Читать книгу The Nixon Effect - Douglas E. Schoen - Страница 8

– CHAPTER 2 –

The Foreign Policy Visionary

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 options for the United States, gave a new vitality and flexibility to the international system. . . . Consultation between China and the United States reached a level of intensity rare even among former allies.

— HENRY KISSINGER1

Nixon and Kissinger’s overture forever changed the Cold War by reconfiguring the Communist bloc and bringing Washington and Beijing together to balance Moscow. . . . The process that Nixon set in motion—the former Red-baiter breaking the taboo on talks with the massive communist power—led to one of those rare times in history when daring leadership actually did redirect the course of events for the better.

— ORVILLE SCHELL2

By July of 1959, the American people already had a pretty good idea of Richard Nixon. He had entered Congress in 1947 and risen to fame rapidly as the chief accuser of Alger Hiss, the former high-level FDR aide who had hidden his ties to the Communist Party. Nixon had won a 1950 Senate election by branding his opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas the “pink lady” for her far-left views and sympathies. He had scratched and clawed to keep his place on the presidential ticket in 1952 with his famous televised “Checkers” speech. And now, a year away from the 1960 presidential election, it was common knowledge that Dwight Eisenhower’s number two would run for the top job.

By 1959 Vice President Nixon was known, but not necessarily understood. Then he went to Moscow to visit the American National Exhibition. The year before, the Soviets had put up an exhibit in New York; the Americans were reciprocating, as part of an effort by the superpowers to improve relations. On arriving in Moscow, Nixon had met with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev; when Khrushchev visited New York, Nixon took the Soviet leader on a tour of the exhibit. Khrushchev surprised Nixon with his aggressiveness and belligerence. As the American vice president stood with the Soviet leader at the exhibit showing him the wonders of color television—then a new innovation—Khrushchev scoffed, and then began challenging Nixon on the US sponsorship of Captive Nations Week, in which Americans were asked to pray for “peoples enslaved by the Soviet Union.”

Reaching out for a burly Russian worker, Khrushchev asked: “Does this man look like a slave laborer?”

Nixon did not back down, but, trying to be gracious, said: “There must be an exchange of ideas. After all, you don’t know everything.” And then he smiled, trying to defuse the tension. The two leaders moved across the gallery to a display model of what was billed as a typical American house, complete with a new washing machine. And right there, as he and Khrushchev stood perched by the railing separating the kitchen, Nixon let the Soviet premier have it.

“Would it not be better to compete in the relative merit of washing machines,” he asked Khrushchev, “than in the strength of rockets?”

“Yes, but your generals say we must compete in rockets,” said the Soviet leader. “We are strong and we can beat you.” And in fact, at that moment in history, the Soviets did outpace the United States in rocket thrust. But Nixon was unfazed.

“In this day and age to argue who is stronger completely misses the point,” he said. “With modern weapons it just does not make sense. If war comes we both lose.” Earlier, Khrushchev had talked over Nixon, but now Nixon turned the tables and cut the Soviet leader off.

“I hope the prime minister understands all the implications of what I just said . . . ,” Nixon asserted. “Whether you place either one of the powerful nations in a position so that they have no choice but to accept dictation or fight, then you are playing with the most destructive power in the world. . . . When we sit down at a conference table it cannot be all one way. One side cannot put an ultimatum to another.”

“Our country has never been guided by ultimatums,” Khrushchev finally offered. “It sounds like a threat.”

“Who is threatening?” Nixon asked.

“You want to threaten us indirectly,” the Soviet leader said. “We have powerful weapons, too, and ours are better than yours if you want to compete.”

“Immaterial,” said Nixon. “I don’t think peace is helped by reiterating that you have more strength than us, because that is a threat, too.” And then he gently jabbed Khrushchev in the chest.³

“We want peace with all nations, especially America,” said Khrushchev, now sounding conciliatory.

“We also want peace,” said Nixon. But: “In order to have peace, Mr. Prime Minister, there must be a sitting down at the table and a discussion in which each sees the points of the other.”⁴

Nixon’s showdown with Khrushchev made front pages around the world, and the picture of the two, perched over the kitchen railing, with Nixon looking very much in charge, became the iconic image of what was soon dubbed the “Kitchen Debate.” Nixon, Time enthused, had “managed in a unique way to personify a national character proud of peaceful accomplishment, sure of its way of life, confident of its power under threat.”⁵ Khrushchev thought so, too: he didn’t forget his encounter with Nixon, whom he now saw as a determined advocate for America and a potentially formidable adversary, should he win the White House. He did whatever he could, he admitted years later, to help defeat Nixon in the 1960 presidential election.

Foreign affairs were always Nixon’s deepest interest, and the staunch anti-Communism of his early career had a natural connection with events overseas. In the late 1940s, when Nixon’s political career began, it seemed world Communism was on an inexorable march: the Soviets had built their Iron Curtain of Eastern European satellite states, and in 1949, Chinese Communists, led by Mao Zedong, had prevailed in the Chinese Civil War and took power on the Chinese mainland—a shattering blow to freedom for the world. In 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to suppress a Democratic movement there. Overhanging all of this was the threat of nuclear annihilation, as the United States and Soviet Union built stockpiles of deadly weapons powerful enough to wipe out any decent concept of human existence.

What Americans saw in the Kitchen Debate was a political leader with the substantive knowledge to go head to head in debate with the leader of Soviet Russia—and to be articulate and resolute in defending the American way of life while doing it. Nixon did not have to worry about whether people saw him as tough on Communism. In fact, when he finally did enter the White House in 1969, many critics had the opposite concern: they felt he would be too much the Cold Warrior, unable and unwilling to manage a more peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union.

Yet the Kitchen Debate provided a clue here as well. “In order to have peace,” Nixon had insisted, “there must be a sitting down at the table and a discussion in which each sees the points of the other.” And as president, much to the surprise of supporters and critics, Nixon would do precisely that with the leaders of the two great Communist powers—not just with the Soviet Union but also with China. He would do it with an approach that I call visionary realism, whereby he exercised a profound strategic wisdom that somehow balanced big-picture thinking with recognition of the realities of the world. And he would do it at a time when the United States faced not just the daunting Cold War challenges of these relationships but also the ongoing bloodbath in Vietnam, which raged on with no end in sight. Nixon’s foreign policy record is large and complex, but for most Americans now, it comes down to three main areas: relations with Russia; relations with China; and the Vietnam War. In each of these areas, Nixon pursued shrewd, strategic, even brilliant policies, though to be sure, this was no guarantee of their enduring success.

Vietnam and Southeast Asia

The Vietnam War paralyzed American foreign policy and traumatized American society. Nixon hadn’t initiated the American military presence in Vietnam, let alone escalated it. But he was determined, as president, to get America out of it. And his foreign policy began with that objective.

When Nixon entered office in January 1969, the war in Vietnam was by far the nation’s most pressing foreign policy issue. Over sixteen thousand Americans had been killed in combat in 1968, the worst casualty year yet for the United States. Worse, the war wasn’t going well; despite years of assurances from the Pentagon and the Johnson administration that a turning point was near, it became clear to the American people in 1968, with the Communist Tet Offensive, that the war would continue to rage on. Even relatively conservative Middle Americans were losing faith in the effort, and they looked to Nixon to find a way out. Most did not favor the Left’s calls for unilateral withdrawal, but they did want American troops to start coming home—preferably, after winning the war.

Nixon had promised as a presidential candidate in 1968 that he had a secret plan to end the war, though he didn’t really have such a plan—at least, nothing that matched the drama of that description. What he developed, once in the Oval Office, was a plan that addressed Americans’ now-prevailing interest: getting Americans home. Thus was born Nixon’s policy of “Vietnamization,” in which he would bring American troops home by the tens of thousands while preparing the Saigon regime to take on more of the war-fighting burden. However, at the same time, Nixon always privately vowed to himself that he would not be the first American president to lose a war, and thus his Vietnam approach had two prongs, which were somewhat mutually exclusive of each other: (1) to get out while saving face as best as possible, and (2) to win. And these conflicting priorities would overhang everything Nixon and Henry Kissinger did when it came to Vietnam.

In his November 3, 1969, address, Nixon laid out his new approach to the nation’s commitment in Southeast Asia:

In the previous administration, we Americanized the war in Vietnam. In this administration, we are Vietnamizing the search for peace. The policy of the previous administration not only resulted in our assuming the primary responsibility for fighting the war, but even more significantly did not adequately stress the goal of strengthening the South Vietnamese so that they could defend themselves when we left. . . . We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for a complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable. This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.⁶

As American troops started returning home, the pressure on the South Vietnam military to carry the fighting load increased. Nixon hoped that US aerial firepower could help even the odds. He coupled his withdrawal of American troops with massive “carpet-bombing” campaigns against North Vietnamese bases in Laos and Cambodia. These efforts commenced with Operation Menu in 1969, in which Nixon deployed American B-52 bombers. His efforts were part strategic and part psychological—he wondered whether he could get better results if Hanoi believed that he was a genuine “madman” or “mad bomber.” Perhaps, he mused on more on than one occasion to Henry Kissinger, if the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies in the region felt that he might go to any length—including the use of nuclear weapons—they might be more inclined to come to the negotiating table. “Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace,” Nixon told Bob Haldeman.⁷ But Nixon’s blunter measures—from mining Haiphong Harbor and bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia to issuing a worldwide nuclear alert—did not make Hanoi back down.

In spring 1970, Nixon upped the ante in Cambodia. Frustrated by the continued presence of large North Vietnamese supply caches in the country and the North’s use of portions of the country as staging grounds for attacks, he ordered a joint invasion (he called it an “incursion”) of the country by American and South Vietnamese troops. His “secret” bombing of Cambodia in 1970 ignited domestic unrest in the United States, sparking the last great wave of campus protests—the largest in American history—which culminated tragically. National Guardsmen fired at protestors at Kent State University, killing four. Two weeks later, at a protest at Jackson State in Mississippi, police fired again on protestors, killing two.

Nixon expressed sorrow about the incidents, but he also made clear that the increasingly violent antiwar movement bore significant responsibility. “This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy. It is my hope that this tragic and unfortunate incident will strengthen the determination of the nation’s campuses—administrators, faculty, and students alike—to stand firmly for the right which exists in this country of peaceful dissent and just as strongly against the resort to violence as a means of such expression.”⁸ Polls showed that the majority of Americans shared his views about the war and the limits of domestic dissent.

The outcry promoted by Nixon’s Cambodia policies might have obscured the broader story, at least from an American perspective: the troops were coming home in massive numbers. On his promise to Vietnamize the war and reduce the American troop commitment, Nixon could hardly have been truer to his word. By April 1972, even in the midst of another massive North Vietnamese offensive, Nixon was able to cite the figures to the American people in a nationally televised speech:

On January 20, 1969, the American troop ceiling in Vietnam was 549,000. Our casualties were running as high as 300 a week. Thirty thousand young Americans were being drafted every month.

Today, 39 months later, through our program of Vietnamization helping the South Vietnamese develop the capability of defending themselves—the number of Americans in Vietnam by Monday, May 1, will have been reduced to 69,000. Our casualties—even during the present, all-out enemy offensive—have been reduced by 95 percent. And draft calls now average fewer than 5,000 men a month, and we expect to bring them to zero next year.⁹

In branding the North Vietnamese offensive “a clear case of naked and unprovoked aggression across an international border,” Nixon made clear that the attack was being repelled solely by South Vietnamese forces. “There are no United States ground troops involved,” Nixon said. “None will be involved.”¹⁰

These massive troop withdrawals not only lowered American casualties in Vietnam but also slowly drained the life out of the antiwar movement at home—and with that, finally brought a close to the anarchic energies of the late 1960s, which a few years earlier had seemed to threaten the capacity of the United States to govern itself. Yet Nixon received virtually no credit for the twin feats of saving American lives and restoring American domestic tranquility.

The remaining problem, for Nixon, was the outcome of the war itself.

The truth of the matter was that Nixon saw Vietnam, to some extent, as a distraction from big-power, Cold War–related politics—the great matters of state that mattered most to him, and in which he hoped to have the most far-reaching impact. So he wanted to get out of Vietnam for many of the same reasons that the American people did. Unlike them, however, he had to worry about his reelection. Nixon’s management of the American withdrawal from Vietnam was at least partially influenced by his concern over electoral politics—namely, that the war not be brought to an end too quickly, lest problems develop in the interim that might reflect badly on the administration’s policies.

Documentary evidence suggests that Kissinger convinced the president that total American troop withdrawals should not be completed until after the 1972 elections.¹¹ And, in fact, twenty years later, during the 1992 presidential primaries, Nixon even told reporters that George H. W. Bush should have kept the Gulf War running through the campaign, as it would have helped his reelection chances.

“We had a lot of success with that in 1972,” Nixon said.¹²

Yet Nixon did succeed in bringing the war to an end, even if the process was protracted and difficult. Peace talks in Paris, which had continued off and on for years, finally began to pick up momentum in 1972. In October of that year, just a month before the presidential election—with Nixon holding a commanding lead in the polls over George McGovern—Kissinger held a press conference and announced that peace was at hand. He hadn’t apparently cleared that view with South Vietnam’s president Thiêu, who objected to terms that would allow Hanoi to retain all of its current territory. But with peace—of a kind—so near to achievement, Nixon knew that he held the advantage, and he pressured Thiêu to accept the agreement by threatening to cut off aid to Saigon. The South Vietnamese president resisted, continuing to push for changes to the tentative agreement; when the North Vietnamese responded by also backing away from the talks, Nixon was left looking for leverage.

He and Kissinger then unleashed the so-called Christmas Bombings in late December to try to bring Hanoi back to the negotiating table. Undertaken a month after Nixon had won the greatest landslide in presidential history, the bombings were some of the most massive in the history of warfare. They did extensive damage to North Vietnamese infrastructure, and Nixon credited the bombardment with bringing Hanoi back to the peace table (others dispute the cause and effect). Perhaps the bombings had the effect Nixon claimed, perhaps not; without question, the momentum for a peace agreement was strong on the American side, and he and Kissinger were determined to bring it to closure. On January 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed, bringing an end to American participation in the Vietnam War, the nation’s longest military conflict.

The agreement constituted “peace with honor,” Nixon said in a televised address to the American people.¹³ Others had their doubts. Critics pointed out that the peace terms—under which the North would be permitted to keep 140,000 troops in South Vietnam, even as American troops withdrew their presence down to zero—were essentially the same as the ones on offer in 1969. And since 1969, they said, an additional twenty-five thousand Americans had died in combat. What had been gained?

That question became more haunting as the peace agreement broke down, due largely to blatant violations by the North Vietnamese Communists. By later in 1973, the two sides were fighting again, and President Thiêu declared the agreement null and void. The now fully Vietnamized fighting forces of the South proved, alas, not able to repel the North’s march—and Nixon, by now reeling under the Watergate scandal, had lost his political leverage to help Saigon. In August 1974, when Nixon resigned the presidency, the war was going very poorly for the South. By spring 1975, the North Vietnamese were nearing Saigon. Thiêu appealed to President Gerald Ford for assistance, but the new Congress, chock full of new progressive Democratic arrivals, elected on anti-Watergate sentiment, blocked the request—one of the most shameful congressional moments in American history, representing a flat-out desertion of an ally in dire need. Thiêu resigned, accusing the Americans of betraying his country—not only by abandoning him but also by forcing him into the 1973 peace agreement. On April 30, the North Vietnamese overran Saigon. The Vietnam War ended at last with victory for the Communists. The North and South would soon unite to become the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

In total, fifty-eight thousand Americans lost their lives in Vietnam, and given its tragic outcome, the sense remains that they died in vain. Some blamed Nixon for prolonging a war that, they claimed, he and Henry Kissinger were never fully interested in winning; all they wanted, on this view, was to establish a “decent interval” between final withdrawal from Vietnam and the total collapse of the Saigon regime. Critics claimed that they cared only about securing the release of American POWs and covering themselves from political damage in the 1972 elections. Otherwise, South Vietnam would be left to fend for itself.¹⁴ Of course, even if one accepts this view, it would at most apportion only partial blame to Nixon. The commitments made by Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and even Johnson’s predecessor, John F. Kennedy, were fateful as well.

I believe, however, that Nixon’s own assessment of these events is closer to the mark. He always maintained that the United States had left Paris in 1973 with a solid agreement to win the peace—and he saw a different culprit in the demise of South Vietnam. “By 1973,” Nixon would later tell Monica Crowley, his assistant in his final years, “we had achieved our political objective; South Vietnam’s independence had been secured. But by 1975, the Congress destroyed our ability to enforce the Paris agreement and left our allies vulnerable to Hanoi’s invading forces. If I sound like I’m blaming Congress, I am.”¹⁵ Indeed, it is impossible to overlook the magnitude of Congress’s decision to wash its hands of the war in 1975.

The American loss in Vietnam was one of the most bitter chapters in American history and continues to haunt our politics today, but Nixon makes a legitimate case in saying that he left the disposition of the war in a manageable state. As the leader of a democracy, he was bound to consult the sentiment of the popular majority, which overwhelmingly desired a drawdown of the American commitment—even if the hope was that such a withdrawal could be done in concert with a victorious outcome. Ultimately, Nixon had to address the American interest first, and in bringing the troops home, reducing American casualties, and securing terms for what, at least in theory, could have been a manageable peace, he achieved as much and probably more than any other president could have done in similar circumstances. It is true that he agreed to a peace in 1973 that he could have had four years earlier—but whether it had been agreed to at the later date or in 1969, Nixon seemed to have gotten the best terms he could have. He extracted the United States from a war that was costing it dearly in human, political, and financial terms. If this doesn’t count quite as a resounding triumph, it deserves the more sober term “achievement.” It took some doing.

Nixon’s conduction of the war had several substantive effects beyond Vietnam. At home, congressional anger about his actions in Cambodia led to the adoption of the War Powers Resolution in 1973, a federal law that reined in a president’s ability to wage acts of war without congressional approval. Of course, the Constitution already makes this clear, but the decade of war in Vietnam prompted congressional liberals to make the terms more specific: presidents would have to notify Congress within forty-eight hours of committing forces, and they could not keep them engaged for longer than sixty days without congressional authorization. The law was passed over Nixon’s veto. Yet nearly forty years later, it did not prevent Barack Obama from waging an undeclared war in Libya.

More broadly, Vietnam was one of the central drivers of Americans’ loss of faith and confidence in government—a confidence that would never again reach the levels of the early postwar period. And, of course, Nixon would be the central player in another driving event: Watergate, which was just beginning to unfold when the Paris Peace Accords were signed. Watergate would not only shatter the confidence of Americans in the honesty and reliability of their government; it would also cripple the remaining American resolve to assist our South Vietnamese ally. Without Watergate, it’s unlikely that the Congress would have so brazenly abandoned Saigon in 1975. The two events are unimaginable without each other.

And so Vietnam cannot be scored as one of Nixon’s happier chapters—indeed, every American president that touched it has found himself scarred. Yet Nixon did fulfill, however imperfectly, his promise to the American people to end the war. There is much to criticize in how he got it done, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that he did get it done.

It’s safe to say, though, that if Nixon’s main foreign policy feat was ending the Vietnam War, his legacy would be checkered at best. But of course, it was not with Vietnam that Nixon left his deepest mark. Nixon will be remembered in history as the American president who ended the global isolation of Communist China, paving the way for normalization of diplomatic relations—with world-historical implications.

China

In 1969, when Nixon took power, many in the American foreign policy establishment still clung to a view of world Communism that held that the Russians, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and Communists elsewhere all moved in sync, united in ideology and goals. Yet the Russian-Chinese relationship had imploded earlier in the decade, and it was clear by 1969 that nothing like a Russian-Chinese alliance any longer existed. Quite the contrary: the two Communist powers had become bitter foes. During Nixon’s first year in office, the Russians and Chinese came closer than they ever had before to going to war. During the spring and summer of 1969, Chinese troops crossed the disputed Ussuri River to ambush the island of Zhenbao (Damanski). But the Russians retook the territory in a successful counteroffensive two weeks later. The fighting took about a thousand lives on both sides, and according to recently released documents, the Soviets seriously considered a nuclear strike against the Chinese.¹⁶ The United States persuaded the Soviets to stand down.

Nixon saw the Soviet Union’s actions as a troubling new phase in the Cold War, reinforcing an idea that had been building in his mind for years: the United States should try to develop constructive relations with the Chinese. It was the Soviets, Nixon told his national-security staff, who posed the greater danger. It would not serve American interests, he stressed, to see the Chinese “smashed” in a war with Russia.¹⁷ The Chinese feared the Soviets, Nixon believed, and these clashes might push China toward developing a better relationship with the United States—and thus help contain Soviet power. The Sino-Soviet Split presented the United States with an opportunity to position itself between the two Communist powers—not only lessening chances that they might become allies again but also reducing the risk to the United States of a three-pronged Cold War. And with the United States and China opening relations, Nixon reasoned, the Russians would be motivated to improve relations with Washington as well.

This was hardly the prevailing outlook in 1969. Not only was it a minority view in the American foreign policy establishment; even Nixon’s own top officials didn’t share it. At first, Henry Kissinger could not understand the president’s desire to reach out to China. “Our leader has taken leave of reality,” Kissinger told his staff in 1969. “He thinks this is the moment to establish normal relations with Communist China. He has just ordered me to make this flight of fancy come true . . . China!”¹⁸

Years later, Kissinger would write that he and Nixon came to the idea of approaching China independently. But the documentary record offers no support for such claims. By all available evidence, the opening to China was Nixon’s idea alone.

Nixon’s anti-Communism, while genuine, had always obscured a more pragmatic, realistic side, which he prided himself on as a student of world affairs. As early as 1954, when he was a young vice president, Nixon had suggested a more conciliatory policy toward China. Nixon did, however, oppose President Kennedy’s proposal to allow China a seat in the UN, saying that it would “irreparably weaken” the rest of Asia. Well into the 1960s, hardline views on Red China, as it was then known, were firmly in the mainstream. In 1966, a Harris poll showed that 58 percent of Americans opposed giving recognition to mainland China and would vote against a candidate proposing it. Yet, Nixon, during that same year, confided to philanthropist Elmer Bobst that his dream was “to bring China into the world.”¹⁹

Nixon had recognized for some time that China was on the world scene to stay, and that Taiwan leader Chiang Kai-shek’s dream of returning to mainland China would never happen. The United States, Nixon had come to believe, had to take the world as it found it—and nowhere did this apply more than to China.

The next year, Nixon authored a seminal article in Foreign Affairs, “Asia after Viet Nam,” in which he tried to determine the future of Asia—and the US policy toward Asia—beyond the impact of the Vietnam War. Envisioning a future that he would soon help to bring about, Nixon wrote:

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. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation. But we could go disastrously wrong if, in pursuing this long-range goal, we failed in the short range to read the lessons of history.

The world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus our aim, to the extent that we can influence events, should be to induce change. The way to do this is to persuade China that it must change: that it cannot satisfy its imperial ambitions, and that its own national interest requires a turning away from foreign adventuring and a turning inward toward the solution of its own domestic problems.²⁰

From early in his first term, then, Nixon set the machinery to work in a long process to pave the way for improved relations with China. In 1969, Nixon’s secretary of state, William Rogers, announced the administration’s Two Chinas policy, which conceded the existence of mainland Communist China and a Nationalist China on the island of Taiwan. That year, the United States gradually lifted a twenty-year economic embargo on China, and within a few years, also ended a trade ban. And the two countries restarted ambassadorial talks in Warsaw in 1970—though the talks were short-circuited when the Chinese walked out in protest of the US bombing of Cambodia.²¹

The public knew little about Nixon’s overtures. The most high-profile hint of anything like rapprochement between the two countries came in April 1971, when Mao Zedong invited an American ping-pong team, competing in the World Table Tennis Championship in Japan, to visit China. The players were the first Americans to visit China since 1949, when the Communists took over. The press called the goodwill gesture “ping-pong diplomacy.”

Yet Mao’s gesture was more than window dressing. The aging Communist dictator understood that he could not afford to be at such a sword’s point with both the Soviet Union and the United States, and thus he sought out better relations with America. Diplomatic ties slowly and quietly grew between the two countries, and, in December 1970, Mao held high-level talks with US officials and indicated that he was willing to meet with Nixon. To pave the way for the meeting and eventual normalizing of relations, Nixon ended naval patrols of the Taiwan Strait, eased travel restrictions, and began referring to the “People’s Republic of China”—a major symbolic milestone.

In June 1971, Kissinger traveled secretly to China to make preparations for a presidential visit. After Kissinger’s return, Nixon finally went public with what he had in mind, dropping the bombshell of his presidency: He announced in a national address that he would travel to China the following year and meet with Mao, becoming the first American president to visit the People’s Republic. The announcement stunned the world and was greeted largely with celebration.

“This is a turning point in world history—I cannot remember anything in my lifetime more exciting or more encouraging,” said Great Britain’s Lord Caradon, former ambassador to the United Nations. “This is one of the great moments in the world’s history,” said Joseph Luns, secretary general of NATO.²² Many others echoed these sentiments, including the New York Times: “By his announcement last night, the President has radically improved the world atmosphere and raised the hopes of all men that the cause of peace in Vietnam and elsewhere will soon be substantially advanced.”²³

Later in 1971, the United States supported the seating of a Communist China representative at the United Nations (though Washington also tried and failed to ensure that a Taiwan delegation be seated as well). Nixon had risen to fame as an anti-Communist, and these announcements shocked many—especially on the conservative right. Millions of others, however, saw the move as a bold and hopeful one to dial down world tensions. Ever since its 1949 Communist Revolution, China had been cut off from the West; now, the president of the world’s greatest power was opening the door to diplomatic recognition.

And so Nixon left Washington on February 17, 1972, heading for China after first spending three days in Guam to acclimate himself to the time difference. His plane touched down in Beijing on February 21. (It’s worth noting that just as Nixon was leaving Washington to set out on his pilgrimage, US planes were dropping the largest tonnage of bombs on Vietnam since June 1968, thus sending a message to Beijing about American firmness in Southeast Asia.)²⁴

The president’s statesman’s instincts were sharp, and he understood that the symbolism of his arrival—indeed, the symbolism of the entire trip—would likely prove more important than any substantive agreements. He instructed his aides to give priority to television reporters and television cameras over the print press—because he understood that the visual images from the trip would be more important than any written words. As he descended the steps of his plane to meet Chinese premier Chou En-lai, Nixon remembered how, in 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had insulted Chou by refusing to shake his hand. Now the most powerful man in the world offered his hand first, and Chou took it.

For a week, Nixon met with Chou en Lai and Mao in China, toured the Great Wall, and drank toasts with Chinese leaders. Though most Chinese did not own television sets, they followed the events via radio and the newspapers—causing the People’s Daily to sell out of copies for the first time in living memory. Back in the United States, and around the world, a global audience of hundreds of millions watched the events—perhaps more people, Nixon said, than had watched any event in the history of the world.

The most important substantive achievement from Nixon’s China trip was the trip itself and what it signified. But for all the pageantry, the two sides did formalize some agreements, which were contained in the Shanghai Communiqué. In broad terms, the agreements contained a pledge from both sides to work toward normalization of relations and not to seek “hegemony” in Asia. And, in what many saw as a warning to the Soviet Union, both sides added: “And each is opposed to efforts by any other country or group of countries to establish such hegemony.”²⁵

On the issue of Taiwan—an irresolvable issue, as the two sides had utterly unbridgeable positions—the American team came up with artful language: “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China.”²⁶ Beijing, in turn, acknowledged that “the American people will continue to carry on commercial, cultural, and other unofficial contacts with the people of Taiwan.” In effect, Nixon’s opening of the US relations with China resulted in an agreement that China indeed existed as one country—while also allowing the United States to maintain that the territories would be overseen by two separate legitimate governments. It allowed the Americans to save face—even though, at the same time, the country was now shifting to a One China policy. Soon after the summit, the United States extended diplomatic recognition and declared that henceforth it would regard the People’s Republic, and not Taiwan, as the legitimate national voice of the Chinese. America relinquished its opposition to Chinese entry into the United Nations, and groundwork was laid for the establishment of diplomatic relations (this did not happen until 1979). Many of the agreements struck in the Shanghai Communiqué continue to govern US-Chinese relations today, especially on the Taiwan issue.²⁷

The political impact of the trip was immediate and entirely to Nixon’s benefit. Nothing he did in office ever approached the acclaim he won for opening relations with China. Nixon had always been respected overseas as a serious political leader, but now he was viewed as a prominent figure in history, as well. At home, too, the trip helped him transform the 1972 presidential race, which once looked like it would be close, into the greatest rout in presidential history. Polls showed 84 percent approval for the China mission—even if conservatives analogized Nixon’s outreach to Nuremberg prosecutors making amends with the Nazis. And while the conservative Right expressed disgust, a Gallup poll revealed that 83 percent of Republicans still supported him for reelection. Somehow he had retained most of his conservative support while pulling off a diplomatic feat that even the most liberal president would have been hard pressed to equal.

Nixon’s overture to China must rank as one of the most audacious and far-reaching foreign policy moves by any American president. It opened the door for an American-Chinese relationship that exists today (with all the complexity that entails). “Nixon goes to China” has become a political metaphor referring to times when a politician with a staunch reputation in one area does something seemingly out of character with, and even in opposition to, his or her long-held principles—but pulls it off on the basis of credibility. (The classical composer John Adams even wrote a symphony about the events called Nixon in China.) Nixon was able to pull it off because as a Cold Warrior, he understood the need to break through a geopolitical state of affairs that had become counterproductive and dangerous. “In Asia, the United States was stuck with a China policy that obliged it to act as though Chiang [Kai-shek] and the other losers of the Chinese civil war were someday going to retake the mainland. The United States was enmeshed in a war in Vietnam that was costing up to 15,000 lives a year,” James Mann wrote in his 1998 book About Face. “Nixon’s initiative was aimed at breaking all of these shackles and creating a world in which American foreign policy would have greater flexibility.”²⁸ This he achieved.

It is no accident that the peace process in Vietnam accelerated after Nixon’s outreach to China. The United States had just strengthened its hand by forging relations with Beijing—and thereby putting the Russians, Hanoi’s leading benefactor, on the defensive. Beyond the impact on Vietnam was the effect the visit had on the Cold War itself. And here, the effect of Nixon’s outreach to China can hardly be overstated. Here was a split in the Eastern bloc; here was a division between the world’s two foremost Communist powers, with one of them now openly embracing the United States as if not an ally, at least not a necessary enemy. This was a chess move on the world table that couldn’t have come with higher stakes, and it was felt like an earthquake in Moscow, which saw itself as losing leverage in the standoff with the United States. Moscow would have to think about dialing down tensions and making deals. And shortly thereafter, the general secretary of the Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev, began reaching out to the Americans to do just that.

Over the long term, too, Nixon’s opening of relations with China seems destined for a place in the annals of historic statesmanship. This becomes increasingly clear today, when the role of China in the world has changed so dramatically since Nixon’s visit to Beijing forty years ago. A younger generation of Americans doesn’t remember a time when China was not an integral, indeed leading, member of the global economic community. Nixon’s historic visit can be regarded as the first step in China’s amazing journey to becoming a world economic powerhouse—a position unimaginable in 1972.

Of course, for that reason, some rue Nixon’s opening communication with Beijing. What, they ask, did the United States get out of it? Haven’t we lost innumerable jobs to China, seeing our manufacturing plants shutter and our working people’s wages fall? In a geopolitical sense, I believe that Nixon’s China gambit bought the United States time and space—with Vietnam, in allowing a way out to be maneuvered; regarding Moscow, in putting more pressure on the Russians to negotiate; and with China itself, in reducing tensions between the two countries. Nixon pursued the national interest relentlessly, without regard to ideological fixations or party preferences.

More broadly, the United States did gain significantly from China’s entry into the global economy, in that the massive availability of cheaper consumer goods has been a boon for those of lower or more modest incomes. Critics of free trade often point to the loss of manufacturing jobs as hurting those of modest means, and there is some truth to that, but they fail to account for the countervailing benefit of cheaper goods. And in China, American businesses have found an enormous and lucrative new market. Our exports to China increased over 600 percent between 2000 and 2011, as compared with just 170 percent to places elsewhere during that period. Chinese demand, in fact, may well be one of the principal drivers behind American job growth in the years ahead.²⁹

This is not to suggest by any means that all is rosy, or that Nixon’s geopolitical achievements have been entirely lasting. Hardly—in my previous book, The Russia-China Axis, I argued that the long Sino-Soviet split is over, and that the two former Communist adversaries have drawn closer and closer together into a de facto alliance against the United States and the Western democracies. This is particularly disheartening in light of the success Nixon had in managing the Chinese relationship—and to a substantial extent, the Russian one, too—and it reflects not only several decades of geopolitical trends but also a massive failure of American leadership. To see Moscow and Beijing jointly conspiring to facilitate rogue regimes like North Korea, Syrian, and Iran; to watch as they ramp up their conventional and nuclear armed forces, as we build ours down; and to understand that they are today’s two leading practitioners of cyberwarfare is to recognize how far we have fallen from Nixon’s successful balancing of these powers. We can only hope that in the presidential election of 2016, the United States gets the foreign policy leadership it deserves and, by now, so desperately needs.

And yet, the failure of Nixon’s successors to maintain a constructive relationship with China as it grew into an economic power, and to manage the transition of Russia after the fall of Soviet Communism, does not detract from Nixon’s achievement. Nixon himself was never ambivalent about the matter: he always saw his opening of US relations with China as his greatest accomplishment, the one for which he would be remembered to history.

As he put it near the end of the China trip, raising his glass for a toast: “This was the week that changed the world.”³⁰

Soviet Union

Needless to say, the Soviet Union was knocked off balance by Nixon’s bold move. The Russians had long counted on hostility between China and the United States as a truism of international relations. Leonid Brezhnev worried that the Chinese might move closer into the American orbit, leaving Russia the odd player out. Thus he began reaching out to Nixon, just as the president and Kissinger had intended. Nixon’s bold opening to Beijing had changed the calculus in Moscow. Pressured by Washington’s new relationship with China, Brezhnev wrote Nixon and invited him to the Soviet Union for a week of summits—which would mark the first time a sitting US president visited the USSR.

When Nixon visited Moscow in May 1972, just three months after he had gone to Beijing, American-Russian relations had been stalled for years, especially on the issue of arms reduction. It had been nearly a decade since John F. Kennedy had brokered an agreement with Moscow (with the help of the British) to limit atmospheric nuclear testing. Moscow had always been obsessed with equaling and eventually surpassing American nuclear capacities. When Nixon took office, the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) were languishing. But now, with the American-Chinese rapprochement, the Russians showed renewed interest in coming to the table.

Nixon had reasons of his own for pursuing the Moscow visit. On the broadest level, reducing tensions with Moscow was a self-evident benefit. The late sixties had been a difficult time; any lessening of tensions would be a boon for national security and for Nixon’s own political standing. But Nixon further hoped to use the prospect of substantive arms control talks as leverage with the Russians in Vietnam. Specifically, he hoped that by making some critical arms control concessions—which he privately believed would not hurt the United States—he could, in turn, win Russian concessions, or at least acquiescence, to American efforts to bring the war to a close.³¹

Nixon knew that leaders in Washington and Moscow were both looking for ways to tamp down the arms race, which had become not just terrifying but also financially ruinous. He approached the Moscow Summit with the same conviction that he had brought to his outreach to China: resolute that he was uniquely suited to the task by virtue of his hardline anti-Communist credentials. He could sell an arms deal with the Russians to the American people, he believed, in a way that a liberal Democratic president couldn’t.

Where Nixon’s Beijing visit had constituted a landmark event merely for taking place, and for the articulation of a general framework of understanding, the Russian visit was more substantive. Nixon and Brezhnev signed ten agreements, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty), an interim SALT treaty, the US-Soviet Incidents at Sea Agreement, and a billion-dollar trade agreement. This was the dawn of détente, a thaw in the Cold War focused on “peaceful coexistence.” The Moscow Summit of 1972 led to two further Nixon-Brezhnev summit meetings, another between Gerald Ford and Brezhnev, and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, resulting in the signing of SALT II in 1979, the details of which had been largely hammered out during the Nixon and Ford administrations. It also served as the model for the very different Reagan-Gorbachev summits a decade later, which laid the groundwork for the end of the Cold War.

Nixon’s forging of détente with Moscow coupled with the opening to China are feats difficult to imagine any other American politician of his era achieving. Only Ronald Reagan had comparable anti-Communist credentials, but in the early 1970s Reagan was a California governor still proving his political abilities. At the senior national political level, no Democrat could have pulled off Nixon’s overtures to Beijing and then to Moscow. More significantly, the American public widely approved of Nixon’s policies, seeing them as courageous efforts to reduce tensions and maintain a fragile peace. On foreign relations, as on domestic policy, Americans saw Nixon as a responsible centrist, a leader poised between irresponsible ideologues to his right and left.

This is not to suggest that the SALT agreements were without flaws. For one thing, the agreements, in “limiting” arms, played a bit with semantics—in that the limits applied to missile production that was already underway. And while the limits applied to the missiles, they did not apply to what were called MIRVs—multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles—the payloads that carried multiple warheads. Thus the Soviets and Americans could still add as many MIRVs as they liked, even if the number of missiles and missile launchers was capped. Both sides could thus produce warheads to an unlimited capacity. As Stephen Ambrose put it, overall SALT was “about as meaningful as freezing the cavalry of the European nations in 1938 but not the tanks.”³²

Yet Ambrose also crystalized why SALT was so important in 1972:

For all the flaws, for all that he could have driven a harder bargain, for all that he had failed to freeze, much less reduce, nuclear arsenals and delivery systems, Nixon had achieved a symbolic breakthrough, namely that the two sides could set limits on their destructive capability. And he fully intended, in his second term, to move from that position to a treaty that would lead to reductions. Even more important, he had established a wholly new basis for the arms race. The ABM Treaty signified the acceptance by both sides of the concept of deterrence through ‘mutual terror.’ In Nixon’s words, “By giving up missile defenses, each side was leaving its population and territory hostage to a strategic missile attack. Each side therefore had an ultimate interest in preventing a war that could only be mutually destructive.”^[33] More than any other individual, Nixon was responsible for that breakthrough.³⁴ (Note 33 transferred from original text.)

From Nixon’s perspective, the benefits of the ABM Treaty, both in national security and in political terms, turned out to be significant. Politically, the trip built on the momentum he already enjoyed from his China visit. Domestically, the concepts of arms control and reducing tensions with the Soviets enjoyed substantial support. However imperfect, the agreement would offer some hope that the superpowers might move away from years of brinksmanship and hostility. The president’s speech to the Soviet people, in which he said that “we shall sometimes be competitors, but we need never be enemies,”³⁵ resonated with Americans back home as well. His approval rating shot into the low sixties.

To be sure, Nixon’s moves resulted in a permanent rift between him and the conservative Right, which already saw his toasts with Chinese totalitarians as shameful. And conservatives would always maintain that it was Ronald Reagan’s more-confrontational approach that really brought an end to the Cold War, a decade later, rather than Nixon’s deal making. After 1972, the president’s political capital as an anti-Communist was fully spent; but at least he had it to spend.

Nixon always felt that the conservative Right did not appreciate the context of what he had achieved—that it saw the arms deal monolithically, from the perspective of anti-Communism. He, by contrast, saw a multilayered playing field. His deal with Brezhnev helped get the Russians to back off from deepening the conflict in Vietnam. The Russians didn’t stand down by any means, but for the rest of 1972, when American bombing reached some of the heaviest levels in the history of warfare, the Soviets did not push back hard. The arms control agreements had bought if not their acquiescence, then at least their restraint. In Nixon’s hands, then, détente was a practical tool—not some dew-eyed vision of a president who didn’t understand the Communists’ true intentions. I would argue the contrary: Nixon’s détente grew out of a shrewd, tragic understanding of how power in the world worked, and a determination to pursue American national interests. And there is no question that his deals with the Chinese and the Russians, in addition to their other benefits, gave the United States the leverage it needed to end the Vietnam War.

For a brief period after the summit, the détente momentum kept up. Nixon kept a promise to Brezhnev to supply the USSR agricultural credits, and the Soviets reciprocated by purchasing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of American grain. Détente was useful in the short term, especially as Nixon eased the United States out of Vietnam.

But détente did not prove to have staying power. Whether the results would have been different had Nixon been able to finish his second term, we cannot know. What we do know is that in the hands of his White House successors, and also as a result of a series of adverse events, the new beginning Nixon and Kissinger had forged with the USSR came apart. Détente lost its relevance as the Soviet bear began to roar again.³⁶

As American leadership waned in the hands of Gerald Ford and then Jimmy Carter, the Soviets, seeing an end to the Nixon era of strategic balance, began to reassert themselves, especially in Africa and South Asia. Ford did not have the political momentum to pursue Nixon’s foreign policy—in fact, Watergate was a serious blow to détente, as it not only discredited Nixon but also emboldened the Republican right wing, which had never supported the policy. Ford even banned use of the word détente during his 1976 presidential campaign.³⁷ The Soviet-American relationship soured further with American pressure on Soviet human rights issues. Though Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II agreements—covering strategic nuclear arms—the agreement was not yet ratified by the US Congress when, in December 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. That brought an end to any hope for SALT II ratification.

Carter, who had prioritized human rights as the basis of his foreign policy for his first three years in office, now shifted to a more “realist” orientation in foreign policy and a more traditional Cold War footing with Moscow. American-Soviet relations moved to a new, more dangerous phase, and the resulting tensions contributed to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. And it was Reagan, as conservatives insist to this day, who went on to win the Cold War with his massive arms buildup, unrelenting resistance to Soviet expansionism, and rhetorical anti-Communism.

But imagine how Reagan might have fared if he faced a Soviet Union that didn’t have to worry about the growing cooperation between the United States and China. Nixon’s opening of China is the silent context for Reagan’s victory in the Cold War, the piece of the puzzle that you don’t hear much about. It fundamentally altered the Cold War’s balance of power, and the shift had a direct impact on the Soviet Union. Washington and Beijing even shared intelligence on the Russians.³⁸ It’s not my intention to minimize Ronald Reagan’s accomplishments, or his leadership in helping to bring down the Soviet Union, but only to point out that Richard Nixon authored one of the crucial chapters in that story.

Visionary Realism

Ultimately, what Nixon’s foreign policy exemplified is the school of foreign-policy thinking described today as “realism,” an approach that emphasizes real-world realities; the balance of power; stability; and a prevailing focus on the national interest—at the expense of ideological frameworks, humanitarian rationales, or hugely ambitious, transformative goals. The foreign-policy realist sees order and predictability as worthwhile goals in themselves, even when that order and predictability are consistent with the presence of dictators or other undemocratic political rulers, because the realist believes that attempts to overthrow or replace such regimes may well lead to more violence and chaos and prove even less manageable than the current order.

As applied to the Cold War, the realists tended to be those who advocated for more constructive relationships with Communist powers, in the interest of minimizing tensions and creating a more manageable framework for coexistence. They clashed often with conservative hawks, who felt that Communism, and the Soviet Union in particular, should be resisted at every turn, and that the ultimate goal of American foreign policy should be an outright triumph in the Cold War. Realists rarely allowed themselves to think that big.

That’s a thumbnail version of foreign policy realism, anyway, but what’s important in considering Nixon is that he was no more married to a narrow conception of “realism” than he was to other schools of thought. You might say that Nixon was a realist’s realist—his prevailing approach was to adopt whatever would work best in any given situation. “Realism is a sensibility, a set of values, not a specific guide as to what to do in each and every crisis,” Robert D. Kaplan wrote. “Realism is a way of thinking, not a set of instructions as to what to think. It doesn’t prevent you from making mistakes. This makes realism more an art than a science.”³⁹

Thus, Nixon was predominantly realist in his understanding that we had to extricate ourselves from Vietnam, but not in a way that would undermine our credibility with our allies. He was realist, though daringly so, in his embrace of détente and arms control with the Russians, and in the opening to China, which he used as a buffer to facilitate deals with the Russians. Kissinger explained how the approach—especially the “triangulation” of America’s relationship with the Communist world—represented an elevation of pragmatism over ideology in US foreign policy:

Our objective was to purge our foreign policy of all sentimentality. There was no reason for us to confine our contacts with major Communist countries to the Soviet Union. We moved toward China not to expiate liberal guilt over our China policy of the late 1940s but to shape a global equilibrium. It was not to collude against the Soviet Union but to give us a balancing position to use for constructive ends—to give each Communist power a stake in better relations with us.⁴⁰

Yet if Nixon’s brand of realism sounds like a steady-as-she-goes approach, that is to misread, again, him as having an allegiance to any one prevailing brand of action. Consider the form his realism took in the fall of 1973, when Syria and Egypt attacked Israel in the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights, precipitating the Yom Kippur War. Israeli tanks were outnumbered nearly ten to one by those of Syria, and near the Suez Canal, a few hundred Israeli infantry faced off against an eighty thousand-strong Egyptian army.

The Israelis faced a coalition of enemies: Nine Arab nations backed the Syrian and Egyptian aggression. So did Moscow, the chief arms supplier of the Arab world. Nixon did not react like the caricature of a realist president, unconcerned about anything but some narrow construal of the national interest. He recognized instantly that Israel faced a mortal threat—and, moreover, that if Arab victory was achieved, it would be achieved through Soviet arms. He moved decisively to protect Israel, authorizing a massive airlift of arms and munitions, and he made certain that his staff understood that it was the highest priority.

“You get the stuff to Israel,” he told Kissinger. “Now.”⁴¹

The massive American resupply effort, which resembled a World War II operation in scale, slowly turned the tide in Tel Aviv’s favor. As the Arab armies lost momentum and began to fall back, Leonid Brezhnev appealed to Nixon for a ceasefire. Nixon agreed, and a ceasefire was signed on October 24, but then Egyptian president Anwar Sadat urged the Americans and Soviets to enforce the ceasefire with troops from both countries. When Nixon refused, Brezhnev threatened to send Russian troops unilaterally.

Nixon did not flinch. He ordered that the US military be placed on the highest level of nuclear alert, and he redeployed aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean and put Air Force strike units on standby. A regional desert war had now devolved into a situation where the world seemed poised for a confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers.

But Brezhnev backed down, and the crisis passed. Israel prevailed in the Yom Kippur War, thanks to Nixon. And to this day, Nixon, though notorious around the world to many people for his misdeeds during Watergate, remains popular in Israel. Israeli prime minister Golda Meir called him “My President.”⁴²

As Stephen Ambrose summarized:

Those were momentous events in world history. Had Nixon not acted so decisively . . . [t]he Arabs probably would have recovered at least some of the territory they had lost in 1967, perhaps all of it. They might have even destroyed Israel. But whatever the might-have-beens, there is no doubt that Nixon . . . made it possible for Israel to win, at some risk to his own reputation and at great risk to the American economy.⁴³

Indeed, Arab members of OPEC slapped an embargo on the United States in retaliation for its support of Israel, hurting the US economy and making Americans aware of their dangerous dependence on foreign oil for the first time. Yet Nixon stood firm, even as the Watergate crisis was draining his political support at home.

What Nixon’s bold actions on behalf of Israel showed was that he was a statesman who could adapt to different situations. It was not a matter of being a pure Cold Warrior, which he wasn’t, or a dyed-in-the-wool realist, which he wasn’t entirely, either. It was about bringing the entire complex of strategic and political analysis to bear on geopolitical questions, with the American national interest as the guiding principle.

Since Nixon, the United States has had few successful foreign policy presidents, and the country has paid the price for it. Jimmy Carter was run aground by naïveté, George W. Bush by ideology, and Barack Obama, in a sense, by both: the naïveté was his own, and the ideology, in his case, was a determined rejection of American preeminence as a lead actor in world affairs. George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton did enjoy some successes in foreign policy; neither possessed Nixon’s overarching strategic vision but both were able to forge successful policies in trouble spots around the world. As for Ronald Reagan, he is the one post-1974 president whose accomplishments bear any comparison with Nixon’s. But, as I noted previously, his achievements should not be divorced from their Nixonian context, nor should it be forgotten that Reagan became a statesman only when he began doing what Nixon had done in 1972—putting ideology aside and reaching out to the enemy, not in a self-destructive way but as a means of determining whether a genuine path toward peace could be found.

And yet, if Nixon often approached foreign policy from a position beyond ideology, he was never unaware of the ideological impact of his policies, especially as they translated to American domestic politics. Having summarized Nixon’s domestic and foreign policy record, I’ll now take an extended look, in the next section of this book, at how Nixon’s domestic and foreign policies reshaped the two major political parties—starting with the Republicans.