doesn’t remember a time when China was not an integral, indeed leading, member of the global economic community. Nixon’s historic visit can be regarded as the first step in China’s amazing journey to becoming a world economic powerhouse—a position unimaginable in 1972.
Of course, for that reason, some rue Nixon’s opening communication with Beijing. What, they ask, did the United States get out of it? Haven’t we lost innumerable jobs to China, seeing our manufacturing plants shutter and our working people’s wages fall? In a geopolitical sense, I believe that Nixon’s China gambit bought the United States time and space—with Vietnam, in allowing a way out to be maneuvered; regarding Moscow, in putting more pressure on the Russians to negotiate; and with China itself, in reducing tensions between the two countries. Nixon pursued the national interest relentlessly, without regard to ideological fixations or party preferences.
More broadly, the United States did gain significantly from China’s entry into the global economy, in that the massive availability of cheaper consumer goods has been a boon for those of lower or more modest incomes. Critics of free trade often point to the loss of manufacturing jobs as hurting those of modest means, and there is some truth to that, but they fail to account for the countervailing benefit of cheaper goods. And in China, American businesses have found an enormous and lucrative new market. Our exports to China increased over 600 percent between 2000 and 2011, as compared with just 170 percent to places elsewhere during that period. Chinese demand, in fact, may well be one of the principal drivers behind American job growth in the years ahead.29
This is not to suggest by any means that all is rosy, or that Nixon’s geopolitical achievements have been entirely lasting. Hardly—in my previous book, The Russia-China Axis, I argued that the long Sino-Soviet split is over, and that the two former Communist adversaries have drawn closer and closer together into a de facto alliance against the United States and the Western democracies. This is particularly disheartening in light of the success Nixon had in managing the Chinese relationship—and to a substantial extent, the Russian one, too—and it reflects not only several decades of geopolitical trends but also a massive failure of American leadership. To see Moscow and Beijing jointly conspiring to facilitate rogue regimes like North Korea, Syrian, and Iran; to watch as they ramp up their conventional and nuclear armed forces, as we build ours down; and to understand that they are today’s two leading practitioners of cyberwarfare is to recognize how far we have fallen from Nixon’s successful balancing of these powers. We can only hope that in the presidential election of 2016, the United States gets the foreign policy leadership it deserves and, by now, so desperately needs.
And yet, the failure of Nixon’s successors to maintain a constructive relationship with China as it grew into an economic power, and to manage the transition of Russia after the fall of Soviet Communism, does not detract from Nixon’s achievement. Nixon himself was never ambivalent about the matter: he always saw his opening of US relations with China as his greatest accomplishment, the one for which he would be remembered to history.
As he put it near the end of the China trip, raising his glass for a toast: “This was the week that changed the world.”30
Soviet Union
Needless to say, the Soviet Union was knocked off balance by Nixon’s bold move. The Russians had long counted on hostility between China and the United States as a truism of international relations. Leonid Brezhnev worried that the Chinese might move closer into the American orbit, leaving Russia the odd player out. Thus he began reaching out to Nixon, just as the president and Kissinger had intended. Nixon’s bold opening to Beijing had changed the calculus in Moscow. Pressured by Washington’s new relationship with China, Brezhnev wrote Nixon and invited him to the Soviet Union for a week of summits—which would mark the first time a sitting US president visited the USSR.
When Nixon visited Moscow in May 1972, just three months after he had gone to Beijing, American-Russian relations had been stalled for years, especially on the issue of arms reduction. It had been nearly a decade since John F. Kennedy had brokered an agreement with Moscow (with the help of the British) to limit atmospheric nuclear testing. Moscow had always been obsessed with equaling and eventually surpassing American nuclear capacities. When Nixon took office, the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) were languishing. But now, with the American-Chinese rapprochement, the Russians showed renewed interest in coming to the table.
Nixon had reasons of his own for pursuing the Moscow visit. On the broadest level, reducing tensions with Moscow was a self-evident benefit. The late sixties had been a difficult time; any lessening of tensions would be a boon for national security and for Nixon’s own political standing. But Nixon further hoped to use the prospect of substantive arms control talks as leverage with the Russians in Vietnam. Specifically, he hoped that by making some critical arms control concessions—which he privately believed would not hurt the United States—he could, in turn, win Russian concessions, or at least acquiescence, to American efforts to bring the war to a close.31
Nixon knew that leaders in Washington and Moscow were both looking for ways to tamp down the arms race, which had become not just terrifying but also financially ruinous. He approached the Moscow Summit with the same conviction that he had brought to his outreach to China: resolute that he was uniquely suited to the task by virtue of his hardline anti-Communist credentials. He could sell an arms deal with the Russians to the American people, he believed, in a way that a liberal Democratic president couldn’t.
Where Nixon’s Beijing visit had constituted a landmark event merely for taking place, and for the articulation of a general framework of understanding, the Russian visit was more substantive. Nixon and Brezhnev signed ten agreements, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty), an interim SALT treaty, the US-Soviet Incidents at Sea Agreement, and a billion-dollar trade agreement. This was the dawn of détente, a thaw in the Cold War focused on “peaceful coexistence.” The Moscow Summit of 1972 led to two further Nixon-Brezhnev summit meetings, another between Gerald Ford and Brezhnev, and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, resulting in the signing of SALT II in 1979, the details of which had been largely hammered out during the Nixon and Ford administrations. It also served as the model for the very different Reagan-Gorbachev summits a decade later, which laid the groundwork for the end of the Cold War.
Nixon’s forging of détente with Moscow coupled with the opening to China are feats difficult to imagine any other American politician of his era achieving. Only Ronald Reagan had comparable anti-Communist credentials, but in the early 1970s Reagan was a California governor still proving his political abilities. At the senior national political level, no Democrat could have pulled off Nixon’s overtures to Beijing and then to Moscow. More significantly, the American public widely approved of Nixon’s policies, seeing them as courageous efforts to reduce tensions and maintain a fragile peace. On foreign relations, as on domestic policy, Americans saw Nixon as a responsible centrist, a leader poised between irresponsible ideologues to his right and left.
This is not to suggest that the SALT agreements were without flaws. For one thing, the agreements, in “limiting” arms, played a bit with semantics—in that the limits applied to missile production that was already underway. And while the limits applied to the missiles, they did not apply to what were called MIRVs—multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles—the payloads that carried multiple warheads. Thus the Soviets and Americans could still add as many MIRVs as they liked, even if the number of missiles and missile launchers was capped. Both sides could thus produce warheads to an unlimited capacity. As Stephen Ambrose put it, overall SALT was “about as meaningful as freezing the cavalry of the European nations in 1938 but not the tanks.”32
Yet Ambrose also crystalized why SALT was so important in 1972:
For all the flaws, for all that he could have driven a harder bargain, for all that he had failed to freeze, much less reduce, nuclear arsenals and delivery systems, Nixon had achieved a symbolic breakthrough, namely that
