The legacy of two foreign policy realists

Joseph Bosco, a fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies (ICAS) and senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), gives a lecture at the ICAS Fall Symposium in Washington, D.C., Oct. 20

By Joseph A. Bosco

WASHINGTON -- China’s assertive actions in the South China Sea, its resurgent hostility to Japan and the West, the use of cyber warfare against the United States by China and North Korea, and the reckless threats of nuclear strikes periodically heard from both countries make East Asia potentially Washington’s most dangerous challenge.

China is pivotal, directly and through its ongoing support for three generations of the Kim family tyranny in Pyongyang. Military scholars now openly debate scenarios for war between the U.S. and China -- over Taiwan, or freedom of navigation in the South or East China Sea, or on the Korean Peninsula.

How did it come to this, after Nixon’s historic opening to China and almost 45 years of intensive Western engagement through eight successive U.S. administrations? Nixon said relations with China would “reduce the chance in the immediate future of a confrontation between the United States and the PRC in Asia, such as we had in Korea, and such as we had indirectly in Vietnam.” He was equally sanguine about the long term:

“Looking further in the future, when they become a nuclear superpower, we will have such relations with them that we can discuss differences and not inevitably have a clash … [and] war in the Pacific. It’s just as coldblooded as that.”

Nixon was reflecting the sober assessment of not engaging China he had made the year before he was elected president. In his seminal Foreign Affairs article, he stated:

“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.”

When he looked back 13 years later on his “strategic gamble,” Nixon still felt it had been a risk worth taking: “China does not threaten us.” In October 1989, he made an unpublicized trip to China, where he told Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng -- four months after the Tiananmen Square massacre as Congress considered sanctions against China: “I am more confident about the future of Sino-American relations than I was in 1972.” But, in a “personal & confidential” memorandum to congressional leaders, Nixon said: “Sino-American relations are in the worst condition they have been in since before I went to China 17 years ago.” He said the gap in perceptions over Tiananmen “is totally unbridgeable.”

Nevertheless, Nixon argued against closing China off from the world, using some of the same words he had used in his 1967 article: “To leave the present and future leaders of China isolated, nurturing their resentments and even hatred of the United States because of what they consider to be unjustified actions against China, is senseless and counterproductive.”

By 2000, however, Nixon confessed to his former speechwriter, William Safire, his real fears about China’s direction. Safire wrote: “That old realist, who had played the China card to exploit the split in the Communist world, replied with some sadness that he was not as hopeful as he had once been: ‘We may have created a Frankenstein.’”

By contrast, Henry Kissinger -- Nixon’s partner in the China project -- has expressed no second thoughts about what engagement has, or has not, accomplished. As he wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal: “The opening to China was based on an immediate and observable adjustment in Chinese policy, not on an expectation of a fundamental change in China’s domestic system.” Unfortunately, that “adjustment in Chinese policy” was supposed to include Beijing’s help in arranging an honorable withdrawal from Vietnam -- which never happened.

North Korea demonstrates the evolution of the two geopolitical realists’ thinking. According to documents in the National Archive, Nixon and Kissinger considered launching nuclear strikes against North Korea after it downed a U.S. reconnaissance plane in international airspace. The plan was scrapped because of feared retaliation against U.S. bases and allies in the region.

Twenty-five years later, when North Korea began developing its own nuclear weapons and missiles, initially with Chinese technology acquired through the A.Q. Kahn network, Kissinger said it threatened one of the greatest potential catastrophes confronting humanity.

For 20 years, Kissinger has argued that China opposes North Korean nukes as much as the rest of the world. Yet, while acknowledging that only Beijing can deter Pyongyang from its nuclear course, Kissinger has offered no less than eight different explanations of why Beijing tolerated and even enabled the North Korean nuclear and missile programs.

Meanwhile, China has effectively played the North Korean card against the U.S., posturing as the indispensable negotiating partner and responsible international stakeholder, gaining enormous leverage in its other dealings with the U.S.

Over the decades, the older Nixon’s pessimism seems justified. While following Nixon’s advice by focusing on domestic development, China’s Communist leaders used that progress as a substitute for political legitimacy and for a massive military buildup that has stirred Chinese nationalism and now intimidates all China’s neighbors.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who knew something about dictatorships, once told Nixon that “Chinese policies would not change, even after Mao’s death; the entire Chinese leadership was instinctively aggressive.” Deng Xiaoping, China’s great reformer, demonstrated the point. He never forgot Mao’s teaching that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” -- both domestically and internationally. He “taught a lesson” to Vietnam in 1978 and to Chinese students in 1989.

In the end, it can be argued that China’s realists have decisively bested America’s leading realists in “managing” the China-U.S. relationship. We are still living with the consequences of Nixon’s “week that changed the world.”

Joseph A. Bosco is a fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies (ICAS) and senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).