My Take | Poor Nixon must be rolling in his grave
- Mutual engagement between China and the US remains the only sane option today, something that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is dangerously trying to undermine
In the early days of the Cold War, during a period of anti-communist hysteria in the United States, a big policy blame game was: “Who lost China?”
Nowadays, though, it’s: “Who created China, the Frankenstein monster?” Of course, China was not for the United States or the West to lose or create. But that didn’t stop US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from delivering a speech that was billed as an epochal change in policy on China, by calling for the “monster” to be slain.
Ironically, this most undiplomatic diplomat wasn’t being rude only to the Chinese, but to his own people, the US foreign policy establishment. Let’s recall the occasion or rather the location where he made his speech – the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in California.
Pompeo tried to repudiate the foreign policy achievement of the late president’s rapprochement with China and called into doubt everything that followed it over a half-century.
He asked rhetorically and we know his answers: “What do the American people have to show now 50 years on from engagement with China? Did the theories of our leaders that proposed a Chinese evolution towards freedom and democracy prove to be true?
“The old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done.”
Nixon must have rolled in his grave. Nixon and Henry Kissinger weren’t concerned about something as futile as “regime change” in China. They wanted to exploit the antagonism between Moscow and Beijing, and get China’s help to restrain Russian and Vietnamese “aggression”.