Nixon was right to gamble on China, despite what many in Washington think today
- Critics in Washington who blame the US policy of engagement for aiding the rise of a geopolitical threat have conveniently forgotten the economic and geopolitical benefits the US itself gained
- Nobody could have foreseen the extent of the Chinese economic miracle that materialised, nor China’s expansionist shift today
In their revisionist narrative, it was Nixon’s meeting with Communist Party of China chairman Mao Zedong, and the policy of engagement it initiated, that helped make China an economic superpower and a geopolitical threat to America.
For these critics, the Nixon visit, far from being a stroke of diplomatic genius, was one of history’s greatest strategic blunders.
But such revisionist arguments discount the substantial benefits the United States gained from Nixon’s gambit and the decades of US-China engagement that followed.
Engagement with China also yielded longer-term geopolitical and economic dividends for the US. Regional tensions in East Asia eased dramatically, mitigating the Chinese threat to vital US interests there, while the US-China quasi-alliance against the Soviet Union in the 1980s contributed to America’s victory in the Cold War.
On the economic front, lower-priced imports from China helped to contain US inflation, while US exports to China grew rapidly and American corporations extended their reach into the country’s domestic market.
Although competition from Chinese imports led to the loss of US manufacturing jobs, it is difficult to argue credibly that the US has not reaped economic benefits from its engagement policy.
Echoes of the past in the uncertain future of China-US ties
Nobody, least of all Nixon or Mao, could have foreseen the Chinese economic miracle that was to materialise in the decades after their fateful encounter.
At the time of Nixon’s visit, Deng was in the political wilderness. It was Mao’s death in 1976 and Deng’s subsequent political rehabilitation and elevation that altered the course of Chinese history.
Only the intervention of president George H.W. Bush, who had served as the second US envoy to China from 1974 to 1975, saved the policy, at the cost being criticised for kowtowing to the “butchers of Beijing”.
Nixon’s legacy was imperilled again in 2001, when the neoconservatives who held sway in president George W. Bush’s administration decided that a fast-growing China posed a geopolitical threat and must be confronted. But 9/11 intervened before they could implement a new policy of containment.
For reasons that remain elusive, the same neocons switched strategic focus and invaded Iraq in 2003, trapping the US in the Middle East quagmire for more than a decade.
But China’s assertiveness and expansionism under President Xi Jinping has made sustaining this approach impossible. Nonetheless, a policy that helped produce 40 years of peace, prosperity and stability between two former staunch foes must be considered a resounding success.