthermore that there are other elements. The military–
industrial complex is a very important component of all of this which
we haven't talked about. I mentioned that there are many factors, most–
ly mutually supporting, that lead to an imperialist stance. And one of
them is the use, ever since the Second World War, of military ex–
penditures as a technique of economic management internally. There
are many reasons why that course was taken. And I think it is a
natural course and one that will continue to be taken. But in order
to continue to employ this very effective technique of inducing pro–
duction and of economic management in the United States, namely a
vast military system, you need an enemy, an external enemy, and
the Soviet Union is a much more credible enemy than China. In
a sense, it was irrational for American policy-planners to try to create
the fear of China as a device for whipping the population into line
to support a huge military budget. It's much more rational to do what
Laird's doing now: to point to the Russian threat, which is not all
that mythical, because Russia is a great power and it does have
missiles and so on and so forth.
MORGENTHAU: "The billion yellow people wantinr. to take away from
us what we already have" - I'm quoting. That's also very plausible.
CHOMSKY: No it isn't, because there is no way for them to do any–
thing to us. The billion yellow people can't swim across the Pacific.
But those Russian submarines, they can do something. So, therefore,
I think it's sort of rational for the United States in its general pro-
