SENATOR MORSE: It is my judgment that the warp and woof of that doctrine ["Pax Americana Technocrata"] has woven our foreign policy rug. I think it pretty much outlines the foreign policy of this country today, and you take your principles and apply them to any analysis of our foreign policy and I think they are all in that rug.

My question is, do you think that we can follow this State Department and Pentagon Building and White House policy of containing China and not end up in the passage of time in a war with China?

MR. THOMSON: Let me suggest, as a way of answering your question, that the problem is China and the United States are squared off against each other with intense suspicion, and the problem is how to break out of the bind of mutual misapprehension.

It seems to me the way that you can back out of that bind is saying "all right, let's both stay out" and in that way you back down from this kind of action-reaction bind that we are in right now.

SENATOR MORSE: In your papers, you referred to one degree or another to the inevitability of change of leadership in China, from natural causes if from none other. We were briefed once before by a great authority on China who pointed out that these old communist leaders are going to die off.

MR. THOMSON: Senator, let me throw out a quick comment on that. It belongs so clearly in the crystal ball realm that anyone who would pretend to give you an answer is deluding himself. We see through a glass darkly here, and any pretense to an understanding of who will suc-Mao--and even if we knew who he was, what he would do--involves self-delusion.

I do myself believe--and I think Mao Tse-tung believes, which is why he has unleashed this "Cultural Revolution"--that China is in grave danger, from his viewpoint (I do not regard is as a danger) of gradually evolving more in the direction of the Soviet state, toward a more pragmatic, revisionist form of Marxist Leninism.

SENATOR MORSE: If we changed from the foreign policy you outlined, could we speed reconciliation with China?

MR. THOMSON: I certainly believe we could. I would caution that this is a job that is going to be incumbent on all of us, this process of learning to live in the same world with the Chinese Communist Revolution and helping to moderate it and helping to assimilate it. Our role, even if played with the greatest skill, and with a great deal of luck, may be marginal at best to the outcome.

I would nonetheless strongly argue for playing that role because--as has been set forth this morning--the role we are playing now very much serves Mao Tse-tung's purposes, the maintenance of ourselves as the enemy he needs.

Tripwires on Vietnam

Incidentally, I would just add on an earlier point that it has been our view--those of us in government and outside government--that the tripwires or at least one tripwire which would bring on Chinese intervention in Vietnam, and, therefore, a collision with China despite China's very considerable reluctance to intervene--Mao Tse-tung, appreciates the situation as it is now, he believes we are bleeding ourselves to death, he believes we are isolating ourselves from the rest of the world, and this ideally suits his purposes.

However, the tripwire which many of us, I think, still regard as a tripwire is he following: China cannot tolerate what it regards as a real threat to its own frontiers. This means, as a corollary, that China cannot tolerate the displacement of a friendly neighbor on its immediate frontier by an unfriendly neighbor or an unknown quantity. Ergo, any imminent threat to North Vietnam as a state that would imply to China that North Vietnam was to be displaced as a state, as a friendly state, and replaced by another state, would, we have always believed, bring on almost automatically greatly intensified Chinese involvement in North Vietnam and, in effect, an intervention in North Vietnam.

This is a two-sided threat: the North Vietnamese would prefer that the Chinese not come in, and the Chinese would prefer not to come in; but engagement of this tripwire by us would be an invasion of North Vietnam or else close and destructive bombing near the China border which might accidentally spill over into China.

"My question is, do you think we can follow this State Department and Pentagon policy...and not end up in a war with China?"