On
China, by Henry Kissinger
(Penguin Press, 586 pages, $36)
Henry Kissinger, Bill Buckley once observed, taught a course at
Harvard in the 1950s “taken only by students who intended to become
prime minister or emperor.”
But such students being in scarce supply, even at Harvard, Dr.
Kissinger proceeded to look to the larger arena of American
politics, where there are numerous men of semi-imperial ambition,
in need of the wisdom and counsel of a wise, worldly, and pragmatic
policy adviser of the old school, who knows where the levers are
and how to pull them.
And Dr. Kissinger was just that—a man who found Bismarck
“probably the greatest diplomat of the second half of the
nineteenth century,” and whose doctoral dissertation at Harvard was
a study of Castlereagh and Metternich. Nor, having seen combat in
Germany in World War II as a U.S. Army sergeant in counter
intelligence—a decorated NCO, and a damned good one—could he be
seen as a sheltered effete academician.
The first political prince he undertook to tutor was Nelson
Rockefeller, the last Ripon Society icon of the 20th century. But
the times—and the candidate—were out of joint. Although he’d be
brought back for various cameo roles—notably as vice president
during the Ford administration—the man who would be emperor never
recovered from being blown off the national stage by Nixon,
Goldwater, then Nixon again. And so, in 1960, Kissinger joined the
winning side, and found in Richard Nixon a leader with a
fascination for statecraft and what at the time may have seemed an
unlikely but often-stated ambition to construct what he called in
speeches “a lasting structure of peace.” In Henry Kissinger, first
as national security advisor, then as secretary of state, Richard
Nixon found his foreign minister. And had it not been for
Watergate, their accomplishments would easily have left the Nixon
presidency as one of the most respected and effective in American
history.
It’s hard to remember now what the country—or the world—looked
like in the late 1960s, when Nixon and Kissinger took office: riots
in Berkeley with the National Guard in the streets, riots in
Chicago as the Democrats met, riots in Boston, San Francisco State,
Columbia—the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert
Kennedy—and helping to fuel it all, the war in Vietnam and its
escalation by the best and brightest of two preceding Democratic
presidents. Across much of the world, with the U.S.
increasingly perceived as a paper tiger, the expansion of the
Soviet Empire continued apace.
There seemed to be no workable plan, no overarching strategy, no
coherent long-range policy, no national direction. It was to remedy
this situation that voters had turned to Richard Nixon. And he
delivered. Despite the nearly total hostility of the liberal media
and the liberal left that controlled our centers of learning, he
ended the domestic turmoil. And abroad, he set out to bring the war
in Vietnam to a close, to forge new relationship with the Soviet
Union and China, and in the process to redress the imbalance in the
world’s balance of power.
It would require high intelligence, a deep understanding of
history, an acute sense of strategy, a clear vision for the
future—and a willingness to roll the dice—to bring this
transformation about. To set it all in motion, the first stop would
be China, and the man in charge would be Henry Kissinger.
“FORTY YEARS AGO,” Kissinger writes, “President Nixon did me the
honor of sending me to Beijing to reestablish contact with a
country central to the history of Asia with which America had no
high-level contact for over twenty years.” Our motive was to
develop a long-term policy “transcending the travail of the Vietnam
war and the ominous vistas of the Cold War.”
At the time, Kissinger reminds us,
both 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.
The trip was in no way the result of an impulse based on the
exigencies of the moment. As early as 1965, Kissinger notes, Mao
had begun to alter his tone in remarks about America. And in 1967,
a year before his election, Richard Nixon had published an article
in Foreign Affairs, one thrust of which was “to invite
China to reenter the community of nations.” In fact, writes
Kissinger, the article “went beyond a call for a diplomatic
adjustment to an appeal for a reconciliation.”*
[FOOTNOTE: *In his splendid tribute to his
grandfather, Going Home To Glory, David
Eisenhower writes that well before taking office, Richard Nixon was
developing a plan for ending the war in Vietnam involving China,
which he incorporated into that Foreign
Affairs article and sent a draft to retired President
Eisenhower, who read it carefully and made several suggestions,
“none of which, to Nixon’s relief, disputed his foreign policy
views. The general took no exception even to Nixon’s
forward-thinking China views, which were unfurled for the first
time in the article.”]
Thus, Nixon’s idea of an opening to China had been germinating
for some time; and thanks to Kissinger’s intense preparation and
brilliantly conducted diplomacy, the trip to China was on. That
trip, beginning on February 21 and ending on February 28, 1972, has
been described in great detail in articles and books, and even
inspired a silly opera.
But no matter the treatment, the results were far-reaching.
Nixon and Kissinger opened a new relationship with China, while
maintaining support for Taiwan. The Soviets were thrown badly off
stride, never to recover, thus accelerating the forces that would
destroy the Soviet empire. As for Indochina, Mao would take steps
to discourage the North Vietnamese, and Nixon and Kissinger would
engineer a successful end to the war. (And had our Congress not
lost its nerve, it may well have held.)
As Kissinger puts it, “Nixon’s visit to China is one of the few
occasions where a state visit brought about a seminal change in
international affairs. The reentry of China into the global
diplomatic game, and the increased strategic operations, gave a new
vitality and flexibility to the international system.”
In her splendid account of the visit, Nixon and Mao: The
Week That Changed the World, Margaret Macmillan cites an old
Chinese proverb, reportedly repeated by Zhou Enlai: “The Helmsman
who knows how to guide the boat will guide it well through the
waves. Otherwise he will be submerged by the waves.”
“Or,” adds Ms. Macmillan, “as Mr. Spock will say aboard his
spaceship many centuries from now, quoting an old Vulcan proverb:
‘Only Nixon can go to China.’ “
And perhaps only, one might add, with Henry Kissinger as guide
and navigator.
THE TRIP SERVES as the dramatic center of this book, with early
chapters on Chinese history, culture, politics and warfare. To
impose an intelligible framework on China’s relations with the
world, China, Kissinger describes differences in terms of two
games—chess, the game of the West, the end of which is “total
victory,” putting “the opposing king into a position where he
cannot move without being destroyed;” and the Chinese game of
we qi, a game based on “a concept of strategic
encirclement.”
Given the historic position of China as Middle Kingdom, a useful
analogy, especially when analyzing Korea and Vietnam. Of the Korean
War, Kissinger writes that the split between Truman and MacArthur
suggested to Asian leaders an “inability to harmonize political and
military goals,” which in turn suggested a political “vulnerability
to wars without clear-cut military outcomes—a dilemma that
reappeared with a vengeance in the vortex of Vietnam.” (And may be
reappearing today.)
One of Richard Nixon’s basic goals, writes Kissinger, “was to
free American policy from the oscillations between extremes of
commitment and withdrawal and ground it in a concept of the
national interest that could be sustained as administrations
succeeded each other.” And that might have happened, had it not
been for Watergate. “At a point when American and Chinese strategic
thinking was striving for congruence, the Watergate crisis
threatened to derail the progress of the relationship….the
destruction of the man who had conceived the opening to China was
incomprehensible in Beijing.”
Nor is it much more comprehensible today. In 1993, Nixon
reportedly said, “I will be known historically for two things,
Watergate and the opening to China…. I don’t mean to be
pessimistic, but Watergate, that silly, silly thing is going to
rank up there historically with [China].”
And that may be the case for as long as an aging generation of
journalists and historians with ideological and political axes to
grind continue to denigrate him. Still, there are strong signs
today that reflexive Nixon haters may be finally on their way to
extinction, and a newer generation of historians like Margaret
Macmillan is taking the field, free from archetypical
preconceptions.
Beyond noting that Watergate “threatened to derail the progress
of the relationship [with China] by enfeebling the American
capacity to manage the geopolitical challenge,” and the subsequent
“collapse of congressional support for an activist foreign policy,”
Kissinger devotes only two pages to Watergate’s impact, those
focused mainly on the Chinese reaction. At first Mao and Zhou
suspected it was all a plot to sabotage the embryonic new
alliance. “Increasingly, however, the Chinese accused the
United States of something worse than treachery:
ineffectualness.”
Since the Nixon trip, Kissinger writes, he has visited China
more than 50 times, holding conversations and discussion with
Chinese leaders, and engaging in a life-long study of the country’s
history. Both China and the U.S., he writes, “believe they
represent unique values. American exceptionalism is missionary. It
holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values
to every part of the world. China’s exceptionalism is cultural.
China does not proselytize; it does not claim that its contemporary
institutions are relevant outside China.”
Both countries “have been obliged to overcome their internal
ambivalences and to define the ultimate nature of their
relationship. What remains…is to move from crisis management to a
definition of common goals….The future of Asia will be shaped to a
significant degree by how China and America envision it and by the
extent to which each nation is able to achieve some congruence with
each other’s historic regional role.”
KISSINGER CONCLUDES with a discussion of building a new Pacific
community, constructed on many of the guiding policies and
principles of the Nixon years, with a historical perspective
provided by analogies with 19th and early 20th century England and
Germany—as might be expected from a student and master
practitioner of balanceof- power statesmanship, and an admirer of
Otto von Bismarck.
The U.S. has an enormous stake in the Pacific, where despite the
current muddled preoccupation with the Middle East, our national
future surely lies. Forty years ago, Kissinger writes, the leaders
of our nations were willing “to raise their sights beyond the
issues of the day…and to lay the basis for a world unimaginable
then but unbelievable without Sino-American cooperation.”
“When Premier Zhou Enlai and I agreed on the communiqué that
announced the secret visit, he said: ‘This will shake the world.’
What a culmination if, forty years later, the United States and
China could merge their efforts not to shake the world, but to
build it.”
