Worldmaking

by David Milne

  It did not take long for Kissinger to take Nixon’s ambitions more seriously, particularly as he quickly realized that establishing relations with communist China could reap significant diplomatic benefits. Indeed, Jeremi Suri argues that “Kissinger’s thinking was distinctive for its effort to integrate China in a systematic global strategy. Improved relations with Beijing were part of a fundamental structural shift from bipolar containment to multipolar federalism.” Here, Suri perhaps underappreciates the quality of insight contained in Nixon’s Foreign Affairs article. But he does marshal some compelling evidence to suggest that Kissinger deserves significant credit for pioneering what he defined in 1968 as “triangular diplomacy,” a three-point relationship that promised Beijing and Moscow an equal stake in improving relations with Washington. In 1968, Kissinger had advised Nelson Rockefeller that the “chances of peace are increased as we are able to develop policy options toward both Communist powers.”108 He was surprised when Nixon indicated his desire for a China opening, for he was no Rockefeller. But once the novelty of “Richard Nixon, Red China enthusiast” wore off, Kissinger joined his president in pushing vigorously for rapprochement with Beijing. And in time he would develop an enduring fascination with and admiration for the “middle kingdom,” one of history’s great civilizations.

  The events leading to the normalization of Sino-American relations proceeded first in small steps, then a canter, and then at a gallop. These ranged from an invitation to the American table tennis team to play in China—a clear signal of Beijing’s willingness to begin the process of restoring relations, later characterized as “Ping-Pong diplomacy”—to Nixon’s use of Romania and Pakistan as channels through which to communicate his administration’s desire for engagement.109 Eventually, on June 2, 1971, a letter arrived from China’s premier, Zhou Enlai—Mao’s second in command—offering to host Kissinger as a prelude to a presidential visit. Rather than focusing solely on Taiwan’s contested status, which had earlier been a sticking point, Zhou indicated his willingness to discuss a broad range of issues, including the war in Vietnam. An elated Kissinger informed Nixon about Zhou’s letter. In a rare moment of bonhomie, Kissinger and Nixon celebrated with a fine bottle of vintage Courvoisier. Nixon proposed a toast: “Let us drink to generations to come who may have a better chance to live in peace because of what we have done.”110 William Rogers and the State Department, meanwhile, grew yet more frustrated at their isolation from the main events of the administration. “It was painful enough to see me and the NSC staff dominate the policy process in Washington,” observed Kissinger. “It was harder still to accept the proposition that I might begin to intrude on the conduct of foreign policy overseas.”111

  Kissinger’s most galling intrusion occurred the following month when, using stomach complaints as subterfuge to fall off the accompanying media’s radar, he hopped on a Chinese aircraft and traveled to Beijing. Over the course of the long flight, Kissinger had time to mull over Nixon’s parting advice. In a two-hour briefing the previous day, Nixon had cautioned against abstract philosophizing. “I’ve talked to communist leaders,” Nixon reminded Kissinger. “They love to talk philosophy, and, on the other hand they have enormous respect if you come pretty directly to the point.” Nixon attributed his success with Khrushchev et al. to the fact that “I don’t fart around … I’m very nice to them—then I come right in with the cold steel … You’ve gotta get down pretty crisply to the nut-cutting … the stuff that really counts.”112 Kissinger decided that what worked for Nixon with the brusque Soviets might not necessarily impress his Chinese interlocutors. So he declined to apply the “cold steel” and instead engaged in a fascinating discussion with Zhou on America’s reluctant world role and how he and Nixon were recalibrating in the direction of modesty.

  Kissinger and Zhou held a series of long meetings on July 9 that began at 4:00 p.m. and concluded seven hours later. Kissinger’s preliminary remarks were suitably charming:

  For us this is an historic occasion. Because this is the first time that American and Chinese leaders are talking to each other on a basis where each country recognizes each other as equals. In our earlier contacts we were a new and developing country in contrast to Chinese cultural superiority. For the past century you were victims of foreign oppression. Only today, after many difficulties and separate roads, have we come together again on the basis of equality and mutual respect.”113

  Kissinger and Zhou thrust and parried on issues such as Taiwan and the Vietnam War until the latter mentioned the blanket anticommunist hostility of America’s early Cold War posture. Kissinger reassured him that times had changed: “We do not deal with communism in the abstract, but with specific communist states on the basis of their specific actions toward us, and not as an abstract crusade.”114 Responding to this, Zhou reiterated China’s default diplomatic stance—noninterference in the affairs of other nations—and compared it unfavorably to America’s frenetic activism that had served to create so much conflict. Surprisingly, Kissinger agreed, blaming many of America’s missteps on a misguided “liberal” activism:

  We didn’t look for hegemony as we spread across the world; this was an undesirable consequence and led us into many enormous difficulties. In fact, our liberal element, very often because of missionary tendencies, got itself even more involved, for example, as in the Kennedy administration, than the more conservative element. (Zhou nods.) So here we are. When President Nixon came into office, we found ourselves, as you say, extended around the world without a clear doctrine under enormously changed circumstances.115

  Kissinger’s critique of U.S. Cold War strategy was thus as far removed from “nut-cutting” as it is possible to imagine. His exposition on his and Nixon’s strategic priorities was crystal clear and similarly cognizant of the limits to American power: “At any rate, this administration has had a very difficult task of adjusting American foreign policy to new realities at the same time we also have to conclude a very painful and difficult war. (Zhou nods.) We have established the principle that the defense of far away countries cannot be primarily an American responsibility … This has been our philosophy since we came into office.”116

  Unsurprisingly, Kissinger and Zhou’s first meeting was an unalloyed success. Kissinger had thoroughly dismantled the confrontational logic of the early Cold War, which was much appreciated by his hosts.

  Yet while Kissinger had succeeded in impressing Zhou Enlai, American conservatives were becoming increasingly hostile toward the policy of engaging with Moscow and Beijing. In August, a group of conservative businessmen close to Governor Ronald Reagan of California signed a public statement in the National Review expressing concern at the way Nixon’s America had bowed so obsequiously to its communist competitors. Governor Reagan called Nixon to register his strong opposition to the UN’s October decision to remove Taiwan (or the Republic of China) from the Security Council and replace it with the People’s Republic of China—a decision that Kissinger’s visit appeared to invite. But this was a rare discordant note across a near-unified chorus of adulation. Nixon poked fun at Reagan’s “typical right wing simplicity” and continued to enjoy the spectacle of Democrats puzzling over how to react.117

  In October, Kissinger traveled to China again, where he warned Zhou of the media circus that would accompany Nixon on his visit. He observed that The New York Times viewed itself as a “sovereign country” and that he was “afraid the Prime Minister [would have] to deal with Walter Lippmann and James Reston in one year; and that is a degree of invasion no country should be required to tolerate.” Zhou replied with good humor that he “was not afraid of that”—and in fact he welcomed the intrusion. The Chinese policy elite were keenly aware that making a good impression on the American home audience, following events on television, was vitally important.

  And so it was. Nixon’s visit took place in February 1972, and it produced indelible images of the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square (which was not yet infamous), and the Great Wall—which
Nixon described in underwhelming but accurate fashion as a “great wall.”118 The grand theater of the visit inspired the American composer John Adams to write his first opera, Nixon in China. In one of its memorable scenes, Nixon sings the following aria after disembarking Air Force One. It captures perfectly how laden with meaning this visit was:

  News has a kind of mystery

  When I shook hands with Chou En-lai

  On this bare field outside Peking

  Just now, the whole world was listening

  Though we spoke quietly

  The eyes and ears of history

  Caught every gesture

  And every word, transforming us

  As we, transfixed,

  Made history.119

  The real Nixon made absolutely sure that he was alone when making history. He firmly instructed Kissinger and Rogers to stay in the plane—on twelve occasions over the course of the flight, by Kissinger’s reckoning—until he had reached the bottom of the stairs and shaken Zhou Enlai’s hand, something John Foster Dulles had famously refused to do when he met Zhou in Geneva in 1954.120 This moment was achieved in near-perfect solitude; Nixon permitted his wife, Pat, to tag along. “Your handshake,” Zhou told Nixon, “came over the vastest ocean in the world—twenty-five years of no communication.”121

  Soon after Nixon’s arrival, Mao issued an invitation to Nixon and Kissinger—William Rogers was not on the list, and Kissinger failed to make his case—to visit his quarters in the Imperial City. Nixon opened discussions by mentioning nations and regions of common concern—Japan, the Soviet Union—hoping to draw Mao into a substantive discussion. The chairman demurred, replying, “All these troublesome questions, I don’t want to get into very much.” Instead, Mao indicated a preference for engaging in “philosophic questions”—which were not Nixon’s natural forte. Taking his cue, Nixon replied gamely, “I have read the Chairman’s poems and speeches, and I knew he was a professional philosopher.” Mao pointed at Kissinger, asking, “He is a doctor of philosophy?” Nixon replied, with irritation, “He is a doctor of brains”—and whatever Nixon meant by that, it probably was not good.

  Pleased nonetheless to have an entrée into the discussion, Kissinger—referencing his Ivy League pedigree—added that he “used to assign the Chairman’s collective writings to my classes at Harvard.” Immune to the flattery, Mao said, “Those writings of mine aren’t anything. There is nothing instructive in what I wrote.” Nixon interjected: “The chairman’s writings moved a nation and have changed the world.” Mao disagreed, observing that “I haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking.” Several moments later, Kissinger delivered an encomium to China’s brand of Marxism-Leninism that had recently wreaked such havoc: “Mr. Chairman, the world situation has also changed dramatically … We’ve had to learn a great deal. We thought all Socialist-Communist states were the same phenomenon. We didn’t understand until the President came into office the different nature of revolution in China and the way revolution had developed in other Socialist states.”122

  It was a good thing that none of the embarrassing details leaked out. Ronald Reagan and his ideological cohort would have found Nixon’s and Kissinger’s “slobbering” over Mao—a word Kissinger often used to mock Anatoly Dobrynin’s warm and familiar diplomatic style—deeply troubling.123

  In his memoir, Kissinger effusively summarizes the impact of the China opening: “In one giant step we had transformed our diplomacy. We had brought new flexibility to our foreign policy. We had captured the initiative and also the imagination of our own people.”124 This observation is hard to dispute. Downplaying ideological differences and restoring relations with a nation of China’s size and latent economic potential was a deft diplomatic move. Moscow was horrified, as one might expect, and Soviet fears of what this unexpected rapprochement portended added value to American diplomacy. It allowed Nixon and his successors to play the communist antagonists against each other. It gave China a direct stake in the timely resolution of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, a devotee of balance-of-power diplomacy, China’s entry to the concert of nations was an absolute gift. If the Cold War resembled a game of chess, as some strategists opined, then the United States had acquired at least a third rook.

  Yet Kissinger’s regard for China and its leadership was almost too high. In February 1973, he informed Nixon that the United States “was now in the extraordinary situation that, with the exception of the United Kingdom, the PRC might well be closest to us in its global perceptions.”125 How does one take this seriously? As a cosmopolitan student of history, Kissinger was probably more susceptible than others to romanticizing China, a civilization whose diplomatic traditions he admired. The military strategist Sun Tzu, for example, held a prominent place in his pantheon of exemplary strategists, alongside Metternich, Clausewitz, and Bismarck. Kissinger later hailed Sun Tzu’s masterpiece The Art of War as possessing “a degree of immediacy and insight that places [Sun Tzu] among the ranks of the world’s foremost strategic thinkers.”126 Kissinger’s Sinophilia was laudable in many ways, but it led him to overestimate China’s geopolitical significance, as well as its ability and willingness to help the United States achieve its goals; this was glaringly apparent in respect to Vietnam. In describing Zhou Enlai as “one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met” and succumbing to something close to awe upon meeting Mao, Kissinger looked and acted more like a fan than a hard-nosed realist.127 Metternich and Sun Tzu would not have approved.

  One thing about the China opening was incontestable. The “liberal” American media that Nixon reviled—but whose good opinion he craved—had little choice but to hail his breakthrough as epoch defining. “An opening exists where there has not been one for 22 years,” went an editorial in The Washington Post. “A beginning has been made; the potential is vast and for this much the President is entitled to great credit for it was a bold stroke … It was something like going to the moon.”128 Such endorsements thrilled Nixon. Yet as with the Moscow Summit, he was angry when he discovered that the media was praising Kissinger in at least equal measure. Nixon viewed the China gambit, with some justification, as a sole-authored breakthrough; this was clearly an affront. The cartoonist Bill Mauldin was ruthless in hitting the president’s (admittedly numerous) psychological weak spots. One of his cartoons showed an excited boy pointing at the presidential motorcade, exclaiming: “Look! It’s Dr. Kissinger’s associate!”129 When in 1972 Time magazine declared Nixon and Kissinger its joint “Men of the Year,” Nixon fumed and sulked. Ahead of publication, Kissinger implored the editor to remove his name and bestow the honor on Nixon alone, but to no avail. Kissinger described the designation a “nightmare” and said that accepting the honor was “almost suicidal.”130 Surrounded by silver lining, Nixon fixated on a cloud called Henry.

  * * *

  Détente with the Soviet Union and the opening to China were significant breakthroughs in their own right. Indeed, a positive appraisal of the Nixon administration’s foreign policies is predicated on our viewing them this way. But Nixon and Kissinger did not view them in isolation at the time. Instead, both men believed that Moscow and Beijing, keen to extract economic and strategic benefits from an improved relationship with Washington, would apply pressure on Hanoi to agree to peace terms permitting a full American withdrawal. On this topic their reasoning was misguided. It did not accord sufficient respect to North Vietnam’s fiercely guarded status as an independent actor, or indeed to the ideological solidarity that existed on at least a bilateral basis between Hanoi and its two Marxist-Leninist patrons.

  So when the United States withdrew from Vietnam in January 1973, when “peace” was finally achieved, it came at a horrendous cost. Cambodia was dragged directly into the fray, leading ultimately to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and a genocide that killed approximately 1.7 million people—20.1 percent of Cambodia’s population.131 Hundreds of thousands of North and South Vietnamese sold
iers and noncombatants lost their lives. Of the fifty-seven thousand American soldiers who died on or above Vietnamese soil, twenty thousand perished during Nixon’s presidency.132 During the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon had stated his intention to achieve “peace with honor.”133 In 1971, a returning veteran named John Kerry testified powerfully before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He indicted the war as “the biggest nothing in history” and posed a powerful question: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”134

  Kissinger’s best answer to Kerry’s question was “for the sake of credibility.” The national security adviser understood that the United States could not “win” the Vietnam War and largely agreed with Kerry that the Americanization of the conflict had been a mistake. But he was adamant that the nation could not be seen to “lose” it either. In a widely noted essay in Foreign Affairs in January 1969 titled “The Viet Nam Negotiations,” Kissinger placed greatest emphasis not on the tangible ramifications of withdrawal but on the amorphous psychological ones:

  The commitment of 500,000 Americans has settled the issue of the importance of Viet Nam. What is involved now is confidence in American promises. However fashionable it is to ridicule the terms “credibility” or “prestige,” they are not empty phrases; other nations can gear their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness … In many parts of the world—the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, even Japan—stability depends on confidence in American promises.135