![]() Where will it end?’” The Russians were so alarmed that within days of Nixon’s announcement, they invited him to Moscow and restarted stalled nuclear arms talks.Īside from frightening Russia, Nixon had another near-term policy aim. When Nixon announced he would visit the PRC, the news hit the Kremlin “like a bolt from the blue,” according to Georgii Arbatov, an adviser to then-Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev.Īrbatov added: “My colleagues said, ‘America will be China’s ally when Nixon visits Beijing, anything could happen. That indeed it did, say historians of Nixon’s diplomacy and Russian officials of the time. Conservative leader Barry Goldwater was persuaded by Nixon to support the trip on grounds that a rapprochement with China would terrify Soviet Russia. His credentials as a Cold War warrior helped to quiet right-wing dissent inside the Republican Party to his outreach. In hindsight, Nixon did not have much to lose and a lot to gain by opening up relations with China. “By opening relations with China we would catch Russia's attention and get more leverage on them through playing this obvious, China card,” Winston Lord, a staffer on Nixon’s national security team, later noted. ![]() In a speech in Shanghai he talked enthusiastically about “what we will do in the years ahead to build a bridge across 16,000 miles and 22 years of hostilities which have divided us in the past.”īut the number one priority of the opening with China was to frighten the Soviet Union, which had fallen out Beijing. In many ways Western leaders are grappling now with the same dilemmas and challenges he faced, and like Nixon they are not coming up with any easy answers.įor all of Nixon’s soaring rhetoric during the trip about what rapprochement would mean for America and China in the future, he was focused mainly, in fact, on near-term policy goals. So is the West turning away from Nixon’s vision of China, closing an opening he created and now set on the path of reversing what he achieved? The answer is no. ![]() “In both the United States and Europe, the severity of the health and economic crisis driven by the pandemic has raised the stakes for policy on China and - especially in the UK, Germany, France and the wider EU - is tipping the balance towards those who advocate for a harder line on China,” says Leslie Vinjamuri of Britain’s Chatham House. Western powers fear Beijing is out to re-shape the liberal world order, subscribing to a growing view that not only does the Chinese Communist Party want to ensure its continued rule at home but to make China the number one global power. They cite a growing military assertiveness by China with Asian neighbors, a crackdown on the former British colony of Hong Kong, predatory lending practices seemingly aimed at catching countries in a manipulative debt trap, and weaponizing commerce. It has given added impetus to an increasingly shared narrative in the US and in other Western democracies that China cannot be trusted, the result of a series of aggressive policy moves by Beijing, say Western officials. The coronavirus pandemic has triggered, say analysts, the start of an historic decoupling of the world’s two leading economies, America and China. Nixon with Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, and States Secretary of State Alexander Haig, walking in rose garden of the White House in Washington, June 6, 1973.įorty-eight years on, America and China are embarking on another perilous voyage, filled possibly with even greater uncertainty than encountered in the 1970s. Haig was taken aback when Kissinger left the Oval Office one day and told him, “Al, this fellow wants to open relations with China.” Haig responded: “Not a cold war warrior like Nixon.” To which Kissinger retorted, “I think he has lost control of his senses.”įILE - President Richard M. leader had shocked the world a few months before the trip by announcing his intention of undertaking one, a plan that surprised many in the White House, too, including Alexander Haig, one of Nixon’s advisers. Reminiscing later about the visit, Nixon said: “We were embarking on a voyage of philosophical discovery as uncertain, and in some ways as perilous as the voyages of geographical discovery of an earlier time.” ![]() “The week that changed the world,” was how Nixon dubbed his bold trip, which was pulled off after months of secret negotiations conducted by his then-National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger. In 1972 US President Richard Nixon visited the People’s Republic of China, ending years of estrangement between the two countries and lifting the bamboo curtain China had been hidden behind since Mao Zedong launched his Cultural Revolution in 1966.
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