When Richard Nixon entered the White House in January 1969, he inherited a war in Southeast Asia, multiple foreign crises, and domestic political turmoil in the form of race riots and antiwar protests. China was in the midst of the brutal and disastrous Cultural Revolution. Soviet Russia had recently invaded and crushed a rebellion in Czechoslovakia. China and Russia were supplying our enemies in Indochina. In the Middle East, another war was brewing that would breakout in Nixon’s second term. Nixon dealt with these matters but never took his eye off the geopolitical prize — the political pluralism of the Eurasian landmass, without which America’s security would be imperiled.
The overriding goal of U.S. foreign policy remains the same — to maintain and strengthen the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia.
Today, the United States confronts a war between Russia and Ukraine, a renewed Middle East conflagration between Palestinians and Israel, and rising tensions in the western Pacific over Taiwan. The Biden administration is pouring money and resources into Ukraine and the Middle East (giving money and aid to both Israel and the Palestinians). Meanwhile, China’s President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are keeping their eyes on the geopolitical prize. At a time when America needs a dose of Nixonian geopolitics, it instead gets an abstract ideological Biden Doctrine that rhetorically divides the world between democracies and autocracies, regardless of geopolitical realities. (READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: The US Foreign Policy Establishment Looks to Restrain Israel)
With American leaders focused on Ukraine and Gaza, Xi and Putin were meeting in Beijing, where the Chinese leader hailed the “political mutual trust” between China and Russia — a trust, Xi said, that was “continously deepening.” Putin, meanwhile, praised the “close foreign policy coordination” between China and Russia. The Sino-Russian axis is strengthening. Their “deep friendship” casts a growing geopolitical shadow across the Eurasian landmass and the western Pacific. Biden and his national security team appear clueless as to how to deal with this threat. Nixon dealt with a similar threat by de-emphasizing ideology, minimizing peripheral conflicts, and focusing on great power politics.
It was called “triangular diplomacy.” It included lessening tensions with China and practicing hard-headed detente with Soviet Russia. Nixon ended the agonizing war in Southeast Asia, recognizing that even a fragile and imperfect peace there was less important than using triangular diplomacy on the Eurasian landmass to deepen the Sino-Soviet split. Nixon was willing to work with the most murderous communist regime in history — Mao Zedong’s government, which was far worse than Putin’s Russia — to improve America’s geopolitical position in Eurasia. He was willing to improve relations with both communist giants, even though they were supplying weapons and, in some instances, manpower to kill American soldiers in Vietnam. And he was willing to support the autocratic Shah of Iran to sustain U.S. predominance in the Middle East. Nixon’s policy was cold, calculating, amoral — and it worked. Nixon’s diplomacy set the stage for Ronald Reagan to end the Cold War on terms favorable to the United States.
Statesmen are judged not by the intentions of their policies but by the consequences of those policies. What will it profit the United States if all of Ukraine is temporarily free and independent, if in the end the Eurasian landmass is dominated by a Sino-Russian-Iranian axis? What will it profit the United States if it uses its diplomatic pressure to craft a temporary two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if it thereby increases Iran’s influence in the region. (READ MORE: Liberal Punditry I: George Packer and the Search for a ‘Clean’ War)
The war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza are peripheral wars — like the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Vietnam War, and the Yom Kippur War. The goal of U.S. policies should be to keep them peripheral, while simultaneously working to diminish the Sino-Russian axis. The overriding goal of U.S. foreign policy remains the same — to maintain and strengthen the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia. Nixon understood that. Biden, apparently, does not.
