approval. Of course, the Constitution already makes this clear, but the decade of war in Vietnam prompted congressional liberals to make the terms more specific: presidents would have to notify Congress within forty-eight hours of committing forces, and they could not keep them engaged for longer than sixty days without congressional authorization. The law was passed over Nixon’s veto. Yet nearly forty years later, it did not prevent Barack Obama from waging an undeclared war in Libya.
More broadly, Vietnam was one of the central drivers of Americans’ loss of faith and confidence in government—a confidence that would never again reach the levels of the early postwar period. And, of course, Nixon would be the central player in another driving event: Watergate, which was just beginning to unfold when the Paris Peace Accords were signed. Watergate would not only shatter the confidence of Americans in the honesty and reliability of their government; it would also cripple the remaining American resolve to assist our South Vietnamese ally. Without Watergate, it’s unlikely that the Congress would have so brazenly abandoned Saigon in 1975. The two events are unimaginable without each other.
And so Vietnam cannot be scored as one of Nixon’s happier chapters—indeed, every American president that touched it has found himself scarred. Yet Nixon did fulfill, however imperfectly, his promise to the American people to end the war. There is much to criticize in how he got it done, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that he did get it done.
It’s safe to say, though, that if Nixon’s main foreign policy feat was ending the Vietnam War, his legacy would be checkered at best. But of course, it was not with Vietnam that Nixon left his deepest mark. Nixon will be remembered in history as the American president who ended the global isolation of Communist China, paving the way for normalization of diplomatic relations—with world-historical implications.
China
In 1969, when Nixon took power, many in the American foreign policy establishment still clung to a view of world Communism that held that the Russians, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and Communists elsewhere all moved in sync, united in ideology and goals. Yet the Russian-Chinese relationship had imploded earlier in the decade, and it was clear by 1969 that nothing like a Russian-Chinese alliance any longer existed. Quite the contrary: the two Communist powers had become bitter foes. During Nixon’s first year in office, the Russians and Chinese came closer than they ever had before to going to war. During the spring and summer of 1969, Chinese troops crossed the disputed Ussuri River to ambush the island of Zhenbao (Damanski). But the Russians retook the territory in a successful counteroffensive two weeks later. The fighting took about a thousand lives on both sides, and according to recently released documents, the Soviets seriously considered a nuclear strike against the Chinese.16 The United States persuaded the Soviets to stand down.
Nixon saw the Soviet Union’s actions as a troubling new phase in the Cold War, reinforcing an idea that had been building in his mind for years: the United States should try to develop constructive relations with the Chinese. It was the Soviets, Nixon told his national-security staff, who posed the greater danger. It would not serve American interests, he stressed, to see the Chinese “smashed” in a war with Russia.17 The Chinese feared the Soviets, Nixon believed, and these clashes might push China toward developing a better relationship with the United States—and thus help contain Soviet power. The Sino-Soviet Split presented the United States with an opportunity to position itself between the two Communist powers—not only lessening chances that they might become allies again but also reducing the risk to the United States of a three-pronged Cold War. And with the United States and China opening relations, Nixon reasoned, the Russians would be motivated to improve relations with Washington as well.
This was hardly the prevailing outlook in 1969. Not only was it a minority view in the American foreign policy establishment; even Nixon’s own top officials didn’t share it. At first, Henry Kissinger could not understand the president’s desire to reach out to China. “Our leader has taken leave of reality,” Kissinger told his staff in 1969. “He thinks this is the moment to establish normal relations with Communist China. He has just ordered me to make this flight of fancy come true . . . China!”18
Years later, Kissinger would write that he and Nixon came to the idea of approaching China independently. But the documentary record offers no support for such claims. By all available evidence, the opening to China was Nixon’s idea alone.
Nixon’s anti-Communism, while genuine, had always obscured a more pragmatic, realistic side, which he prided himself on as a student of world affairs. As early as 1954, when he was a young vice president, Nixon had suggested a more conciliatory policy toward China. Nixon did, however, oppose President Kennedy’s proposal to allow China a seat in the UN, saying that it would “irreparably weaken” the rest of Asia. Well into the 1960s, hardline views on Red China, as it was then known, were firmly in the mainstream. In 1966, a Harris poll showed that 58 percent of Americans opposed giving recognition to mainland China and would vote against a candidate proposing it. Yet, Nixon, during that same year, confided to philanthropist Elmer Bobst that his dream was “to bring China into the world.”19
Nixon had recognized for some time that China was on the world scene to stay, and that Taiwan leader Chiang Kai-shek’s dream of returning to mainland China would never happen. The United States, Nixon had come to believe, had to take the world as it found it—and nowhere did this apply more than to China.
The next year, Nixon authored a seminal article in Foreign Affairs, “Asia after Viet Nam,” in which he tried to determine the future of Asia—and the US policy toward Asia—beyond the impact of the Vietnam War. Envisioning a future that he would soon help to bring about, Nixon wrote:
Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation. But we could go disastrously wrong if, in pursuing this long-range goal, we failed in the short range to read the lessons of history.
The world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus our aim, to the extent that we can influence events, should be to induce change. The way to do this is to persuade China that it must change: that it cannot satisfy its imperial ambitions, and that its own national interest requires a turning away from foreign adventuring and a turning inward toward the solution of its own domestic problems.20
From early in his first term, then, Nixon set the machinery to work in a long process to pave the way for improved relations with China. In 1969, Nixon’s secretary of state, William Rogers, announced the administration’s Two Chinas policy, which conceded the existence of mainland Communist China and a Nationalist China on the island of Taiwan. That year, the United States gradually lifted a twenty-year economic embargo on China, and within a few years, also ended a trade ban. And the two countries restarted ambassadorial talks in Warsaw in 1970—though the talks were short-circuited when the Chinese walked out in protest of the US bombing of Cambodia.21
The public knew little about Nixon’s overtures. The most high-profile hint of anything like rapprochement between the two countries came in April 1971, when Mao Zedong invited an American ping-pong team, competing in the World Table Tennis Championship in Japan, to visit China. The players were the first Americans to visit China since 1949, when the Communists took over. The press called the goodwill gesture “ping-pong diplomacy.”
Yet Mao’s gesture was more than window dressing. The aging Communist dictator understood that he could not afford to be at such a sword’s point with both the Soviet Union and the United States, and thus he sought out better relations with America. Diplomatic ties slowly and quietly grew between the two countries, and, in December 1970, Mao held high-level talks with US officials and indicated that he was willing to meet with Nixon. To pave the way for the meeting and eventual normalizing of relations, Nixon ended
