Each of the parties to the strategi

Each of the parties to the strategic triangle perceived it differently and changed their policies over time. The Chinese, whose principal foreign policy concerns to date could be described as seeking to manoeuvre between the two superpowers in order to preserve China’s independence, opened to America in order to better contain the Soviet Union. Later, however, the Chinese shifted to a more independent position as the Soviet threat declined and as the Reagan administration no longer seemed to need the Chinese counterweight as much as its predecessors. Kissinger and Nixon, as the architects of the new structure of international relations, saw it less as a means of bringing unrelenting pressure on one party by the other two than as a means of bringing about a balance or equilibrium in which the Soviet leaders would see it to be in their interests to act with restraint. Their successors, however, argued as to whether it would be possible to rein in Soviet Union that had not acted with ‘restraint’ by supplying sophisticated weaponry to China what became known as playing the ‘China card’. The issue was finally settled by the Reagan administration’s huge military build-up, which made the Chinese role almost redundant. The Soviet leaders, who had less room for manoeuvre in the triangle than the other two, first emphasized their significance to the Americans as a fellow superpower, only to later describe the Chinese as extreme ‘anti-Soviets’ who had got the Americans on side, and finally to end up in a position in which they sought to cultivate relations with the Chinese partly in order to limit American unilateralism.