My Take | Kissinger insight missing in big picture over Taiwan
- Nixon and Kissinger had started a good thing going for America over China, but now, their successors want to throw it all away for short-term advantages or purposes which are unclear even to themselves
I love reading the one-on-one conversations between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. We have all become the proverbial fly on the wall inside the Nixon White House over the years, thanks to a steady stream of releases from public records, official investigations, freedom of information requests and their own memoirs and biographies.
They range from ugly outbursts and obsequious ingratiation worthy of the worst of America’s daytime soap operas to uncommon political wisdom on par with Machiavelli, Bismarck and Thucydides – Western realpolitik in action.
This one I am about to quote you is highly relevant today with so much tension across the Taiwan Strait threatening war. You ask: whose fault is that? And you may answer, it’s mainland China, the United States or Taiwan, or all of the above?
Kissinger already answered that question half a century ago: it’s the wrong question, especially if you are trying to defend America’s national interests. That was in 1972, when Nixon and Kissinger, and Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were working out rapprochement between their two countries, which has come to define and maintain peaceful Chinese-US relations, at least until recently.
He told Nixon: “I think in 20 years your successor, if he’s as wise as you, will wind up leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese. For the next 15 years we have to lean towards the Chinese against the Russians. We have to play this balance of power game totally unemotionally. Right now, we need the Chinese to correct the Russians and to discipline the Russians.”