15

Nixon in Beijing

While the 1960s began changes that would transform Europe, the 1970s saw a metamorphosis that transformed Asia and with it, gradually, the world. Although China sidelined itself through its Cultural Revolution, other Asian countries had been preparing for an economic takeoff within the capitalist world system dominated by the United States. Japan had been in the forefront. During the 1960s its economy had grown 11 percent per year, one of the fastest growth rates ever known for what was, in essence, already a developed economy. But from the late 1960s other Asian countries joined Japan in rapid growth, borrowing some aspects of its export-driven economic principles. Within the span of a decade, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore went from being poor, resourceless countries to economic dynamos, mainly on the strength of their integrated industrial enterprises, government guidance, and hardworking, well-educated labor forces.

It is no surprise that all the “little tigers” of the rapidly growing east Asian economy were close political allies of the United States. Just like in the case of Japan, Cold War alliance with Washington meant access to US and other Western markets on preferential terms. It also meant that east Asian authoritarian governments, helped by US advisers and military support, could defend themselves against rebellions among their own populations. None of the American links would have been enough by themselves to create east Asian economic growth. That was caused mainly by domestic factors. Neither is it true, as sometimes claimed, that the US war in Vietnam bought time for successful capitalist industrialization elsewhere in Asia. In execution, as well as in consequence, these were unrelated phenomena, even though the demand for goods created by the Indochina wars did stimulate other economies in the region. But, in overall terms, the Cold War did help to make export-led growth a surer path to quick economic transformation, thereby creating global economic interaction on an ever-larger scale.

IN THE 1970S, many Americans grew increasingly fearful that the resurgence of western Europe and rapid growth in parts of Asia meant the loss of jobs and income in the United States. And in relative terms the US economy was becoming less predominant. In 1945 the United States had contributed a full third of the global economy. In 1970 the figure was less than a quarter and dropping. This ought not to have been surprising. Right after World War II all main competitors had been in ruins. A generation later they had rebuilt and could therefore compete more effectively. What really worried US policy-makers was their own country’s combination of low domestic growth rates and high government expenditure, especially on defense. In 1970 the Japanese economy grew 10.7 percent, and the West German 2.6 percent. The US economy grew only 0.5 percent. The competitors were also catching up in terms of overall productivity.

In 1971 the US government acted to defend its own economic interest. By abruptly suspending the fixed rate of exchanging dollars for gold, it in effect devalued the US dollar against other currencies, helping American exporters and domestic business. It thereby deliberately destroyed the Bretton Woods system, in which most other currencies had been pegged to the dollar at a fixed exchange rate. For the first time since 1945 US leaders looked more to their own bottom line than to preserving and integrating the world economic system. Of course, it could be argued that successive US Administrations had upheld that system, because it first and foremost served the American economy. But by the early 1970s this seemed to no longer to be the case. The global economy entered a new and turbulent era.

The collapse of Bretton Woods had a significant effect on the Cold War. The global economy had been stable in terms of its structure since the late 1940s. Of course there had been fluctuations, both in volume and in profits. But it had been stable in the sense that the capitalist economies had gradually become more integrated through their common dependence on the US dollar. Although a slow process, it had facilitated the recovery of western Europe and Japan. It had also deflated the price of raw materials, giving industrialized countries an edge. So while the protection and expansion of the global capitalist system had been a core US objective in the Cold War, its pursuit of this aim had been hegemonic, not particularistic. The success of capitalism drove US policies much more than concerns about the profitability of American companies or even foreign expenditures of the American state.

All of this changed in the “long 1970s,” from 1968 to 1982 or thereabouts. While the unsuccessful war in Indochina created a sense of US political and military weakness, unilateral action to prop up its own economic interests made the United States seem less predominant and more self-serving. These perceptions may have been less than true overall, but they were widely held at the time, both inside and outside the United States itself. More important than perceptions, though, were the new realities created by economic and technological change. The collapse of Bretton Woods and the floating of exchange rates were not a cause but a symptom of a global reshaping. In the capitalist West, the state-centered, tariff-oriented, capital-controls-dominated postwar world was giving way to international trade and international finance. World trade tripled from the mid-1960s to 1980, much helped by more effective forms of transport and by large amounts of currency, especially US dollars, held outside its country of origin. Overseas investments also increased dramatically, in part because improved communications provided investors with more information and therefore increased confidence. In the 1970s, capitalism went global, with consequences few could foresee. Over time, the United States would be a big beneficiary of this so-called “globalization.” But at the beginning of the process this was hard to imagine, not least for Americans themselves, who felt that their country was slipping behind.

THE US ELECTIONS of 1968—like those in France the same year—delivered a conservative result on the back of deep societal upheaval. The civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Democratic front-runner for their party’s nomination as president, Robert F. Kennedy, the late president’s brother, were both assassinated in the lead-up to the elections. Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate who had served as Eisenhower’s vice president for eight years, was elected in a sharply fought three-way race. Nixon had the lowest percentage of popular votes since Woodrow Wilson in 1912. In his campaign, he had appealed to “the silent majority” who were afraid of change, tumult, and foreign wars. “We hear sirens in the night,” he told his party’s convention. “We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.” Nixon promised stability in America and “an honorable peace” in Vietnam. His supporters, he said, would be “the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators. They are not racists or sick,” Nixon assured them, “they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land.”¹

To those who knew him, Nixon often stood out as small-minded and insecure, but by 1969 he had enormous political experience. His sense of desperation over his country’s future made him an imaginative foreign policy-maker, who was willing to break barriers. Nixon wanted to fight and win the Cold War. But, alone among recent presidents, he thought of the United States as one country among many in the international system. It was the most powerful country, at least for now. But Nixon did not trust the American people, and especially its youth, to be willing to pay the price that Superpower status implied in the time ahead. He worried about a future in which lack of internal cohesion and the rise of powerful and more purposeful challengers could destroy US predominance. His policies of détente were intended to postpone that day and make an uncertain future more predictable and therefore less dangerous for the United States.

Nixon had made his name as a conservative Cold Warrior. His election campaign had been filled with pledges of restoring American greatness and with more than a whiff of prejudice against racial minorities at home and foreigners out to exploit the United States. But he knew that he would have to govern by leaving behind many of the tones he had struck in the campaign. Domestically, the new president kept most of the social reforms of the Johnson years, and even expanded some of them. Internationally, he, from the very beginning of his presidency, wanted to reshape the global framework so the United States could keep its preeminence at a lower cost than before. And Nixon knew that in order to do so, he would need to sit down with the Soviet leaders and negotiate some kind of temporary Cold War truce.

In his first instructions to his national security adviser, Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, Nixon underlined how all actions in foreign policy were connected. The new president’s top priority was to disengage the United States from the wars in Indochina. But he felt that the road to get there did not go primarily through peace negotiations with Hanoi, but through Moscow and Beijing. Already before he became president, Nixon had begun thinking about exploring some form of relaxation of tension with China. In a 1967 article in the influential journal Foreign Affairs, he had argued that outside of Indochina, Asia was really a great success story from a US perspective. It had rapidly modernizing states with strong economic growth. Sooner or later China would join the others. “We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations.… There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation,” Nixon argued.² If China wanted to talk, Nixon was ready to listen.

NIXON WAS RIGHT about the rest of Asia, or at least about some countries in its eastern half. It had taken longer there than in Europe to overcome the effects of war. But by the time Nixon was elected, domestically driven market economies were starting to transform the lives of people in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It was hard to see the significance of this at the time. The Vietnam War overshadowed most other developments. And some bigger countries were barely affected by the changes, at least to begin with: China by choice, others by indigence. But the entry of Asia’s “little tigers” into the capitalist world economy was to change the bigger picture, not least in terms of the global economic significance of eastern Asia. And none of this would have happened without the strictures and apertures of the Cold War.

Japan was the forerunner for much of this development. It provided a model, even though the other market economies were hardly just copies of the Japanese experience. When the United States ended its occupation of Japan in 1951, very few people in Asia or elsewhere would have predicted a glorious economic future for the island nation. Annual growth was slowing and political deadlock between Right and Left made the country hard to govern. But two things were happening that were going to change the future. The Japanese Right began to put aside its internal infighting, meaning that conservatives who had supported the war and those few who had seen it as a disaster joined in the same party. Their somewhat incongruously named Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) defeated the Left and established a political hegemony that lasted thirty-five years. The new government’s industrial policy emphasized increasing productivity (in part by curbing the power of the trade unions) and a strong role for the state in guiding investment, production, and foreign exports.

At the same time as Japan got a stable government that emphasized long-term economic growth, some of the fundaments of expansion in the private sector started to come together. US needs during the Korean War had made some sectors of Japanese industry very profitable. Guided by the government, the big companies, the zaibatsu, used their profits to invest in rationalization and new technology. Meanwhile, the Eisenhower Administration—fearful of the influence of the Japanese Left—smoothed the way for Japanese exports not only to the United States, but to western Europe and southeast Asia as well. Few of the recipient countries were thrilled at the prospect of opening their markets to cheap imports from a former enemy. But the Americans insisted, telling them that strategic interests had to take priority over short-term balance-of-trade issues. US policy toward Japan, said a 1960 National Security Council (NSC) directive, encouraged “a strong, healthy, self-supporting and expanding economy which will permit improvement in Japan’s living standards, provide more capital for the development of less-developed nations, and make a greater contribution to the strength of the Free World.”³

1960 was the year of decision for the future of Japan. With the renewal of the US-Japanese Security Treaty pending, the Japanese Left mobilized its waning forces in an attempt to defeat it in parliament. The parliamentary clash over the future of the treaty set off protests by trade unionists, students, and government employees, who felt that the LDP had ridden rough-shod over their interests. The crisis led to violence on the streets and the cancellation of a planned visit by President Eisenhower. While it neither toppled the government nor blocked security treaty renewal, the 1960 crisis told the LDP grandees that they had to make Japan’s reindustrialization more socially inclusive. The party got rid of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, a wartime minister of munitions who had been all too eager to settle old scores with the Left. The new LDP government insisted that welfare for all was the aim of its economic policy, and promised that everyone’s personal income would double within ten years.

With the Japanese economy now growing at double-digit figures, it took only seven years to realize the income doubling plan. During the 1960s and ’70s Japan transformed itself from the sick man of the industrialized world to its foremost economic powerhouse. Helped by liberalizing trade regimes, government credit and export guidance, and strong and cohesive companies, Japan’s access to international markets propelled it to become the world’s second-largest economy and a global leader in technology and productivity by 1970. In 1960 Charles de Gaulle had disparagingly written off the visiting Japanese prime minister as a “transistor salesman.” Twenty years later the Japanese economy was twice the size of France’s and its productivity a staggering 25 percent higher.⁴

TO MANY IN the West, Japan was still the exception that proved the rule of Asian underdevelopment. As late as the mid-1960s, when President Johnson made his fateful decision to send US ground troops to Vietnam, a commonly held view was that the rest of Asia would fall further and further behind North America, western Europe, and even the resource-rich states of the Middle East and Africa. The Asian countries were overpopulated, under-resourced, and very badly governed, argued US experts. This, in a sense, was why they were prime targets for Communist aggression and had to be defended by the United States. Asia was a region for Cold War expansion, not because of its importance but because of its weakness.

Those who held such views had not done their homework on South Korea, Taiwan, or the city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore. In 1954 South Korea had been the poorest country in eastern Asia, devastated by three years of war in which the front lines had moved through the whole country several times. Everyone had been affected by the cataclysm. Its GDP per capita was behind that of Ghana or Kenya and showed no sign of improving. But during the 1960s things changed, laying the groundwork for a massive economic expansion in the 1970s and ’80s. The same can be said for Taiwan, a rump Chinese state ruled by refugees from mainland China. Some parts of their stories are similar to Japan’s: state-led development, export-oriented growth, and high domestic savings rates. But others are distinct: the emphasis on building education, in some cases almost from scratch; the significance of social programs and welfare from the beginning of the economic expansion; and the rule of “development dictatorships,” governed with an iron fist by their military leaders.

Both South Korea and Taiwan were front-line states in the Cold War. US assistance to both was significant. Between 1946 and 1978 South Korea received almost as much US aid as all of Africa put together.⁵ But easy access to US and Japanese markets was at least as important. In 1970 three-quarters of South Korea’s exports went to the United States or Japan.⁶ The middle part of the Cold War obviously gave the two economic opportunities that they otherwise would not have had. But it also posed challenges. The dictatorships were held in place in part by their access to US aid, including significant military assistance. The most important point, though, is that South Korea and Taiwan took the opportunities offered to them and made good use of their unanticipated advantage.

The same can be said, to an even higher degree, for Singapore and Hong Kong. Two unloved (and some would say unwashed) cities that had lost their strategic importance with the decline of the British empire saw it revived by the Cold War. Hong Kong became a listening post against China, ruled up to the end of the Cold War by Britain, in part in order to share its information cachet with the Americans. Singapore became, first, an unhappy member of the Malaysian federation, and then, from 1964, when they were thrown out of Malaysia, an independent city-state. From the birth of sovereign Singapore, its leader Lee Kuan Yew believed that, with the British leaving, only a US presence could save his new country. “Anyone who was not a Communist and wanted to see the US leave Southeast Asia was a fool,” Lee told Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi.⁷Although of Chinese extraction himself, Lee feared Chinese dominance of his region.

But Singapore’s real Cold War significance, at least in symbolic terms, was the degree to which the former labor organizer Lee Kuan Yew broke with ideals of Third World solidarity, which had much appealed to him in his youth, and moved toward market-led domestic development. At independence, Singapore had been dirt poor. It had no resources except its population. The US presence in his region provided both security and economic opportunity for Lee. By the early 1970s he no longer had any time for Third World demands for higher raw material prices or political nonalignment. Lee decided that only by embracing global markets could Singapore become rich and he himself more powerful.

WHILE OTHER EAST Asian countries experienced growth within a US-led world system, Mao’s People’s Republic of China had been exploring the depths of Marxist political rectitude. Although not the same kind of economic disaster as the Great Leap Forward campaign a decade earlier, the Cultural Revolution isolated China further from the world around it. It also quickly ran into trouble at home. While screaming students were carrying out Mao’s orders to “bombard the headquarters” and senior Communists were dragged through the streets or punished as criminals, the country became increasingly ungovernable. With key functions such as railways or telephone services increasingly out of order, mainly because their staff was being hauled away for political reeducation, the Chairman started to worry about China’s preparedness against a foreign attack. By 1969 many of the craziest aspects of the Cultural Revolution—public torture sessions, all-day political meetings, constant shouting of slogans—were brought to a halt, in part through the use of the army against Red Guard activists. Labor camps and reeducation sites remained, now sometimes populated by those who had been the Chairman’s strongest supporters when the Cultural Revolution began. Even if Maoist terror was still in place, the political landscape in China was gradually changing.

Part of the reason for Mao’s change of heart was a shift in his views of the Cold War. In 1965 Mao’s main foreign preoccupation had been with the US intervention in Vietnam. But while he had predicted further American involvement there, he was surprised by the scale of it. Mao believed that the North Vietnamese stood no chance of winning without direct Chinese support, as in Korea. And, in the midst of Cultural Revolution chaos, he was loath to get into another war against the most powerful country on earth. But like Stalin in the Korean case, neither did the Chairman see any disadvantage in having the Americans bogged down in Indochina. When Hanoi in 1968, in the wake of the failed Tet offensive, agreed to tentative talks with the Johnson Administration, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai lambasted them for compromising the cause and imperiling their position. “Before their backbone has been broken, or before five or six of their fingers have been broken, [the Americans] will not accept defeat, and they will not leave,” he told Xuan Thuy, the North Vietnamese chief negotiator. He even accused Hanoi’s concessions of having caused both the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and a stock market rise in the United States (a very bad thing in Chinese eyes).⁸ No wonder that Le Duan, now convinced that Beijing wanted to fight the Vietnam War to the last Vietnamese, turned increasingly to their other sponsor, the Soviet Union, for assistance.

As in so many other matters, Mao Zedong’s own actions brought about the results he feared the most. By late 1968 his attention had turned almost exclusively to the Soviet threat to China. The USSR, he believed, was the rising Superpower, while the United States was the declining one. Together they were completing the encirclement of China. China had to break out of the siege. Intent on showing Moscow that China did not fear its military might, Mao ordered Chinese soldiers to patrol disputed areas along the Sino-Soviet border. The Soviet countermeasures fueled Beijing’s war scare of 1969.

That summer, fearful of a Soviet nuclear attack, Mao hauled four of his old military comrades back from the hovels to which they had been sent during the Cultural Revolution and ordered them to write a no-holds-barred secret report on China’s international options. Entitled “A Preliminary Evaluation of the War Situation,” their report began, prudently, by confirming Mao’s worldview: the Superpowers hated China because of its successful Communism and the gains of its Cultural Revolution. The Soviet Union was, at the moment, more dangerous to China than the United States. War with the Soviets was coming, though it would not happen immediately. The Americans would prefer to see the two fight each other. “By ‘sitting on top of the mountain to watch a fight between two tigers,’ they will see the weakening of both China and the Soviet Union.”

The four old marshals stressed the urgency of the situation. They compared it to China’s position just prior to the Japanese attack in 1937. China, they said, had to improve its defensive stance. Although the Soviets and the Americans shared some interests, the conflict between them was “real and concrete.” And Nixon, obsessed with the Vietnam War, “takes China as a ‘potential threat,’ rather than a real threat.”⁹ Chen Yi, Nie Rongzhen, and the other marshals sensibly left Mao to draw his own conclusions. But their implication, that China may want to reduce its conflict with the United States in order to fight the Soviet Union, was clear.

IN WASHINGTON RICHARD NIXON had wasted no time in getting his new China initiatives going. Shocked by the Sino-Soviet border clashes in the spring of 1969 and fearful they could lead to nuclear war, he also saw huge opportunities for the United States. By the summer he had instructed US diplomats to signal that the United States was open to talks with Beijing. He also lessened trade and travel restrictions on the People’s Republic. With a view to exit from the war in Indochina and improve relations with the Chinese, Nixon told South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu that the United States in the future would continue to support anti-Communist governments in Asia, but would not intervene to help them with its own troops. He then took off on a whirlwind tour around the world, meeting leaders in Pakistan and—as the first US president—in Communist Romania. In both places Nixon told his hosts in very direct language that he wanted to talk to Beijing, and asked for their help in relaying the message to Mao and Zhou Enlai.

With a new high in Sino-Soviet tension in the fall, and before the Chinese had responded to his feelers, Nixon began thinking about the longer-term implications of reaching out to China. With an eye always on domestic politics, the president realized that Soviet threats against China would make a moderation of US-China policy easier to accept by the American public. But he also told the NSC that the only country that could threaten the United States in the long run was the Soviet Union. Therefore, Nixon asked his team, “we must think through whether it is a safer world with China down, or should we look to keeping China strong?”¹⁰ These were revolutionary thoughts by an American president, and indicated a plan that only Richard Nixon, with his conservative domestic record, could have any hope of achieving.

After the war scare of 1969 abated, the Chinese leaders held back from welcoming Nixon’s overtures too openly. Mao’s focus returned to domestic affairs and to the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Beijing was worried that Nixon was setting a trap for them, and that the real aim of his China policy was just to make it simpler for the United States to win the war in Vietnam. Nixon’s attacks into Cambodia and Laos in 1970, undertaken primarily to cut off North Vietnam’s supply lines to the south, seemed to confirm this view. Mao condemned Nixon’s “Fascist aggression” and agreed to host Cambodia’s exiled king, Sihanouk, in Beijing. Little concrete therefore happened in the Sino-American relationship at first, even though it was clear that new foundations had been laid for the future.

President Nixon was in some ways lucky that his China initiatives took some time to play themselves out. After all, his primary target for a global relaxation of tension was the Soviet Union, not China. And the Soviets had told him very directly about their wariness of any US messing about with their former Chinese clients. The veteran Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatolii Dobrynin, had given the president a message from Moscow, which included stark warnings. “If someone in the United States is tempted to make profit from Soviet-Chinese relations at the Soviet Union’s expense, and there are some signs of that, then we would like to frankly warn in advance that such line of conduct, if pursued, can lead to a very grave miscalculation and is in no way consistent with the goal of better relations between the US and the USSR.”¹¹ Nixon hoped that the Soviets and the Chinese would attempt to overbid each other in a search for America’s good graces. But at the same time he had to be careful not to play the China card in such a way that he upset the more important game, that with the Soviet Union.

Nixon wanted to find a stable balance in relations with the Soviets, at least for the immediate future. His aim was to reduce the risk of war and, over time, socialize Moscow into the international system that the United States had created. The Soviet Union, Nixon believed, was a postrevolutionary state, whose state interests counted for more than its ideology. As long as the Soviets did not challenge the global power of the United States, the president was happy to recognize it as the other Superpower and let it keep its hegemony in eastern Europe. The Russian leadership of the Soviet Union was, after all, fellow Europeans, Nixon concluded. They were easier to talk to, and through, than assorted Third World radicals, including those in Vietnam.

But Nixon’s détente policy toward the Soviet Union also took time to put in place. Although Brezhnev was eager for a stabilization of relations with the United States, there were many points of conflict that got in the way. The Soviet Union, Brezhnev insisted, would not accept a position of subservience to the United States in return for peace. It would continue to set its own positions in world politics on a global scale and defend socialism internationally, including in Cuba and the Middle East. Even in getting an agreement on limiting the number of strategic nuclear missiles, which Brezhnev himself had called for in the past, the Soviets would not be rushed. In Moscow, leaders believed circumstances favored them. “We got time,” Brezhnev told his colleagues. “The Americans… try to push us. Now, we will not abandon the talks, but neither will we drive them forward.”¹² By 1971, with his reelection campaign coming up, Nixon was getting impatient, especially on the nuclear talks. “Just make any kind of a damn deal,” he told Henry Kissinger. “You know it doesn’t make a goddamn bit of difference. We’re going to agree to settle it anyway.”¹³

It was Brezhnev’s foot-dragging that pushed Nixon toward the greatest gamble of his political career. In April 1971 Mao had finally decided to respond to Nixon’s overtures. Through the Pakistanis, he invited the president to visit Beijing for direct talks with the Chinese leadership. Nixon immediately decided to accept. He thought that reaching out to Beijing would put necessary pressure both on the Soviets and the North Vietnamese. “The difference between [the Chinese] and the Russians,” Henry Kissinger explained, “is that if you drop some loose change, when you go to pick it up the Russians will step on your fingers and the Chinese won’t.… The Russians squeeze us on every bloody move and it has just been stupid.”¹⁴

In spite of Nixon’s doubts about his national security adviser’s negotiating skills, he decided to send Kissinger to Beijing as his advance man. The preparatory mission was to be secret, and Nixon knew that sending Kissinger was his best bet to keep it that way. On 8 July 1971, Kissinger flew to Pakistan for well publicized meetings with the leaders there. After the welcome reception on the first evening, Kissinger feigned illness, and his spokesman told reporters that he needed to rest outside Islamabad for a day or so. Instead, Kissinger that night flew secretly on a Pakistani aircraft straight to Beijing, where he was welcomed by Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Awestruck at being the first American leader to visit Communist China, Kissinger began reading from a prepared text. Zhou cut him short. China, he said, was hoping for “coexistence, equality, and friendship.” But for that to happen, the United States “must recognize the PRC as the sole legitimate government of China and not make any exceptions. Just as we recognize the United States as the sole legitimate government without considering Hawaii, the last state, an exception to your sovereignty, or still less, Long Island.” In other words, the US relationship with Taiwan had to go.

On 15 July, with Kissinger back from his trip, Nixon astounded the world by going on live television to announce that he would visit the People’s Republic of China soon. His aim, he said, was to further the cause of world peace. In Beijing the public announcement was shocking for those who had grown up with anti-Americanism as part of their basic beliefs. But it did strengthen Zhou Enlai’s position in the frenzied infighting that the Chinese regime was going through due to the Cultural Revolution. As usual, Zhou had succeeded in carrying out Mao’s wishes. Suspecting that he was falling out of favor, in part as a result of the US deal, Mao’s designated successor Lin Biao made a dash for the Soviet border, only to die when the plane he was escaping on crashed in Mongolia. The chaos created by Lin’s defection and death in September 1971 postponed Nixon’s visit. It also reinforced Mao’s hatred of the Soviet Union. Just like he had done in the case of Liu Shaoqi, Mao linked Lin’s betrayal to Soviet social imperialism. Lin Biao had “wanted to compromise with the Soviet revisionists in defiance of our party’s efforts to expose and criticize Soviet revisionism,” Mao claimed.¹⁵ When asked by Romania’s Ceauşescu, who had helped with contacting the Americans, whether China, in due time, could also put things right with Moscow, the Chairman was adamant: “We will not put anything right, and will continue in our dogmatism; even [for] ten thousand years.”¹⁶

On 21 February 1972 Nixon arrived in Beijing, the first US president ever to visit China. With arms limitation talks with the Soviets still ongoing, and no end to the war in Vietnam, the president needed a foreign policy success. He was determined to make this the one. Mao was ill, recovering from a severe lung infection, and only put in a brief appearance, during which he rambled about his weakness and incapacity. When the president gushed that “the Chairman’s writings moved a nation and have changed the world,” Mao responded that he had “not been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity” of Beijing. Looking at Nixon, Mao pronounced that he liked him. “I like Rightists,” the Chairman said. “I am comparatively happy when these people on the Right come into power.… We were not very happy with these presidents, Truman and Johnson.”¹⁷ Mao left the negotiations to Zhou, but kept a keen eye on what was happening.

Speaking to Zhou as if he were a congressman whom the president needed to win over to his side, Nixon stressed that the Chinese needed to deal with him, the president, directly. Other US politicians would oppose the understanding with China, Nixon said. Only he could deliver it. But in order to do so he needed to keep even some of his own cabinet members in the dark about what was going on. These included Secretary of State William Rogers, whose department Nixon suspected of leaking documents to the press in order to damage the president. Zhou listened to this unexpected and ingratiating performance, saying very little.

Then the president jumped straight into his view of why the United States and China had to cooperate. The Soviet Union was threatening world peace. “I believe,” Nixon told Zhou, that “the interests of China as well as the interests of the U.S. urgently require that the U.S. maintains its military establishment at approximately its present levels and… [maintains] a military presence in Europe, in Japan, and of course our naval forces in the Pacific. I believe the interests of China are just as great as those of the U.S. on that point,” Nixon said. To him, the president explained, this was not about Taiwan, or east Asia, or even about the Vietnam War. It was about global stability.¹⁸

With Mao watching every move, it was hard even for a seasoned diplomat like Zhou Enlai to come up with much that the Americans wanted to hear, except attacks on the Soviets. On Indochina, Zhou told Nixon that the United States should withdraw, but that the Chinese would continue to support North Vietnam, the FNL, and the Cambodian and Laotian Communists. Japan, the premier said, should become “peaceful, independent, and neutral.” Korea was an internal matter, for the Koreans to decide. And Taiwan would be “liberated” by the PRC after the United States broke its military links with Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, something Zhou hoped would happen during Nixon’s second term in office.

But Zhou did not have to offer much. Nixon needed a breakthrough with China for his own reasons. He hoped the positive press coverage of the visit in the United States would help him get reelected. But he also hoped the Soviets and the North Vietnamese would be concerned enough about the Sino-American contacts to seek their own settlements with Washington. The final statement of the visit, the Shanghai Communiqué, set out the views of the Chinese and US government separately at first. But it then concluded that the two countries would continue to work toward full normalization of their bilateral relations and cooperate on trade and technology. On the crucial issue of Taiwan, the communiqué made it clear that neither side wanted the island’s future to be a barrier to current Sino-American interactions:

The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves. With this prospect in mind, it affirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan. In the meantime, it will progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as the tension in the area diminishes.¹⁹

As with most diplomatic breakthroughs, neither side had fully got what they wanted. But Nixon was right about the value for the United States of starting an open-ended process in which China could be brought into play to serve American interests. Mao, on his side, had obtained increased security against the Soviet Union and at least some hope of recovering Taiwan soon. The Chairman remained puzzled, however, about the ultimate aims of the Americans. He could not understand why Nixon would support the “real” Communist revolution, his revolution, against the fake Communists in Moscow. “Kissinger,” Mao had told the Vietnamese in 1970, “is a stinking scholar… a university professor who does not know anything about diplomacy.”²⁰ Five years later, Mao accused Kissinger of “leaping to Moscow by way of our shoulders.”²¹ There was limited cooperation but almost no trust in the relationship, even after the Americans started to share highly sensitive intelligence with the Chinese.

For the rest of the world, and especially the rest of Asia, the breakthrough in Sino-American relations amounted to a strategic earthquake. For more than twenty years, Washington had been telling the Japanese, the South Koreans, and the southeast Asians that the Americans were in Asia to protect them against the expansionist plans of Chinese Communism. In Europe and elsewhere, the United States had protested any attempts by its allies or by neutrals to recognize the People’s Republic of China. And now the US president appeared, smiling and saluting, in Beijing with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. The Japanese prime minister, Sato Eisaku, who had been informed just a few minutes before Nixon’s TV speech in 1971, had been in tears. “I have done everything they [the Americans] have asked,” Sato said, but “they have let me down.”²²

For Japan, the “Niksonu Shokku,” or Nixon Shocks, of 1971 led to some big discussions about the country’s future, even within the ruling LDP. This was Japan’s Cold War turning point. Nixon’s departure from Bretton Woods was to a high extent directed against Japan’s commercial interests. Seen from Washington, Japan had done too well under American tutelage. And Nixon’s China adventure had left Japan high and dry diplomatically. Meanwhile Japan’s domestic Cold War, between the LDP on the one side and the Communists, Socialists, and trade unions on the other, had abated (though much still divided them). The hapless Sato was in 1972 replaced by Tanaka Kakuei, who immediately set out for Beijing himself to make up for lost time. China and Japan agreed to establish full diplomatic relations, recognize Taiwan as a part of the PRC, and jointly oppose “hegemony” (shorthand for the Soviet Union) in the region.

Other Asians followed suit. Now encouraged by Beijing, the North Vietnamese decided that Nixon was serious about wanting out, and agreed to a peace deal with the Americans in Paris in January 1973. The Paris Accords were a curious mix of points inserted unilaterally by Washington and Hanoi, affirming both the unity of Vietnam and the sovereignty of South Vietnam. “The military demarcation line between the two zones at the 17th parallel is only provisional and not a political or territorial boundary,” the text said. But it also said that “the South Vietnamese people’s right to self-determination is sacred, inalienable, and shall be respected by all countries.” Understandably, Nixon had to twist the South Vietnamese leaders’ arms to get them to sign such a jerry-built agreement. In Beijing, Mao told the North Vietnamese that they should take a break for at least six months before they went on to conquer the whole country. But the Sino-Vietnamese relationship was already in free fall. As Vietnam neared forcible reunification under its Communists, Beijing suspected that their long-time allies had now teamed up with the Soviets to control all of Indochina.

Richard Nixon’s opening to China had manifestly paid off in terms of what mattered most to the president. Suddenly fearful of losing out on the opportunity for détente with its main enemy, Leonid Brezhnev had pushed the arms limitation talks with the Americans toward agreement. When Nixon arrived in Moscow in May 1972, three months after his visit to Beijing, a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) was ready for signing. For Brezhnev the summit was the highlight of his career as a statesman. Not only did the SALT agreement assume that the Soviet Union had reached parity with the United States in terms of strategic nuclear forces and was therefore militarily its equal, but the US president was willing to accept a general text, which included some of the key concepts that the Soviets had put forward in international relations over the past twenty years. “In the nuclear age,” said the Basic Principles agreement signed in Moscow,

there is no alternative to conducting [US-Soviet] mutual relations on the basis of peaceful coexistence. Differences in ideology and in the social systems of the USA and the USSR are not obstacles to the bilateral development of normal relations based on the principles of sovereignty, equality, non-interference in internal affairs and mutual advantage.… [The two countries] will always exercise restraint in their mutual relations, and will be prepared to negotiate and settle differences by peaceful means. Discussions and negotiations on outstanding issues will be conducted in a spirit of reciprocity, mutual accommodation and mutual benefit. Both sides recognize that efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, directly or indirectly, are inconsistent with these objectives. The prerequisites for maintaining and strengthening peaceful relations between the USA and the USSR are the recognition of the security interests of the Parties based on the principle of equality and the renunciation of the use or threat of force.²³

It was a remarkable declaration of a Cold War truce and of US recognition of the Soviet Union as an equal. For a country that throughout its twentieth-century history had built its foreign policy on concepts of uniqueness and, eventually, unrivaled power, this was a big step and, over time, a highly contested one domestically. But internationally it set off a moment during the Cold War where people in many different parts of the world for the first time thought that the conflict would be resolved by negotiation and mutual convergence. At this particular juncture it probably mattered less that neither Nixon nor Kissinger thought so. Their worlds remained ensconced within the Cold War. Elsewhere their actions helped some people start thinking beyond it.

One such departure in the 1970s stressed human and governmental interdependence across Cold War blocs. Humanity faced many challenges that were common to East and West alike, went the argument from some intellectuals and politicians. States were getting increasingly difficult to govern because they were getting more complex. Information flows were more difficult to harness, both for public and private activity, because there were more of them. Challenges of education, health, social care, urban planning, and transport were similar in all industrialized societies. Was it then not likely that East and West would become more similar over time, and that ideologies would matter less? The US economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who had served in the Kennedy Administration, had foreseen this already in his Reith Lectures for the BBC in 1966:

The convergence between the two ostensibly different industrial systems, the one billed as socialism and that derived from capitalism, is a fact. And we must also assume that it is a good thing. In time, and perhaps in less time than may be imagined, it will dispose of the notion of inevitable conflict based on irreconcilable difference.… In the United States, were it not so celebrated in ideology, it would long since have been agreed that the line that now divides public from so-called private organization in military procurement, space exploration, and atomic energy is so indistinct as to be nearly imperceptible.²⁴

Common perceptions of the centrality of science and technology would be key in bringing states of different persuasions closer together, Galbraith and others argued. But the arms race stood in the way of scientific cooperation. Distrust precluded common gains. Even though Nixon and Brezhnev moved toward arms control, many experts felt that such efforts were not moving fast enough. The Pugwash Conferences, in which scientists from East and West met without (at least visible) government interference, served to spread the idea that the scientific elite had a particular responsibility for world peace. In its 1969 report, the conference maintained that “effective deterrence can be obtained with a drastically reduced level of nuclear stockpiles.… The enormity of the destruction that would result from a full scale nuclear war with present stockpiles of nuclear weapons is simply not comprehended by the general public. Scientists have a great responsibility to help educate the public about this.”²⁵

The Pugwash scientists were undoubtedly right that US and Soviet nuclear stockpiles had reached unconscionable levels by the 1970s. The SALT negotiations, important as they were in building trust between the two sides, did nothing to reduce these levels. Their aspiration was simply to reduce future growth in the arsenals. During the 1960s the number of nuclear warheads had increased massively. Most of this increase was in the Soviet Union and the United States. The other nuclear powers—Britain, France, and China—had much smaller arsenals. The Soviets attempted to catch up with the US lead. In 1964 the United States had had ten times as many strategic nuclear warheads as the Soviet Union. Ten years later this advantage was reduced, though the Americans still had more than three times as many warheads, with much greater precision and deliverability. Between them, though, the increase was staggering, as the overall number of nuclear weapons had more than doubled during the 1960s. By 1975 there were nearly fifty thousand nuclear weapons. Some of these had six to ten independently targetable warheads. Their combined explosive power was more than enough to destroy all of the Earth’s combined landmass.

But the perverted logic of the arms race did not stop with Earth. After the Soviet Union put the first satellite in orbit in 1957, the Cold War also threatened to spread into space. The rockets used to lift satellites into position was nearly identical to those propelling the Superpowers’ intercontinental nuclear missiles. Both sides knew that making military use of such satellites would dramatically improve their position in the arms race. Very soon they were used not only for communications and missile guidance systems, but also for surveillance. Some experts on both sides argued for putting offensive weapons in space. Luckily, political leaders held back. One of the first signs of a coming era of détente was a UN-sponsored treaty in 1967 prohibiting the permanent stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space.

After the US moon landings in 1969 Nixon and Brezhnev realized that some cooperation on space exploration might be in the interest of both countries, and could provide a powerful symbol of a new era in Superpower relations. Pushed by scientists from both sides, the two leaders signed an agreement on cooperation in space research during Nixon’s 1972 visit to Moscow. “That’s got so much imagination to it,” Kissinger crowed to his boss. “Kennedy,” said Nixon, being Nixon, “Kennedy could never get even that, that space thing.” Three years later space cooperation delivered one of the most striking images of détente, when a US Apollo spacecraft docked with a Soviet Soiuz and the astronauts shook hands through the opening hatch.

While some Cold War skeptics devoted themselves to promoting contact between societies, scientific exchange, or disarmament, others protested the Cold War as an extension of state control of the individual. The youth protest of the 1960s went through a transformation in the 1970s, at least for some of its protagonists. Out went the belief in Trotskyist or Maoist alternatives, at least for the Western world. In came a concern with state surveillance and state crimes. The French philosopher André Glucksmann, who had been chanting Maoist slogans in the streets in 1968, six years later wrote a book in which he compared Stalin’s crimes to those of Hitler. Entitled The Stove and the Cannibal: An Essay on the Connections Between the State, Marxism, and the Concentration Camps, the book argued that Marxism in any form led to totalitarianism. In the United States, too, former socialists—like Georgetown professor Jean Kirkpatrick, and radicals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the architects of Johnson’s War on Poverty—began stressing individual rights and choices over welfare provisions.

Some of the reinvigorated preoccupation with personal liberties in the West linked up with the critique of Stalinist society coming from Soviets and east Europeans. The Soviet Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stood out as one of the bravest investigators of his government’s crimes. His novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich revealed the inhumane conditions in Soviet labor camps, in which millions had served for no reason whatsoever. To Solzhenitsyn, the camp guards’ cry became emblematic for the Soviet Union itself: “Attention, prisoners. Marching orders must be strictly obeyed. Keep to your ranks. No hurrying, keep a steady pace. No talking. Keep your eyes fixed ahead and your hands behind your backs. A step to right or left is considered an attempt to escape and the escort has orders to shoot without warning.”²⁶

Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. Other writers followed suit. Andrei Amalrik was forced to go abroad two years later. His crime was that in an essay published in the West he had asked whether the Soviet Union could survive until George Orwell’s infamous year 1984. A state so dependent on control and repression would sooner or later get into trouble, Amalrik argued. The longer authoritarianism and international isolation lasted, “the more rapid and decisive will be the collapse when confrontation with reality becomes inevitable.” Against those both inside and outside the Soviet Union who said that “the situation is better now than it was ten years ago; therefore ten years from now it will be better still,” Amalrik felt instead that the Russian Revolution had run its course, and that it had nothing more to offer the Soviet peoples.²⁷

Other Cold War critics took their argument to the global level. They argued that neither socialism nor capitalism had been able to solve the big, common problems that humanity faced, and that the ideological competition rather distracted from their resolution. The damage to the environment caused by both forms of industrial development, the rapid increase in population, which many experts assumed contributed to hunger and turmoil, and the dire poverty in the postcolonial states convinced many in the West that the Cold War would soon be a thing of the past. The 1967–69 civil war in Nigeria, which was set off by resource competition and ethnic conflict rather than Superpower intervention, seemed more real than any potential clashes across the Cold War divide in Europe. The pictures of starving children in Biafra, broadcast worldwide by both East and West, seemed more of a threat to a common future than the arcane menace of a nuclear Armageddon.

But even for those who foresaw other threats as gaining in importance, détente between East and West stood out as a positive step. In the United States in 1973 almost 70 percent of the population believed that the United States and the USSR could work together for peace. There were even higher levels of support for SALT and for increased contacts in other fields, including trade and technological cooperation.²⁸ In western Europe opinion polls showed that many people thought the Cold War was over for good. Less than 10 percent of West Germans thought that the Soviet Union was a real threat to their country. Interestingly, when asked who they thought would be most powerful in fifty years’ time, more than twice as many West Germans said the Soviet Union than said the United States.²⁹ But unlike in the 1950s, this prospect seemed no longer to fill them with horror.

At first, at least, even the increasingly visible foibles of détente’s main protagonists in the West, President Nixon and West German chancellor Brandt, did not disturb public support for détente. Nixon’s trouble with the law engulfed his presidency soon after his reelection in 1972. The president was found to have interfered with the investigation of a break-in at the headquarters of his Democratic opponents at the Watergate building in Washington. The burglary had been carried out on the orders of White House officials, and pressure on Nixon to testify increased. When it became clear that he faced impeachment and probable removal from office, Nixon resigned in August 1974. He was the first US president to resign and did so in disgrace.

Willy Brandt’s chancellorship also ran aground on trouble of his own making. Like Nixon, he had been reelected in the autumn of 1972 with a solid public mandate. Brandt seemed uncertain, though, over where to move his Ostpolitik initiatives next. He did not want to challenge the US concept of a Superpower-led détente too directly, and he hoped to see more positive changes in the East, and especially in East Germany, before presenting new plans for East-West cooperation. Meanwhile, Brandt’s private life was increasingly messy. He drank too much and his extramarital affairs worried his colleagues, even before they found out that a key official in Brandt’s office was an East German spy. Fearful of attempts at blackmail, Brandt resigned in May 1974. His replacement, Helmut Schmidt, supported Ostpolitik but was a marked skeptic over any eastern European and Soviet long-term willingness to reciprocate for Western concessions.

Nixon’s successor in the White House, Gerald Ford, was also a strong supporter of further engagement with the Soviets and the Chinese. Henry Kissinger continued as foreign policy supremo, now as secretary of state, even though his position within the new Administration was gradually more curtailed. With Congress controlled by the Democrats and even many Republicans after Watergate critical of the strong executive Nixon had tried to put in place, the White House’s room for maneuver in foreign policy became limited. In spite of this, the Ford Administration was able to complete the framework for a new SALT agreement, SALT II, which set equal and clear limits to the number of strategic nuclear weapons each side could possess, even in case of multiple warheads for each missile (MIRVs). The agreement also attempted to prevent the future deployment of new types of strategic weapons.

In November 1974 President Ford traveled to Vladivostok on the Soviet Pacific coast to sign the framework agreement for SALT II. In the negotiations there, both leaders attempted to move ahead as quickly as possible, sometimes against the advice of their own military experts. Brezhnev claimed that his aim was to settle the arms race so that the Soviet Union could turn more to domestic development. “We are spending billions on all these things, billions that would be much better spent for the benefit of the people,” Brezhnev told Ford.³⁰ But the Soviet leader also wanted full equality in terms of all kinds of strategic weapons, including those where the Soviets in reality were lagging behind the United States. Full strategic parity therefore became a kind of trap for Brezhnev, if his aim was to salvage more funds for civilian purposes. The Soviet Union had to spend increasing amounts to reach the levels of weaponry they had falsely claimed, and the Americans generally believed, that the Red Army was already at.

By the mid-1970s proponents of détente had achieved much in ways that could not have been foreseen a decade earlier. It is too easy to say, as some do, that the time was ripe for such measures of confidence-building. Even though the détente process was haphazard and, on some critical issues, contradictory, it had taken real courage to bring it to where it was by 1975. The aging Brezhnev had made it into his life’s work and believed it would preserve peace, even as he and his colleagues in Marxist terms began suspecting that global capitalism had entered a structural crisis that advantaged the Soviet Union in international affairs. The Chinese leaders also deserve some approbation for breaking with the past, even though they wanted to use the security they had gained for further nefarious purposes at home. It was, however, Richard Nixon who had made it all possible. Because he fundamentally distrusted his own people, Nixon had forced US foreign policy onto a track where, for the first time during the Cold War, it dealt with others on the assumption that US global hegemony would not last forever.