Tag Archive for: Richard Nixon

Nixon was right to gamble on China

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With China currently the only country capable of unseating America as the leading global power, many in Washington may wish that US President Richard Nixon had never made his historic trip to China 50 years ago this week. In their revisionist narrative, it was Nixon’s meeting with Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, and the policy of engagement it initiated, that helped make China an economic superpower and a geopolitical threat to America. For these critics, the Nixon visit, far from being a stroke of diplomatic genius, was one of history’s greatest strategic blunders.

But such revisionist arguments discount the substantial benefits the United States gained from Nixon’s gambit and the decades of US–China engagement that followed. Although China didn’t directly assist the US, Nixon’s visit shifted the perceived Cold War balance of power and influenced the strategic calculations of both the Soviet Union and North Vietnam, resulting in immediate US gains. America and the Soviet Union signed the first nuclear arms control treaty (SALT I) in May 1972, and the US extricated itself from Vietnam a year later.

Engagement with China also yielded significant longer-term geopolitical and economic dividends for the US. Regional tensions in East Asia eased dramatically, mitigating the Chinese threat to vital US interests there, while the US–China quasi-alliance against the Soviet Union in the 1980s contributed to America’s victory in the Cold War.

On the economic front, lower-priced imports from China helped to contain US inflation, while US exports to China grew rapidly and American corporations extended their reach into the country’s domestic market. Although competition from Chinese imports led to the loss of US manufacturing jobs, it’s difficult to argue credibly that the US hasn’t reaped economic benefits from its engagement policy.

To be sure, China has gained substantially more than the US in economic terms from the bilateral relationship. But that was mainly due to the process of reform and opening launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Nobody, least of all Nixon or Mao, could have foreseen the Chinese economic miracle that was to materialise in the decades after their fateful encounter. At the time of Nixon’s visit, Deng was in the political wilderness, performing menial labour in Jiangxi province. It was Mao’s death in 1976 and Deng’s subsequent political rehabilitation and elevation that altered the course of Chinese history.

If the Nixon–Mao meeting made any difference in terms of China’s rise, it was by saving Deng the trouble of having to start from scratch in normalising relations with the US. Without the Sino-American rapprochement that Nixon and Mao engineered (mainly to counter the shared Soviet threat), Deng would have needed more time and effort to persuade the West to embrace China, which had been a pariah state before 1972.

Revisionists also seem to forget that the US–China relationship forged by Nixon rested on fragile foundations, and that America’s engagement policy was in constant danger of being derailed by actions or events in both countries. Deng himself nearly brought US–China engagement to an end when he crushed the peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Only the intervention of President George H.W. Bush, who had served as the second US envoy to China from 1974 to 1975, saved the policy, at the cost of being criticised for kowtowing to the ‘butchers of Beijing’.

Nixon’s legacy was imperilled again in 2001, when the neo-conservatives who held sway in President George W. Bush’s administration decided that a fast-growing China posed a geopolitical threat and must be confronted. But 9/11 intervened before they could implement a new policy of containment. For reasons that remain elusive, the same neo-cons switched strategic focus and invaded Iraq in 2003, trapping the US in the Middle East quagmire for more than a decade.

Despite the volatility in US–China relations, the engagement policy crafted by Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, served the interests of both countries until about a decade ago. But China’s assertiveness and expansionism under President Xi Jinping has made sustaining that approach impossible. Nonetheless, a policy that helped produce 40 years of peace, prosperity and stability between two former staunch foes must be considered a resounding success.

With the US and its allies now facing an unfriendly China, it’s tempting to imagine repeating Nixon’s gambit, this time with an ironic twist. Specifically, some commentators in Washington think that the US should do a ‘reverse Nixon’ and try to pry Russian President Vladimir Putin from Xi’s embrace.

Unfortunately, those advocating such a strategy overlook a crucial difference with the Nixon era. The concession that Putin seems to be demanding, now with the threat of war in Ukraine, is a fundamental revision of the post–Cold War settlement in Europe. Few Western leaders, including US President Joe Biden, appear willing to accept such a price in return for weaker Sino-Russian ties.

Likewise, revisionists appear to have forgotten that, other than risking a domestic political backlash (which never occurred), Nixon didn’t have to make any real, let alone painful, concessions to China (the Taiwan issue was shelved with the help of linguistic legerdemain). Fifty years on, his visit to Beijing remains, as Americans would say, a geopolitical no-brainer.

US–China relations: Nixon and Mao, 50 years on

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Fifty years ago this week, US President Richard Nixon visited the People’s Republic of China and met with Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong. Nixon was the first president of the United States ever to visit China.

At the time, the US and China both needed an ally against the aggressive Soviet Union. Nixon also wanted Mao’s support for exiting the Vietnam War. And after decades of internal turmoil, Mao needed American technology to help reconstruct China.

The two heads of state met for just over an hour. However, the meeting changed the course of history, helped to accelerate China’s opening and laid the foundation for their countries’ future relationship. Nixon considered opening relations with China his greatest achievement and called his visit ‘the week that changed the world’. But even the strategically experienced Nixon could not have imagined how dramatically the world would change.

Following its establishment in 1949, for two decades China was internationally isolated, poor and ravaged by internal struggles. The Sino-Soviet rift in 1960 paved the way for an opening with the US. The turning point came in 1971, when the UN General Assembly approved the People’s Republic as China’s sole representative in the world body, in the process ousting Taiwan.

Having had no formal relations for two decades, the two countries’ first steps were tentative. Pakistan, which enjoyed good relations with both, proved the most practical channel. In October 1970, Pakistan’s President Yahya Khan conveyed to Premier Zhou Enlai a message from Nixon that the US wanted to normalise relations.

This was followed by ‘ping-pong diplomacy’, the much-publicised visit of the US table tennis team to China in April 1971, and national security adviser Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing in July.

Nixon’s visit to China followed, on 21–28 February 1972. Nixon was assisted by the legendary Kissinger, and Mao by the urbane Zhou.

The meeting with Mao was held on the first day, in the chairman’s study. Kissinger describes the discussion as wide-ranging, including building relations, Taiwan, and a US withdrawal from Vietnam. Mao left Nixon and Zhou to work out the details. That time there was no second meeting, apparently due to Mao’s poor health.

The visit resulted in the Shanghai Communiqué in which the US recognised the one-China policy. The visit had repercussions around the world. America’s Asian allies were concerned, since most had defence agreements with the US. Taiwan was worried about its special status, and Tokyo went into shokku. The greatest shock, however, was in Moscow, which had warned the US not to take advantage of the Sino-Soviet split, and quickly agreed to a bilateral summit with Washington.

According to the Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, Nixon wanted to bring stability to Asia. Kissinger goes a step further, suggesting that Nixon wanted a more peaceful world order.

Once Deng Xiaoping in 1978 announced that China would open its economy, the West expected broader change. The assumption was that growth would bring affluence, and that China’s middle class would expand, increasing pressure for democracy. Gradually—so the optimists thought—China would join the rules-based international order.

Initially, change was in the air. Beijing joined the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and set up special economic zones, and foreign funds started to flow. For two decades, Washington used democratisation to justify its support for China’s economy. From 1980, the US annually granted China most-favoured-nation status, and few restrictions were placed on technology transfers.

However, two events intervened: the violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. The Tiananmen incident led to the ousting of the reform-minded CCP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, with power shifting to Premier Li Peng’s hardline conservatives. Economic reforms stalled.

The collapse of the Soviet Union deeply shocked the CCP and led to a thorough-going internal review. To avoid a similar fate, the party reformed its structures and strengthened internal discipline. Its plans are currently implemented by 95 million carefully selected cadres.

Within two years of Tiananmen, President George H.W. Bush once again granted China MFN status, and in 2001 China was let into the World Trade Organization.

If Nixon and his successors had in a crystal ball seen China’s rapid emergence as a rival superpower, would they have supported China as openly as they did?

University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer has long criticised American support for China. He wonders why four presidents, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, all proactively helped to strengthen China, although this was at odds with the United States’ natural geopolitical interest of retaining its position as the world’s leading superpower.

Of the four key participants in the Nixon–Mao meeting, only the 98-year-old Kissinger is still alive. According to him, in 1972 Nixon could not have imagined a world in which the Soviet Union had collapsed, China had risen to its present stature, and the US and China were on the brink of a new kind of cold war.

In a 2021 speech at the McCain Institute, Kissinger warned of the apocalyptic risks facing the world if war were to erupt between the US and China. The American and Chinese military arsenals are far more destructive now than those of the Cold War, in particular given the role of artificial intelligence. And China is affluent, which the Soviet Union never was.

Fifty years on, this sounds almost like an admission from Kissinger that he helped Nixon to open Pandora’s box.