I can only imagine what Nixon would be thinking about what China has now become, and what it means for the US and the world.
Duh.
And China was even worse in Nixon’s time and he and Kissinger knew it.
Yes, he was. And many of us said so at the time.
Recognize the ROC.
Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the UN.The fact that a US president (Carter) implemented the 15th communist goal on that list of 45 communist goals for the USA marks this as a tremendous mistake.
He said that with a straight face? Nixon's legacy is big and bigger government. Even Noam Chomsky calls him one of the great 'liberal' (sic) presidents.
I’m thinking that, since the globalists have been laying plans for almost 200 years, it’s a mistake to assume that Nixon was being naive. He may have been laying plans and being well-paid for those plans.
Don’t leave out Russia.
Yes, of course he was wrong to engage China just as Reagan was wrong to give illegals amnesty. Two worst decisions in the past 50 years. Add to that Bush Junior’s decision to invade Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 when clearly it was his Saudi friends that were behind the attacks. Heck, we’ve had a string of bad Republican decisions that have cost us dearly.
Nixon was probably better than McGovern but who is to say?
Nixon also gave us the 18 year old voter.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691182797/empires-of-the-weak
written by a china fan
China used money we’ve given to them through unfair trade to grow from, at best, a regional threat to a global threat.
We were gullible to think that evil can be reformed.
I think it was a move against the Soviets more than anything. We didn’t open up trade to China until much later.
Henry Kissinger said: every solution is also an entry ticket to a set of new problems.
Richard Nixon was the immoral jerk who supported Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh, forcing Indira Gandhi to become a humanitarian hero. Apart from that he gave us wage and price controls, and the DDT ban that Dr Michael Crichton estimates killed 50 million Africans from malaria. The opening to China was just the worst of Nixon’s many disastrous mistakes. Republican apologists for Nixon are clueless fools.
I still remember the vote to give China the permanent preferred trading status. Sometimes in nineties.
It was actually bipartisan vote - patriots, unionist and human rights congressmen (Va congressman Wolf and NJ Smith, as well as Dick Gephardt MI, were most vocal.) on both sides against, vs. free traders for. That was when US lost everything!
They argued that giving China free access to markets will eventually make China like America, free.
It looks like it is more making America like China!
Nixon was (maybe) right to do some agreement with China against Soviets. But that was it. They should stick with limited opening.
Instead, it snowballed to present day situation, when we cannot make anything in the USA!
Nixon had to know it was wrong but somewhere, somehow the myth of the Red Chinese being agrarian reformers fit in with Nixon’s Quaker worldview
Nixon opened China politically, which was a good move. Clinton opened China economically to our markets, which destroyed American manufacturing.
Everything is unfolding exactly as it is supposed to be.
Like parents who try to control and manipulate their children as adults, the Chinese people are growing and will rebel against their controlling parent.
Hindsight is always clearer. But Nixon’s strategy needs to be judged in the context of what he knew and what his plan was. Not by how it developed years later under subsequent Administrations.
In the 1950s Communist China and the USSR were thought to be a dangerous unified bloc at war with the Free World. Collaborating on the Korean War. On the Indochina Wars. Looking to topple all of Southeast Asia, maybe including the Philippines and Australia.
But there was tension between the two Communist giants and by 1962 the ‘Sino-Soviet Split’ was official. Nixon in the late 60s early 70s was trying to make that split even bigger by luring China into a rapprochement with the US. Nixon’s role in it ends with his resignation in 1974.
The policy of turning China into an industrial powerhouse, a most favored trading partner, and the gutting of American manufacturing occurs in the 1990s with the GHW Bush and Clinton presidencies. A policy continued by Bush junior and Obama. Richly rewarded by campaign donations from corporations enriched by that trade.
China is ramping up the construction of a blue water navy at a pace unseen since WWII. We are dangerously reliant on Chinese manufacturing for many basic needs that we used to manufacture ourselves. None of that is Nixon’s fault. The two major parties collaborated on it in the years after he was long gone. And other than Trump they still are.
I think, at the time, Nixon was right to engage China in a limited & symbolic way.
The problem is that, starting with Clinton, they handed China the keys to the front door.