It is hard to imagine Nixon or Kissinger sending signals to China of a U.S. initiatives to begin normalization, and ironically an almost dead certainty that any substantive relationship would elude the U.S. Nixon’s first year in office was marked by uncertainty at how China would respond to U.S. government should try to make contact and eventually normalize relations with China in hopes of a friendlier post-Mao generation of leadership. Resigned to the fact that China would inevitably emerge from isolation and that this opening would be a long process, Nixon decided that the U.S. In spite of this double threat, Nixon resolved to reach out to the Chinese as the lesser of two possible evils. feared Soviet hegemony in Asia while at the same time feared the Chinese communist influence on its neighbors. to reexamine its relationships with allies and enemies. military forces in Asia, which forced the U.S.
The broad transition strategy from American hegemony to a multipolar community required retrenchment of U.S. When the Nixon administration began in 1969, Nixon and Kissinger believed the Soviet Union had rough nuclear parity with the U.S. In light of these problems, Nixon particularly pinpointed China policy as needing reevaluation and prodded Kissinger to read his Foreign Affairs article that laid out his line of thought.
security, such as reviving the NATO alliance, the Middle East, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Nixon spoke of his determination to avoid Lyndon Johnson’s pitfall of focusing on short-term problems like the Vietnam quagmire and instead concentrate on future threats to U.S. After winning the presidential election in 1968, Nixon met with Kissinger on November 25. Nixon carried this logic into his presidency, which pertained not only to China, but also to a whole host of long-term regional stability issues in U.S. He took a similar line in his famous Foreign Affairs article, titled “Asia After Vietnam,” where he painted the dangers of a billion Chinese living in “angry isolation” and the urgency of making China a responsible member of the world. Nixon predicted to Ceausescu that within twenty years, if China remained secluded, world peace would be at stake. could do little to establish effective communications with China until the Vietnam war was ended.” In spite of this, he maintained the necessity of bringing China out of isolation and into the international community for the sake of stability in an increasingly multipolar world. During Nixon’s 1967 worldwide trips, he expressed to Romanian Communist Party’s Secretary General Nicolae Ceauşescu that “the U.S. China policy, but China’s isolationism and Mao Zedong’s ideological regime dampened any expectation that this change would come soon. retrenched militarily.Įven before taking office, Nixon had a desire for change in U.S. Moreover, as Sino-Soviet clashes heightened and revealed deeper division than previously known, China’s role in an emerging triangular diplomacy centered on preventing Soviet turbulent expansion into Asia as the U.S. This paper proposes that Nixon and Kissinger sought rapprochement with China primarily as a means for long-term stability in Asia. However, unwarranted emphasis on triangular diplomacy in the study of U.S.-China rapprochement has lent misleading weight to the “China card” perspective at the expense of recognizing Nixon’s concern for Asia in a post-Mao era. It cannot be denied that Nixon and Kissinger used China to pressure the Soviet Union to concede in other trouble areas of foreign policy, especially in the Vietnam War. diplomatic triangle to pry concessions from the Soviet Union. Was rapprochement used to exploit Sino-Soviet hostilities for immediate gain? Or, was the birth of rapprochement the result of visionary leadership seeing the future importance of China for Asian stability? Henry Kissinger described Nixon’s motives for an opening to China as a means to “squeeze the Soviet Union into short-term help on Vietnam.” Others charge Kissinger for crudely playing the China card in an emerging Sino-Soviet-U.S. When Richard Nixon took office the Chinese Cultural Revolution’s self-imposed isolation was still underway and there was little expectation of foreseeable improvements in U.S.-Sino relations.
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