MacMillan, Margaret. Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2007.
On February 17, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon, First Lady Pat Nixon, and a brigade sized group of administration and press officials departed Washington, D.C. More than a of Beijing to meet with Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou in the Forbidden City, Nixon’s trip represented the start of passing one thousand years of a world dominated by Atlantic powers to that mass of humanity in Asia destined to outnumber all others. In the early 21st Century, the strategic destiny within the grasp of Asia, based on physical geography, potential Gross National Product (GNP), and demography already surpass old Europe. The US to continue its destiny must better understand how this happened. It really does start, as the author of Nixon and Mao says, with The Week that Changed the World.
Margaret MacMillan’s new book on the diplomacy around the trip presents a nicely done history entirely accessible to willing readers. She explains well how this moment in history began, in a non-chronological format, with the events and people involved before and during Nixon’s trip. These all mesh quite well. Revealing in foreshadow within the text, the author explains the unique circumstances that began the shift in the balance of East-West power governing this world today. This book can inform and entertain the junkies and the scholars alike. MacMillan’s book, though, has very few glaring editorial shortcomings. But none of these delete her authority as an historian or as a writer So, instead of ridiculing fine points and misdemeanors of authorship, it is far better to examine the context of the subject of “Only Nixon could go to China.”
Nixon’s trip to China–the great reopening of a Communist tyranny to the trade, ideas, and investment of the United States–completely changed the rules of the game of the Cold War, then in a period of detente, or warming relationships between the US and the Soviet Union. Nixon’s efforts to relink China to the US via very personal diplomacy took place 23 years following the Communist victory in 1949 during the Chinese civil war. Having fought a hot, costly, tough war of limited political goals against the “Red Chinese” in Korea from 1950-1953, Communist China and America had no diplomatic relations or economic engagement in the intervening years. This bipartisan consensus happened after almost two centuries of trade between the two, immigration to America, and missionary work in and diplomatic support for China.
With the fall of US allies in the Chinese Quomidang Party, China became a close ally in Soviet Union’s perceived “global revolution” against capitalist democracies in the West. After receiving enough economic aid and even technical help from the Soviet Union to build nuclear weapons, the Soviet and Chine split apart in 1959-61. Chinese leader Chairman Mao Zedong suffered paranoid persecutions of opponent’s and foreign agents within his country and government. In his ruthless understanding that political power comes out of the barrel of a gun, Mao feared a Soviet inspired attempt to overthrow him. In 1969, Chinese and Soviet troops fought rather large-scale “border disputes” at two different points on the map.
The US suffered its own problems. Having entered in 1954, and then escalated its war against Communism in Vietnam beginning in 1961, by the time of Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969, US options for military victory in Southeast Asia were spent. The public would no longer tolerate anything other than the beginning of disengagement. Nixon campaigned and won office on a “secret plan” to end the war. No such plan existed until it formed during Nixon’s first term. It involved a secretive, intricate, creative, ultra-complex diplomacy combined with the use of force that resulted in the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January of 1973
Negotiating by “linkage” for trades of favors with the Soviet Union, on a range of economic issues (subsidized grain), military issues (Anti-Ballistic Missile Defenses), and political issues (Helsinki treaty process), Nixon demanded cooperation with the Soviet Union in ending Vietnam.
Coming from the realist school in international relations, the ideas dictated by national interest and the balance of powers between nations, Nixon, took a gamble despite risk of failure. Why? To improve, via diplomacy, the US position in the world, weakened by war. In such a way the US could isolate North Vietnam. Nixon faced opposition from his own party base for going. Long the most visible opponent to Communism in US politics, he had gone to China because Russia and China feared each other; so it was better to be closer to either of them than they were to the other. This is a lesson the US is losing in the present.
With all of its weight in human flesh, China then, as it is now, is far too large to ignore or underestimate. With such a brilliant insight into foreign policy, Nixon understood all of this long before he took office. In the end, he merely did the inevitable when it best served US national interest. China had and still has the requirements for a strategic destiny to be a major world power. It held such status in its “half of the world” from ancient times to the European Renaissance. Like the US and needs to maintain, China has the geographical advantages, economic potential, and human capital to govern its own fate. Will the US govern hers?.