The Nixon Foundation, Henry Kissinger and China: The ‘Grand Strategy disconnect’

The Richard Nixon Foundation, created to memorialize the achievements of the 37th president of the United States, recently commemorated the 50th anniversary of his historic opening to China.  

The program was entitled “Grand Strategy Summit Dedicated to Addressing America’s Geopolitical Challenges,” and began with a keynote address by Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s first national security adviser and second Secretary of State. It was moderated by Robert O’Brien, a successor of Kissinger’s at the National Security Council.

Kissinger noted that Nixon came into office at a fraught moment for U.S. foreign policy, facing issues in Vietnam, the Middle East and the Soviet Union, while China was outside of any set of relationships with the U.S.

He generously praised Nixon’s combination of strategic vision and tactical flexibility. By introducing strategic thinking to American foreign policy, Kissinger said, Nixon was able to make simultaneous progress on all those key issues. 

Kissinger described a memo Nixon sent to key members of his foreign policy team, instructing them  to “avoid the approach of treating each problem on its so-called merits.” Otherwise, “aggressors” could use distractions to avoid focusing on America’s main concerns while opportunistically shifting from peaceful consultation to periodic confrontation as it suited their purposes. Kissinger said Nixon followed that approach during his entire 6 ½ years in office.  America’s adversaries practice the strategy today.

Since Kissinger was Nixon’s chief national security influencer, he obviously played a key role in shaping the president’s approach. In his book, “On China,” Kissinger described the new approach as “America’s discovery of realpolitik,” which is his trademark contribution to U.S. foreign policy — though Nixon himself had never been known as a moralist on international relations. 

On the opening to China, however, which Kissinger called Nixon’s “signal achievement,” that was pure Nixon, at least before his China collaboration with Kissinger. A lifetime hawk on Communist China, he laid out his new thinking in his 1967 Foreign Affairs article, “Asia After Viet Nam.” He described China as a problem for the world that had to be addressed in a responsible manner. As he put it, in the parlance of the day: “Red China [has become] Asia’s most immediate threat. … Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.  

Kissinger’s own writings and his teaching at Harvard focused on the Soviet Union and nuclear weapons and evinced no interest in China or in Asia generally. Even when university faculties and students around Boston were embroiled in debates over the Vietnam War, he took no part in any of it, saying he preferred to keep his views to himself.

Winston Lord, who participated in the China project as a Kissinger aide, told a Wilson Center audience that when his boss saw the historic magnitude of Nixon’s purpose, he jumped at the opportunity to be part of it. When Nixon assigned Kissinger the lead role in the preliminary negotiations with China, he provided guidance on how they should be conducted: “We cannot be too forthcoming in terms of what America will do. We’ll withdraw [from Taiwan], and we’ll do this, and that, and the other thing.”

In the end, however, the two realists did just that, pulling the Seventh Fleet out of the Taiwan Strait and withdrawing U.S. forces from Taiwan, all before Nixon made his pilgrimage to meet with Mao Zedong.  

After Kissinger’s remarks, the Nixon Foundation’s next speaker was O’Brien, interviewed by journalist Hugh Hewitt. O’Brien called China “probably the biggest national security threat we face as a country right now” and said the Chinese Communist Party “wants to destroy Taiwan” because of its democratic example to the Chinese people.

“It’s gonna be very hard for us to get closer to China, because we tried that once. We had this idea that if we turned a blind eye to Chinese intellectual property theft, if we let them move all the manufacturing out of America and move it to China, if we turned a blind eye to their human rights violations, whether it was the Uyghurs in Xinjiang or the annexation of Tibet or the extinguishing of democracy in Hong Kong, the threats against Taiwan — if we just let all that happen, the Chinese would get rich at our expense but they’d become more liberal, they become more democratic, they become more like us. … But they love Dr. Kissinger. … But the idea that we’re going to somehow get closer to China, and China’s going to become more like us, just turned out to be a naive hope. … We did a lot for China. And it didn’t pan out, we need to recognize it.”

Nixon himself eventually recognized the failure of his engagement policy, as followed and nurtured by all his successors, except Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden. Yet it was Kissinger, having come to the China engagement portfolio late in his career, who claimed it as his own special mission long after Nixon regretted that “We may have created a Frankenstein” — and Kissinger claims it yet today.

As for Taiwan, Kissinger has never been there. He jokingly chided Mao in 1972 for being willing to defer an attack to seize it for “100 years,” and warned the Taiwanese in 2007 that China “will not wait forever.” Nixon, on the other hand, visited Taiwan more than once and wrote in 1994 that, given Taiwan’s remarkable economic and political development, “China and Taiwan are permanently separated politically.”

Kissinger had a more in-depth opportunity for second thoughts when he did a “retrospective” at another 50-year anniversary, for the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, in 2018.

More than a half-century after Nixon warned that “Red China [has become] Asia’s most immediate threat,” Kissinger unselfconsciously uttered the words that sounded the death-knell of the engagement policy: “[T]he peace and prosperity of the world depend on whether China and the United States can find a method to work together. … This is the key problem of our time.” 

But the most remarkable and revealing aspect of Kissinger’s remarks was his explanation for the potentially calamitous turn of events: “We are two countries that believe they have an exceptional nature in the conduct of policy: We on the basis of the political system of democratic constitutionalism; China on the basis of an evolution that goes back at least to Confucius and centuries of unique practice.” It is a theme often repeated in Kissinger’s writings.

Yet, his moral equivalence makes no mention of the Chinese Communist Party, the real monster that Nixon blamed himself for creating but only erred in believing he could change or tame it.  Kissinger, to this day, does not recognize Marxism-Leninism as the problem and personifies the naivete, albeit sophisticated and erudite, that O’Brien identified in what can only be called the “Grand Strategy disconnect.”

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.