Minxin Pei

Opinion | Nixon was right to gamble on China, despite what many in Washington think today

Critics in Washington who blame the US policy of engagement for aiding the rise of a geopolitical threat have conveniently forgotten the economic and geopolitical benefits the US itself gained

Nobody could have foreseen the extent of the Chinese economic miracle that materialised, nor China’s expansionist shift today

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US president Richard Nixon toasts with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in February 1972 in Beijing, during his official visit to China. Photo: AFP

Minxin Pei

Published: 1:30am, 19 Feb 2022Updated: 3:29am, 19 Feb 2022

With China currently the only country capable of unseating America as the leading global power, many in Washington may wish that US president Richard Nixon had never made his historic trip to China 50 years ago this month.

In their revisionist narrative, it was Nixon’s meeting with Communist Party of China chairman Mao Zedong, and the policy of engagement it initiated, that helped make China an economic superpower and a geopolitical threat to America.

For these critics, the Nixon visit, far from being a stroke of diplomatic genius, was one of history’s greatest strategic blunders.

But such revisionist arguments discount the substantial benefits the United States gained from Nixon’s gambit and the decades of US-China engagement that followed.

Nixon’s visit shifted the perceived Cold War balance of power and influenced the strategic calculations of both the Soviet Union and North Vietnam, resulting in immediate US gains. America and the Soviet Union signed the first nuclear arms control treaty in May 1972, and the US extricated itself from Vietnam a year later.

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Nixon in China: How a US presidential trip made history 50 years ago

Engagement with China also yielded longer-term geopolitical and economic dividends for the US. Regional tensions in East Asia eased dramatically, mitigating the Chinese threat to vital US interests there, while the US-China quasi-alliance against the Soviet Union in the 1980s contributed to America’s victory in the Cold War.