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
“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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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