Nixon went to China and what the 1972 trip teaches about hard bargaining

Only Nixon could go to China. A Vulcan character says so in a 1991 science-fiction movie, calling it an old Vulcan proverb, and the audience laughs because they know the joke, which has outlived the movie and become a piece of political shorthand. It means that sometimes only the person nobody can accuse of softness is able to make the hard, unpopular deal. A hawk can sign a treaty a dove could never sell. A tax-cutter can raise a tax. A man who built his career by attacking communists can sit down with Mao Zedong.

The proverb is a good one. But, like most proverbs, it is a compressed version of something more complicated, and conservatives who use it as a punch line miss the real lesson. Nixon did not go to China to be friendly. He went because he had a strategy, the strategy had a purpose, and the purpose was to make the Soviet Union worry. Let me walk you through how it happened, what he got, what he gave up, what conservatives said at the time, and whether the half-century that followed vindicated the idea.

A hawk reads the map

Start with who Richard Nixon was. He had made his name in the late 1940s as a young congressman on the House Un-American Activities Committee, he had been Eisenhower's Vice President, and in 1960 he had lost a narrow race to John Kennedy. Through the 1950s and 1960s he was a reliable anti-communist who had no patience for the diplomatic establishment's softer instincts.

In October 1967, writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, he made an argument that surprised many of his admirers. Looking at the long run, he wrote, the United States could not afford to leave China outside the family of nations indefinitely, where it would nurse its grievances and threaten its neighbors. That is not a friendship sentence. It is a sentence about a country of hundreds of millions of people that could not be ignored forever, written by a man preparing to run for President.

Two years later events gave the idea teeth. In March 1969, Chinese and Soviet troops fought a series of border clashes along the Ussuri River. The two great communist powers, which Americans had been accustomed to think of as a single bloc, were shooting at each other. The split had been developing for years, but now it was visible. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, saw something a purely ideological reading of the world could not see: if the two communist giants feared each other, then the United States could talk to both and be feared, courted or at least watched by each.

That is the first thing to understand. The opening to China was not a change in Nixon's convictions. It was an application of them. If the Soviet Union was the main adversary, then a strong China that was not allied with the Soviets was a gain for America.

The steps, in order

The opening came in stages, and the order tells you the story.

April 1971: ping-pong. The Chinese government invited the visiting American table tennis team in Japan to come to China, and the Americans went. The trip was widely covered and was used by both governments to signal that something was changing. Nobody in the American press called it a diplomatic breakthrough at the time, but it opened a door.

July 1971: the secret trip. Kissinger traveled to Pakistan, and while he was there, slipped away, reportedly with a stomach illness as cover, and flew to Beijing. He met with Premier Zhou Enlai from July 9 to 11. On July 15, Nixon went on television and announced that he had accepted an invitation to visit China. The surprise was total. The Soviet leadership, among others, noticed.

October 1971: the United Nations. On October 25, 1971, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758, which seated the People's Republic of China as China's representative at the United Nations and expelled the representatives of the Republic of China government on Taiwan. The Nixon administration had pushed a formula that would have kept Taiwan in some form, and it failed. This was a defeat for American diplomacy, and it is worth remembering that Nixon was not in control of every piece of the board.

February 1972: the visit. Nixon arrived in Beijing on February 21, 1972, and met Chairman Mao on the first day, a meeting that had not been guaranteed in advance. Over the next week he met repeatedly with Zhou. The trip was broadcast to Americans on television, and it was the first time most of them had seen China in a generation.

February 1972: the Shanghai Communique. The visit ended with a joint statement issued in Shanghai, and its format was unusual. It did not paper over differences. Each side stated its own positions separately and then listed what they agreed on, including a commitment to work toward normal relations and a shared opposition to any single power seeking hegemony in Asia. On Taiwan, the United States acknowledged that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain that there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China, and said the United States did not challenge that position. It added that the dispute should be settled peacefully by the Chinese themselves.

Full diplomatic relations did not come until January 1, 1979, under President Carter, and Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act in 1979 to govern the American relationship with the island. The Nixon trip was a first move, not the last.

What Nixon got for the trip

A skeptic asks: what did we actually get? Let me answer in terms of leverage.

1. A wedge. The communist world was no longer a single bloc, and Moscow knew it. Three months after Nixon left Beijing, he flew to Moscow, and in May 1972 he and Leonid Brezhnev signed the first strategic arms limitation agreement, usually called SALT I, together with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Historians still argue about how much the China card caused the Soviet willingness to deal. It is hard to argue that it hurt.
2. A new set of options on Asia. For two decades America had no direct channel to the government of the world's most populous country. Now it had one. Washington could talk to Beijing about Vietnam, about Korea and about the Soviet threat along China's northern border.
3. A window into the other side. Even a limited relationship meant embassies, visits and information. A government that is willing to talk to its rival is a government that is learning what the rival wants.

And what did he give? The language on Taiwan, which was careful but real. Over time the United States reduced its military presence on the island and, as part of the switch in recognition at the end of 1978 and start of 1979, gave notice that it would end the formal defense treaty with the Republic of China. Those were costs, and they were paid by Taiwan as much as by America.

The conservatives who objected

It would be a mistake to say the right cheered. It did not. The conservative movement of the early 1970s had been built on the idea that communism was an evil to be opposed, not managed, and many conservatives saw the trip as a betrayal of that creed.

In July 1971, after Kissinger's secret visit was announced, a group of prominent conservatives met and publicly said they were suspending their support for Nixon over a set of grievances that included the China policy. The movement's elder statesmen worried about Taiwan, which they regarded as a loyal ally. In the 1972 Republican primaries, Representative John Ashbrook of Ohio challenged Nixon from the right. He lost badly, but his candidacy was a statement.

I think the critics deserve a fair hearing. Their argument was not stupid. It went like this: the Chinese government was a one-party dictatorship that had killed and imprisoned its own people on a huge scale. Shaking its hand lent it legitimacy. Our friends on Taiwan deserved better than a vague communique. And Nixon was getting nothing concrete in exchange for the prestige of the visit.

Here is the answer, point by point.

1. Diplomacy is not endorsement. Roosevelt and Churchill dealt with Stalin, and Reagan, as you can read in How Reagan built strength first and then sat down with Gorbachev, sat down with the Soviet leadership. Talking to a rival does not mean approving of its government. It means taking its power seriously.
2. The alternative was not rollback. In 1972 nobody had a plausible plan to topple the Chinese Communist Party. The real choice was between a hostile and isolated China and a hostile but engaged one that was also worried about its northern border. The second was better for American interests.
3. The deal was transactional, and Nixon knew it. The Shanghai Communique was written so that each side could say what it believed. That was not softness. It was careful drafting that left the issues unresolved and Washington's options open.

Did decades of engagement pay off?

This is the real debate now, and it is a more difficult one than the 1972 argument.

Here is the case that it paid off. China's turn toward markets began under Deng Xiaoping after 1978, and the access to American trade and technology was part of that. Hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of extreme poverty, which is an unambiguous human good. And the strategic triangle helped squeeze the Soviet Union during the final stretch of the Cold War.

Here is the case that it did not. The theory that trade and contact would make China freer politically did not come true. Instead, China's government used access to Western markets to build up its economy and its military without changing its political system. That theory, that we could trade our way to a more liberal China, is the one I take apart in We Bet That Trade Would Make China Free and the Bet Did Not Pay, and it's worth reading alongside this post.

But be careful about what you blame on Nixon. The 1972 opening was a strategic move in the middle of a Cold War against the Soviet Union, and its goal was to improve America's position against Moscow. The later bet, that trade would liberalize China, was a different decision made by different people. Congress granted China permanent normal trade relations in 2000, and China joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001. Those were choices by later administrations and Congresses of both parties, resting on an economic and political assumption that Nixon never made. It is a mistake to hang a 2001 policy around the neck of a 1972 one.

That distinction has a practical value for anyone who wants to be a serious critic. If you say "engagement failed," you have to say which engagement. The one that helped split the communist world and led to arms control was, on its own terms, a success. The one that opened the American market on the theory of political reform did not deliver the reform. A conservative can honor the first and criticize the second without contradiction. For more on how trade policy serves foreign policy, see Trade Is Foreign Policy and Every President Has Treated It That Way.

What the trip teaches about hard bargaining

Strip away the period detail and the Nixon trip is a short course in how to bargain with a rival. Here are four lessons that carry over.

One: know what you want before you sit down. Nixon wanted leverage over the Soviets. He did not need China to love him. A negotiator who wants to be liked will pay too much for it.

Two: bring leverage, not hope. The Chinese leadership had its own reasons to talk. They feared the Soviets, with whom they had fought on the border, and they wanted an American counterweight. A deal works when both sides have something to gain, and you cannot manufacture the other side's interests. You can only find them.

Three: keep your other options alive. Nixon flew to Moscow three months after Beijing. He never let either capital believe it was the only one. If you are negotiating with a rival, make sure the rival knows you have another phone number.

Four: a deal that cannot be explained at home will not last. Nixon announced his trip on television and brought the press along. The visit was a public event, and the public could judge it. The conservative critics were heard, and that is how a democracy is supposed to work. A foreign policy that was never explained to the voters is a policy that will not survive a change of administration.

There is a fifth lesson that cuts the other way, and I think it is the most important for people on our side of the aisle. The opening to China was a genuine success for American strategy in 1972 and 1973, and it was also a policy that needed to be revisited. Strategies expire. What made sense when the Soviet Union was the threat does not automatically make sense when the threat changes. Nixon was willing to throw out the old consensus when the facts changed. The way to honor that is not to treat his policy as scripture but to apply his method: look at the map as it is, not as you wish it were.

For a broader framework, compare the three theories of trade I lay out in free trade, tariffs or managed trade, three theories side by side, and the deterrence logic that ran through Republican foreign policy, from Eisenhower on, in Peace Through Strength Is Older Than Reagan and It Still Works. Taken together, they show that conservative foreign policy has always been about interests, not sentiment.

The bottom line

• Nixon's 1972 trip was a strategic move, not a friendship. It aimed to split the communist world and gain leverage over Moscow, and within months it helped produce the first SALT agreement.
• Conservatives were right to ask hard questions about Taiwan and about shaking hands with a dictatorship. Their objections deserve a serious answer, not a shrug.
• Do not confuse the 1972 opening with the trade policy of 2000 and 2001. They rested on different theories, and the second one is the one that failed.
• A good deal requires leverage, clear goals and a willingness to walk away. Those rules apply whether the other side is in Beijing or at the bargaining table down the street.
• Check the documents yourself: the Shanghai Communique and UN Resolution 2758 are both short, public and worth reading in full.