As Kissinger stresses, Zhou did not “want to risk subordinates’ thwarting of our common design by their haggling over ‘modalities.’ By keeping technical arrangements in the Pakistani channel, he ensured discretion, high-level consideration, and expeditious decisions.”¹³ Bass, ignoring the evident Chinese insistence on Pakistan, attacks the White House’s use of Yahya Khan as an intermediary as evidence of a gratuitous Nixonian affection for military strongmen. In addition to the strong PRC preference for Pakistan and the advantages of geographic proximity, another explanation is also pertinent: it is difficult to imagine how it could have been arranged for Kissinger to visit Beijing secretly from either Paris (a world capital) or Bucharest (a prime target of Soviet penetration); secrecy was an essential requirement since Nixon could risk neither premature U.S. domestic euphoria nor a public failure in Beijing. Nothing regarding this highly sensitive matter leaked from Pakistan, and Yahya Khan discreetly managed the complex arrangements to get Kissinger secretly from Islamabad to Beijing, as Zhou had suggested.

The late great Harvard historian Ernest May once observed, “What a historian chooses to leave out or minimize is often as important and telling as what he decides to include.”¹⁴ One must wonder if Bass discounts the clear Chinese preference for Yahya Khan as the intermediary between Beijing and Washington because acknowledging it would undermine one of his core assertions: that Nixon and Kissinger could have openly condemned or even attempted to unseat the Pakistani president without endangering the opening to China. In his book, Bass never directly confronts a series of major questions: If he knew that the opening to China would have faltered, as Nixon and Kissinger feared, because of U.S. pressure on Yahya over the atrocities in East Pakistan, would he nevertheless have forced a showdown with Pakistan over the plight of Hindu Bengalis? Would he have been content to face an outcome in which the China initiative collapsed even as Pakistan rejected American demands as irrelevant? Would the next step have been sanctions against Pakistan, or perhaps American support for the Bengali insurgency—and what other results would these policies have entailed? Statesmen have to make such choices; professors do not.

To duck these questions, Bass must implicitly posit an alternative rosy scenario in which Nixon and Kissinger are able to establish an equally effective channel to Beijing while bringing about a swift improvement in Pakistan’s domestic conditions. But what would the Chinese reaction have been if the United States had informed an adversary of two decades at an enormously delicate moment that its watershed invitation to improve relations had been misdirected and that the Yahya Khan channel was unacceptable to Washington? What if those within the Chinese government who had wished to sabotage the possibility of an opening to the United States had used this U.S. switch in channels to delay Kissinger’s visit? Who could have known how long Zhou would be in a sufficiently strong bureaucratic position to pursue a breakthrough with Washington? (In fact, just two years later, he was “struggled against” by ultraleftists and purged.) Who could have been sure that Mao Zedong, always mercurial and then in exceedingly poor health, would not reverse course and seek to solve his Soviet problem through rapprochement with Moscow? And what conclusions might Beijing have drawn regarding American credibility if Nixon and Kissinger, as Bass advises, had dramatically changed course and abandoned a longtime ally during the defining crisis of its independent existence?

AS NIXON AND KISSINGER had warned, the crisis in East Pakistan produced escalating Indian-Pakistani tensions, which culminated in war in December 1971. India, backed by a freshly signed Indo-Soviet friendship treaty with military clauses and an active Soviet supply line, crushed Pakistani forces in East Pakistan and recognized Bangladesh as an independent state. Pressing their advantage, top Indian officials considered objectives in West Pakistan including a total destruction of Pakistani military power and (as Bass himself notes) “other ways to crack up West Pakistan itself.”¹⁵ This outcome could have inaugurated an ominous precedent in international order—the destruction of a sovereign state by foreign military action—with consequences that would reverberate far beyond the immediate humanitarian crisis. If India succeeded, Kissinger warned during the crisis:

The result would be a nation of 100 million people dismembered, their political structure changed by military attack, despite a treaty of alliance with and private assurances by the United States. And all the other countries, on whom we have considered we could rely . . . would know that this has been done by the weight of Soviet arms and with Soviet diplomatic support. What will be the effect in the Middle East, for example—could we tell Israel that she should give up something along a line from A to B, in return for something else, with any plausibility?¹⁶

And how would China have reacted if Washington had stood by passively and watched Beijing’s chosen channel to the United States and longtime friend crushed by a combination of Indian military action and Soviet weapons? What then for Mao’s willingness to pursue the opening of U.S.-Chinese relations?

Seeking to deter such a destructive outcome, the United States deployed an aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal (where it was joined by a Soviet naval task force deployed from Vladivostok) and pushed for an immediate UN-backed cease-fire. With military aid to Pakistan frozen, the White House encouraged allies to make shows of force, including a back-channel proposal in which Iran and Jordan would transfer some of their own American-made fighter jets to the West Pakistan front. Bass expresses indignation at this proposal, suggesting that it was undertaken to assist in the repression of civilians in East Pakistan. He fails to explain that the discussion involved transferring jets to West Pakistan during a war in which India was considering a drive for total victory and an all-out destruction of the Pakistani armed forces. In any case, it is not apparent what military role, if any, the planes played in the conflict.¹⁷ In Bass’s view, these actions constituted a perverse betrayal of democratic principles by Nixon and Kissinger—American participation in “Kissinger’s secret onslaught” and an “arsenal against democracy” that drove India into the arms of the Soviet Union and “enduringly alienat[ed] not just Indira Gandhi . . . but a whole democratic society.”¹⁸ But this insults the sophistication and agency of the main Indian players, in addition to misrepresenting the actual sequence of events.

Scholars will long marvel at how the world’s two largest democracies ended up on opposite sides of the Cold War. Yet their rift was growing well before the 1971 Pakistan crisis, and it transcended Richard Nixon and Indira Gandhi’s mutual personal dislike. Negotiations over the Indo-Soviet friendship treaty had begun by March 1969, when the Soviet defense minister brought a draft treaty text to New Delhi. A draft text was ready by mid-1970, though by some Indian accounts its signing was postponed pending the Indian election. According to one Indian participant in the negotiations, all that remained to be negotiated at this point was the final wording of the decisive military clause.¹⁹

The 1971 crisis did strain U.S.-Indian relations—yet this was largely because Washington and New Delhi had incompatible strategic aspirations. Washington increasingly accepted that East Pakistan would become autonomous or independent, but opposed an outcome in which this was achieved through a regional war or with Soviet arms. India, pursuing a sophisticated blend of humanitarian impulses and Machiavellian calculation, opted almost immediately for a military solution. As Bass himself notes, “On March 2, over three weeks before Yahya launched his slaughter, [Indira] Gandhi ordered her best and brightest . . . to evaluate ‘giving help to Bangla Desh’ and the possibility of recognizing ‘an independent Bangla Desh.’” Bengali partisans, she assessed, would need aircraft for “quick movement inside India around the borders of Bangla Desh” and “arms and ammunition (including L[ight] M[achine] G[un]s, M[edium] M[achine] G[uns] and Mortars”—in other words, Indian military support for a cross-border separatist insurgency.²⁰ At the beginning of April 1971, Indira Gandhi reportedly told her cabinet that “we don’t mind a war” and ordered the Indian army to prepare for an invasion of East Pakistan. According to one high-ranking Indian officer quoted by Bass, she ordered them to “move in” immediately. When the army balked at invading a flood plain on the eve of a monsoon, a compromise solution was reached: Indian conventional forces would prepare to enter East Pakistan around “the fifteenth of November,” and in the meantime India would provide Bengali separatists with “material assistance” and “training in guerilla tactics, to prepare for a long struggle.”²¹ Bengali guerilla units—organized, trained and armed by India—operated from border sanctuaries throughout the summer and fall, backed up by occasional Indian firepower and at least one cross-border Indian raid.²²

The United States—including Kissinger, in his trip to New Delhi in July 1971, and Nixon, during his November summit with Indira Gandhi—pressed India to refrain from provocations on the border and argued that war would be best avoided if all parties committed to a peaceful political track. India, convinced that it had both a moral obligation and a historic strategic opportunity to act, denied its covert assistance to the Bengali insurgency and insisted that the problem was Pakistan’s to solve. Indira Gandhi refused American requests to send U.S. or UN observers to help administer refugee aid (in retrospect, most likely because two ambitious Indian programs were proceeding simultaneously among the refugee population—one humanitarian and the other covert).