10/11/2023 0 Comments Nixon visits china reason![]() They hoped it would also hasten the end of America’s war in Vietnam, as North Vietnamese leaders realised it was time to sue for peace. In their plans, embracing weak China would usefully unsettle the mighty Soviet Union. With China and the Soviet Union on such terrible terms that Mao feared a Soviet invasion, Mr Kissinger and his president saw a chance for geometric diplomacy, to realign the global balance of power. Yet alongside noble talk of ending China’s isolation, Nixon and his foreign-policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, flew to China for secret, cynical reasons, too. His visit was a global sensation, televised live. “We simply cannot leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbours,” Nixon wrote in 1967. Nixon, a cold-war hawk who had spent years smearing opponents as soft on communism, had come to believe that a stable global order must include China. Desperately poor, its people were six years into the Cultural Revolution, a decade of ideological purges and violence at times approaching civil war. China, home to a fifth of humanity, languished in angry isolation in 1972, its borders all but closed to the world. The president’s stated motives were grandly visionary. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android. Listen to this story Your browser does not support the element. On a cold, hazy February morning, he landed in Beijing, the capital of a communist regime that America did not officially recognise, to meet China’s ailing tyrant, Mao Zedong. H ALF A CENTURY ago Richard Nixon took a gamble that made history.
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