Opinion | Ukraine crisis: US and China must restore pragmatism of Nixon and Mao to pull the world back from the brink
- Fifty years ago, the US and China struck an improbable geopolitical truce that heralded an era of peace and prosperity
- Today, with an internally divided US pushing China and Russia together, and the war in Ukraine threatening the return of a binary world order, can Biden and Xi pull off a similar feat?
The Ukraine war has plunged the world into a period of instability. But, without the political fortitude for pragmatic compromises, the swift restoration of peace that the international community yearns for will remain elusive.
Commentators could not help but notice the stark geopolitical contrast between then and now. In 1972, Nixon successfully drove a wedge between China and the Soviet Union. Today, an increasingly bitter US-China rivalry has pushed Beijing towards Moscow.
But barely a month later, as the Ukraine invasion began, it quickly became apparent that this high rhetoric was facing a harsh reality check, as Beijing struggled to recalibrate its support of Russia.
Putin’s aggression towards Ukraine is a setback to Xi’s vision of a shared future for humankind. For over a decade, through schemes such as the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has meticulously laid the groundwork for a new global architecture that it had hoped would draw together democracies and autocratic regimes alike into harmonious coexistence.
