CHAPTER 8
The Road to Reconciliation
BY THE TIME the improbable pair of Richard Nixon and
Mao Zedong decided to move toward each other, both of their
countries were in the midst of upheaval. China was nearly consumed
by the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution; America’s political
consensus was strained by the growing protest movement against the
Vietnam War. China faced the prospect of war on all its
frontiers—especially its northern border, where actual clashes
between Soviet and Chinese forces were taking place. Nixon
inherited a war in Vietnam and a domestic imperative to end it, and
entered the White House at the end of a decade marked by
assassinations and racial conflict.
Mao tried to address
China’s peril by returning to a classical Chinese stratagem:
pitting the barbarians against each other, and enlisting faraway
enemies against those nearby. Nixon, true to the values of his
society, invoked Wilsonian principles in proposing to invite China
to reenter the community of nations: “We simply cannot afford,” he
wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs
in October 1967, “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.”1
Nixon went beyond a
call for a diplomatic adjustment to an appeal for a reconciliation.
He likened the diplomatic challenge to the problem of social reform
in American inner cities: “In each case dialogues have to be
opened; in each case aggression has to be restrained while
education proceeds; and, not least, in neither case can we afford
to let those now self-exiled from society stay exiled
forever.”2
Necessity may provide
the impetus for policy; it does not, however, automatically define
the means. And both Mao and Nixon faced huge obstacles in
initiating a dialogue, not to speak of a reconciliation between the
United States and China. Their countries had, for twenty years,
considered each other implacable enemies. China had classified
America as a “capitalist-imperialist” country—in Marxist terms, the
ultimate form of capitalism, which, it was theorized, would be able
to overcome its “contradictions” only by war. Conflict with the
United States was unavoidable; war was probable.
America’s perception
was the mirror image of China’s. A decade of military conflicts and
near conflicts seemed to bear out the national assessment that
China, acting as the fount of world revolution, was determined to
expel the United States from the Western Pacific. To Americans, Mao
seemed even more implacable than the Soviet leaders.
For all these
reasons, Mao and Nixon had to move cautiously. First steps were
likely to offend basic domestic constituencies and unnerve allies.
This was a particular challenge for Mao in the midst of the
Cultural Revolution.