Centenarian Henry Kissinger demonstrated his remarkable physical and intellectual vigor when he met in Beijing last week with Xi Jinping, who simultaneously declined a meeting with the visiting John Kerry, President Biden’s climate change czar. Xi praised Kissinger’s “insightful” part in establishing U.S.-China relations and hoped he would “continue to play a constructive role.”
It was the latest in a series of over 100 such Kissinger trips since 1971, when he helped pave the way for President Nixon’s own historic visit the following year — what Nixon proclaimed as “the week that changed the world.”
That it did, but not in ways that Nixon and most of his successors expected — though not Kissinger, who has never expressed genuine interest in tempering China’s anti-Western hostility or moderating its domestic repression.
Nixon had laid out his vision for U.S.-China relations in his 1967 Foreign Affairs article anticipating his 1968 run for the presidency. Known for his strong anti-communist stance, Nixon recounted Beijing’s history of vitriolic hostility to the West, culminating in Beijing joining North Korea’s invasion of South Korea and its support for “wars of national liberation” throughout Africa and Asia, most notably in Vietnam.
“Red China [has become] Asia’s most immediate threat,” he said. “The world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus our aim … should be to induce change … to persuade China that it must change: that it cannot satisfy its imperial ambitions, and that its own national interest requires a turning away from foreign adventuring.”
Enter Kissinger, whom Nixon appointed his national security adviser. In his writings and teachings at Harvard, Kissinger focused on nuclear policy and European diplomatic history and security issues. China was not an area of his interest in his undergraduate lectures or his graduate national security seminar. But when Nixon began his project to “open China to the world and open the world to China,” Kissinger jumped at the chance to be part of such a historic event, former aide Winston Lord told a Wilson Center audience in 2018.
Kissinger’s China career started in 1971-1972 when he negotiated the Shanghai Communique, the original sin of U.S.-China relations. The most contentious issue between Beijing and Washington was the status of Taiwan, and Kissinger adopted some early State Department language to finesse it. The U.S. said it “acknowledges [and] does not challenge” China’s position that Taiwan is part of China.
China asserted the right and intent to continue intervening in the Vietnam War where its forces participated in the killing of Americans, South Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. The U.S. side said, “In the absence of a negotiated settlement the United States envisages the ultimate withdrawal of all US forces from the region consistent with the aim of self-determination for each country of Indochina.”
Washington also agreed to curtail its support for the Taiwanese to defend their territorial integrity and independent identity by withdrawing its forces from Taiwan, but China never reciprocated by enabling America’s “graceful exit” from Vietnam.
For the next 50 years, China hewed to the line that the Communique term “acknowledged” meant the U.S. agreedthat Taiwan is part of China, and Kissinger never uttered a word of correction or clarification. He left it to successive U.S. administrations to struggle with explaining the difference between Beijing’s “one China principle” — that there is only one China and Taiwan is part of it — and Washington’s “one China policy” — that there is only one China and Taiwan’s status is still undetermined.
Nor has Kissinger publicly objected to China’s repeated assertions of a “right” to use force to subjugate Taiwan, enshrined in the 2005 Anti-Secession Law on which Kissinger was silent — despite the 1972 Communique’s statement of U.S. “interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question.”
According to his own account in “On China,” when Mao Zedong said he could wait “even 100 years” to take Taiwan, Kissinger quipped he was “surprised China would wait that long.” In 2007, at the Asia Society, Kissinger warned Taiwan that “China will not wait forever.” Nor has he ever questioned China’s repeated military exercises and forays directed at Taiwan.
While the rest of the world condemned the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Kissinger opined that no national leader would allow its capital city to be taken over by demonstrators.
Nixon saw developments differently. In 1994, looking back at his historic opening to China, he rued, “We may have created a Frankenstein[’s monster.]” It was an admission that, despite his benign intentions toward China, the fear he expressed in his 1967 article was being realized: “We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.”
China under communist rule, despite five decades of generous Western engagement welcoming it into the family of nations, has not fundamentally changed. Kissinger, with his realpolitik perspective, never expected it to, noting that China is disinclined to accept “an international order it had no part in creating.” The nuance ignores the historical fact that the Chinese government, before the communists, had intimately participated in the creation of the post-World War II order. Beijing presumes to select the parts of China’s legacy it will honor or invent, and Kissinger has no problem with that.
But, Taiwan has changed, from the once-authoritarian Chiang Kai-shek regime to a flourishing democracy, and the Taiwanese people have no intention of returning to dictatorship, whether communist or anti-communist. Unlike Kissinger, Nixon recognized the new reality. He wrote in 1994 in “Beyond Peace”that China and Taiwan are now “permanently separated politically.”
To ensure that historians will judge his record as kindly as Xi presently does for the wrong reasons, Kissinger should at least acknowledge the redeeming truth Nixon recognized in Taiwan’s permanent democratic identity. He should demonstrate that enlightened vision by making his first visit to Taiwan and honoring its dedication to democracy.
Such a revelation, though very late, will be good for cross-Strait stability, threatened by four decades of Kissingerian engagement/accommodation policies. It will be good for the cause of change in China that Nixon set out to accomplish and tasked Kissinger to prepare for. And, given the teaching of Kissinger’s Harvard mentor, the late William Yandell Elliott, that all international relations is fundamentally a struggle between good and evil, it will be good for Kissinger’s soul. His road to Damascus goes through Taipei.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA