Fifty years after Nixon’s historic opening, China is still hostile and much more powerful

As the United States and China prepare to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s historic opening to China, it is fair to ask which country’s expectations were more fully met by the decades of Sino-U.S. engagement that followed.

The negotiations were carried out by what might be called “The Gang of Four Realists”: Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, on the U.S. side, and Communist Party Chairman and Paramount Leader Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai for China.

The stakes hardly could be higher, or the primary adversaries more entrenched in their views.  Nixon had been an ardent, lifelong anti-communist from his World War II years as a U.S. Navy officer in the Pacific, his service in the U.S. Senate, and as vice president under President Dwight Eisenhower. Mao was victorious in China’s civil war, defeating the nationalist government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, an ally of the West. 

Mao harbored a visceral hatred of America and the international order it led and sponsored “wars of national liberation” throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. China sent almost 2 million soldiers to join North Korea’s invasion of South Korea (for which both communist countries were labeled as aggressors by the United Nations). It also poured $2 billion in arms and support, as well as 310,000 Chinese troops, to assist Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam’s protracted invasion of South Vietnam and conquest of Laos and Cambodia. Domestically, Mao’s Great Leap Forward caused the death of up to 65 million Chinese.

Yet, in the eight years since he had lost the presidency to John Kennedy (after declining to pursue credible evidence of voter fraud in Illinois because it would undermine American credibility against foreign threats), Nixon had thought deeply about the need to change the U.S.-China dynamic. He stated his new insights in a seminal article in Foreign Affairs in 1967. As he put it, in the parlance of the day: “Red China [has become] Asia’s most immediate threat. … The world cannot be safe until China changes. … [W]e simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.”

As president, Nixon was predisposed to exploit the growing hostility between the Soviet Union and China. Through diplomatic channels, he made it clear to Moscow and Beijing that the United States would not stand by idly if the Soviets threatened China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. It was an unprecedented security guarantee to an erstwhile enemy and opened the door to possible U.S.-China rapprochement. Kissinger wrote approvingly about Nixon’s strategy: “It marked America’s return to the world of Realpolitik.” 

Nixon hoped his moves would lead to what he had called for in his 1967 article — a process of “dynamic detoxification [to] draw off the poison from the ‘Thoughts of Mao.’” Nixon also deeply wanted Beijing’s help in extricating America from the war in Vietnam. But, as Kissinger wrote, “China would discuss no other subject until the United States agreed to withdraw from Taiwan, and the United States would not talk about withdrawing from Taiwan until China renounced the use of force to solve the Taiwan question.” 

When Nixon designated Kissinger as his surrogate in preliminary negotiations, he cautioned him, “We cannot be too forthcoming in terms of what America will do. We’ll withdraw [from Taiwan], and we’ll do this, and that, and the other thing.” Yet, in the end, the two consummate realists did all those things — and they began implementing the concessions even before Nixon went to China.

Meanwhile, the expected Chinese help in arranging a graceful U.S. exit from Vietnam never materialized. As Kissinger ruefully observed, “We [Americans] like to pay in advance to show our good will, but in foreign policy you never get paid for services already rendered.”

Having already signaled Washington’s willingness to bend on Taiwan, Kissinger helped fashion the Shanghai Communique — the original sin of modern U.S.-China relations — where the two sides laid out their positions. China asserted that there is only one China and Taiwan is an “inalienable” part of it. This became known as Beijing’s “one China principle.” 

Since Chiang’s Nationalist Party on Taiwan took the same view — while claiming it was the rightful government of all of China — the U.S. side “acknowledged [and] did not challenge” the position, while “reaffirm[ing] its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.” This is called America’s “one China policy.”

Over the ensuing decades, the two positions became blurred, including by Kissinger himself, who warned Taiwan in 2007 to yield to Beijing’s demands because “China will not wait forever.”  (During their 1972 meeting, Mao had insisted China would use force to take Taiwan “even in a hundred years.” Kissinger quipped he was surprised China would wait that long.)

Nixon, instead, judged that events in both China and Taiwan had passed unification by. Likening the contending parties to a divorced couple, he wrote in 1994, “The situation has changed dramatically. … The separation is permanent politically, but they are in bed together economically.”

Given the developments of the past four decades, with a far more powerful Communist China under Xi Jinping still, in Nixon‘s words, “ nurtur[ing] its fantasies, cherish[ing] its hates and threaten[ing] its neighbors,” it is fair to conclude that their realists bested ours. Nixon came to the sad realization that “the week that changed the world” may have changed it for the worse. As he noted with regret in an interview with his former speechwriter, “We may have created a Frankenstein.”

The ultimate bitter irony is that the Communist China that America under Nixon saved from an attack by the Soviet Union is now aligned with a revanchist Russian leader intent on reconstituting that aggressive empire in pursuit of their joint objective of defeating the West. History may well judge Nixon’s opening to China, and Kissinger’s 50-year shepherding of that policy over eight U.S. administrations, as the most colossal diplomatic blunder in U.S. diplomatic history.

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 is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.