Source:
https://scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3100553/how-trump-administration-has-misunderstood-lessons-nixon-kissinger
Comment/ Opinion

How the Trump administration has misunderstood the lessons of Nixon, Kissinger and the past 50 years of US-China diplomacy

  • Decades of China engagement failed, according to Pompeo, because China did not liberalise as US leaders had anticipated
  • However, Nixon’s opening to China in 1972 had nothing to do with spreading democracy or free enterprise but was entirely about gaining the upper hand over the Soviets in the Cold War
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library on July 23. Photo: Reuters

With the party conventions over and the debates between Democratic nominee Joe Biden and incumbent Republican president Donald Trump looming, the 2020 US presidential campaign is about to enter its critical final stage. In light of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump and the Republican Party have sought to cast blame on China for the unprecedented crisis that has cost over 180,000 American lives, and millions more their jobs and economic security.

“Making China pay” has become a Republican rally cry for not only the presidential race, but the congressional races as well. Trump and his administration have gone as far as to recast the last 50 years of Sino-American relations as misguided.

China has been used as a political issue before – from the “who lost China” debate in the 1950s to Bill Clinton’s criticism of George H.W. Bush’s response to Tiananmen in the 1992 election. But, this time, Trump and his officials are going further.

In a speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in July, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke critically of the US-China rapprochement 50 years after Nixon’s historic opening in 1972. Pompeo was careful not to malign Nixon at his namesake library but noted that the world was “much different” then.

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“We imagined engagement with China would produce a future with bright promise of comity and cooperation,” he said, but this did not come to fruition. The engagement strategy failed, according to Pompeo, because China did not liberalise as US presidents had anticipated.

Pompeo is wrong on both points. Before the US casts off the last 50 years of China engagement as a loss, it is important to look back at the justification for Nixon’s opening to China: it was entirely about gaining the upper hand in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. As Henry Kissinger described in his 2011 book On China, Nixon “had not come to China to convert its leaders to American principles of democracy or free enterprise – judging it to be useless”.

The US-China relationship in the 1970s was bound up with the shared threat of the Soviet Union. That is why it survived significant domestic crises in both countries: Watergate in the US and the death of Mao Zedong in China.

It was Jimmy Carter who saw normalisation of relations with China as a means to improve the quality of life of the Chinese themselves. The decision, however, was still motivated by the perception of the Soviet threat. This helped sway sceptics in the US into supporting normalisation, especially after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

Carter was correct that normalisation of relations would help the Chinese people; Deng Xiaoping launched economic reforms around the time normalisation was finalised in January 1979.

Chinese cooperation was, in fact, instrumental in the US covert action against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The increased trade and other ties between the US and China also helped hundreds of millions of Chinese escape poverty.

Another aspect of the Nixon and Carter eras is seemingly lost on Trump and Pompeo: the importance of having experienced hands guide diplomacy and foreign policy. Nixon and Carter both had that with Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, respectively.

While these figures leave large shoes that few secretaries of state or national security advisers could fill, Pompeo is in my opinion the worst to have held either position for some time. I am not alone in having so low an opinion of him. Pompeo is neither an intellectual nor a career diplomat.

He has politicised his office to such an extent that he appears to be little more than a global spokesperson for Trump’s whims. His constant berating of China and President Xi Jinping on cable news accomplishes nothing but further damage to already fraught US-China relations.

Pompeo’s diplomatic capabilities are further hampered by the lack of China experts informing him. Renowned scholars like John K. Fairbank and A. Doak Barnett once helped inform decision-making about China in Washington. Instead, Pompeo seems content to listen to dissenters with narrow views of China who only exacerbate his hawkish impulses.

When Trump and Pompeo dismiss the success of economic engagement with China, they fail to appreciate the enormity of this achievement. It is not only Trump and his administration who have forgotten this chapter in the US-China relationship. The Chinese have criticised the US for attempting to stop China’s rise without acknowledging the role the Americans played in it.

I am not saying that the US should be more sentimental or China more grateful. But, with US-China relations looking more tense by the day, it is important to remember what the two countries were able to accomplish when they worked together – even despite lasting differences.

This is an important point because, while the Soviet threat is gone, the US and China still have numerous shared enemies: climate change, terrorism, poverty, and the Covid-19 pandemic, to name a few. Just as Nixon and Mao – and Carter and Deng – were able to look past their differences, Trump and Xi would do well to remember that the US and China have much to gain through cooperation, and much more to lose through confrontation.

Chi Wang, a former head of the Chinese section of the US Library of Congress, is president of the US-China Policy Foundation