Half century on, US hawks revive criticism of China normalization
WASHINGTON: For half a century, Richard Nixon’s opening to communist China has been viewed by many Americans as a diplomatic masterstroke, with successive presidents of both parties following his course.
US hawks have now revived an alternative view — that normalization was a mistake that, in the view of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, set the stage for an aggressive China and soaring tensions between Washington and Beijing.
It all began in 1971 with secret trips to Beijing by Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security advisor.
Nixon stunned the world when he announced his own 1972 visit to China to see supremo Mao Zedong. This time the trip was anything but quiet, with the pageantry broadcast back home to US television viewers in an election year.
Nixon had built his career as a staunch hardliner on communism, leading to what became a US political axiom that only Nixon could establish relations with communist China.
Ending ‘old paradigm’
Pompeo last week delivered a rebuke — all the more stinging as he spoke at the Nixon library and museum in southern California where the Republican president is buried.
“President Nixon once said he feared he had created a Frankenstein by opening the world to the CCP, and here we are,” Pompeo said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
“The old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done,” Pompeo said.
Calling for a “new alliance of democracies,” Pompeo said that Chinese President Xi Jinping “is not destined to tyrannize inside and outside of China forever, unless we allow it.”
Stapleton Roy, who took part in the secret negotiations in the 1970s before becoming US ambassador to China two decades later, said that Pompeo’s “old paradigm” was never the basis for US policymakers.
“It is historically inaccurate to say that the US policy of engagement with China was based on a naive expectation that China was bound to liberalize politically,” said Roy, who later headed the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States.
According to Roy, Nixon and Kissinger were “totally pragmatic” in their objectives with China.