Today's Anniversary: Nixon in China

[Stavros]

Richad Nixon arrived in China on the 21st of February 1972 in an historic meeting which marked the beginning of the end of China's isolation from much of the world. There is evidence that Nixon had considered how to break the impasse in the election year 1968, but the chaos of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and particularly the confrontation between Chinese and Russian troops across the Yalu River in 1969 propelled China toward the USA. Richard Nixon is one of those complex Presidents whose record seems to veer from the courageous and the imaginative, China being an example, to the borderline insanity of the Breakfast Missions in Cambodia and the equally venal lies Nixon told over Watergate. China, however, was never really the same again, Mao was in decline and died in 1976, and thus what began in 1972 was a sequence of events that has brought us closer, and Nixon was a key driver of that policy.

[runningdownthatdream]

I must say these little history tidbits of yours are interesting and appreciated!

In theory it would appear that his approach to China better served both countries over the long term and by default the rest of their respective spheres of influence. It's arguably THE major achievement of American diplomacy over the past 40 years.

[Stavros]

Thanks for the compliment, I get a lot of this stuff through online bulletins that I subscribe to. On the one hand I can see your point about American diplomacy and China, but on the other hand there are other candidates.

Many people -not least in the Arab world- were taken by surprise in 1977 when Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat flew to Jersualem to address the Knesset (he had in fact floated this idea, or some face-to-face discussions with the Israelis before); two years later President Carter sponsored the talks at Camp David which led to the 1979 Peace treaty which still holds and which makes Carter the only one of two Presidents, the other also a Democrat, who have brokered peace treaties between Israel and its neighbours which nine other Presidents failed to achieve- ten if you include Obama as it remains to be seen if John Kerry can get anywhere with Netanyahu (Mahmoud Abbas is such a craven, supine loser he will agree to almost anything).

Because the conflict with Israel has not ended, this might not rank as highly as China, and some people, not just Americans, are nervous about the 'rise of China' that has taken place since Nixon went to China; but some might want to argue it did show that supposedly implacable enemies can be brought to the negotiating table and shake hands -I don't think anyone expected it of Menachem Begin, and certainly not of Yasser Arafat in 1993, and in the case of the latter, the diplomacy began in secret in Norway and the Americans were not initially involved.

Nevertheless, it was critical for the Americans to be seen as 'honest brokers' in the Middle East and that was also part of Clinton's diplomatic initiative in the Balkans, although it might also be argued that the Serbians were 'bombed to the negotiating table' so I am not sure if the Balkans qualifies on the same level as China and the Middle East. Fundamentally, it is about the USA being a decisive player in the resolution of disputes, more so than the United Nations. On that basis, these treaties can be seen as triumphs of American diplomacy. China and the Middle East are both important regions, how you rank these achievements I don't know.

The 1979 treaty would not have happened without Sadat's initiative (and he was assassinated a few years later); the 1993 Treaty would not have happened without the PLO losing its funding from the USSR and the secret talks in Oslo (and Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated a few years later). The diplomacy in China would not have happened without the military confrontation between the Chinese and the USSR in 1969.

Yet, individuals still had to make decisions, and Nixon got that one right.

[buttslinger]

I wonder if Nixon would have liked Bush and Cheney on his team. Corrupt enough but totally incompetent.

[Dino Velvet]

I wonder if Nixon would have liked Bush and Cheney on his team. Corrupt enough but totally incompetent.

Add Obama to the team as press secretary. Every corrupt man needs a good liar to vouch for him.

[buttslinger]

Add Obama to the team as press secretary. Every corrupt man needs a good liar to vouch for him.

You're pretty brave when Trish ain't here. The only lie I ever heard Obama tell was when he said he didn't know who Snooki was. FDR was a GREAT liar. Nixon had that sweaty upper lip. Not good for playing poker or debating.

[Dino Velvet]

You're pretty brave when Trish ain't here. The only lie I ever heard Obama tell was when he said he didn't know who Snooki was. FDR was a GREAT liar. Nixon had that sweaty upper lip. Not good for playing poker or debating.

I didn't know Trish was his secret service. She also knows he's just a public servant and wouldn't jump on a live grenade for him like some in here would.

Obama did lie about Snooki. Everything else was taken as gospel by his followers. Like The Bible, too much manipulation. I can't make that leap of faith. Gotta dunk my head in the toilet first to baptize me into becoming a believer.

[Stavros]

I wonder if Nixon would have liked Bush and Cheney on his team. Corrupt enough but totally incompetent.

You need to do some elementary research Buttslinger -Cheney was in the Nixon White House in his early career-

-Office of Economic Opportunity 1969-70 (the Office was run by Donald Rumsfeld).
-White House Staff Assistant, 1971
-Assistant Director of the Cost of Living Council 1971-73

-Deputy Assistant to President Ford, succeeding Rumsfeld as White House Chief of Staff. Ok so it's not Nixon but Cheney's career began and blossomed when Nixon was in the White House.

[runningdownthatdream]

You need to do some elementary research Buttslinger -Cheney was in the Nixon White House in his early career-

-Office of Economic Opportunity 1969-70 (the Office was run by Donald Rumsfeld).
-White House Staff Assistant, 1971
-Assistant Director of the Cost of Living Council 1971-73

-Deputy Assistant to President Ford, succeeding Rumsfeld as White House Chief of Staff. Ok so it's not Nixon but Cheney's career began and blossomed when Nixon was in the White House.

Stavro if you haven't watched it already there's a good informative doc On Cheney called 'The World According to Dick Cheney'. He's a disturbing man and you get that impression just from him casually talking - really typifies the 'banality of evil' saying.

The World According to Dick Cheney (2013) - IMDb

[Stavros]

Stavro if you haven't watched it already there's a good informative doc On Cheney called 'The World According to Dick Cheney'. He's a disturbing man and you get that impression just from him casually talking - really typifies the 'banality of evil' saying.

Thanks for the link -I have found a clip from youtube. I am not sure how many studies there have been of Vice-Presidents, there is an assumption that they don't do much except ceremonial duties while waiting their turn to occupy the top job -Cheney comes across as the most 'activist' VP in recent memory, but also the most intellectually superior. I can't agree with much of what he says but there is no denying the quality of his intellect; when he was interviewed on the BBC once he completely shredded the arguments being put to him, so anyone taking him on needs to know what they are talking about. Cheney was undoubtedly committed to the security of the USA, whether or not his policy choices have guaranteed it is not so clear.

In the clip below which appears to undermine the diplomatic efforts of Condoleeza Rice against his activist solutions, he argues it was right to physically obliterate the 'reactor' being built in Syria just as it was right to overthrow Saddam Hussein to eliminate the cultivation of WMD that would fall into the 'wrong hands'. The nuclear genie has been out of its bottle in the Middle East for years, but attempts to develop a nuclear option in the region show how difficult and expensive it is -no state can decide to 'go nuclear' in year zero and have a credible threat in year ten. In addition, Iraq was a stable state like Syria -courtesy of the 'stability of terror' in which people were literally terrified of expressing themselves, and has been replaced by a state where hundreds of people are killed each month in bombings, where the northern region of Kurdistan is on the way to becoming a separate state, and where more radical and violent Jihadi groups are feeding the civil war in Syria, even if they failed to make an impact on Iraq itself. I don't know how this can be thought of as a positive outcome of the 2003 invasion, which in any case, had no final solution other than a utopian belief that Iraq would experience a 'democratic revolution'. Indeed, as Dick Cheney says at the beginning of the excellent four-part documentary that aired on the BBC last year -'Anyone was better than Saddam Hussein' -not to mention the chilling words of Tony Blair -'I took the view that we needed to remake the Middle East'.