What’s a prez to do? Nixon and detente

Richard Nixon had been plotting his move for years. Looking back, it seemed as though his entry onto the national stage had been crafted with this in mind. He himself didn't claim such prescience, although he had to admit that his early reputation for strident anticommunism was the perfect setup for what he was about to do.

That reputation was what had made him appealing to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The general who had won the Republican nomination for president disdained the red-baiting tactics of the Republicans’ right wing, yet Ike knew he needed the support of the conservatives to win the presidency. Nixon was a peace offering. He was also smart and appeared educable. He might bring more to the administration than the typical vice president.

Nixon proved the loyal lieutenant. After eight years, Eisenhower backed him for the top spot on the Republican ticket, albeit with less enthusiasm than he might have. A bit more and Nixon could have defeated John Kennedy in 1960. Nixon, embittered, spent the next eight years in the political wilderness.

But he never stopped watching and learning. And he concluded that the reflexive anticommunism that had been his entry ticket to the national stage had become anachronistic. The communist world, plausibly a monolith in the early 1950s, was demonstrably no longer so. China under Mao Zedong had broken with the post-Stalin Soviet Union. Where Eisenhower's favorite indoor pastime had been bridge, Nixon thought in chess terms. He hoped to fork the communist great powers, to America's benefit.

First he must open relations with China—the real China of the mainland, not the notional China on Taiwan which the United States continued to recognize. This continued recognition owed much to the efforts of Nixon himself in the 1950s to make Red China radioactive. It was what would make his new move such a surprise. Surprise was essential. Important elements of Nixon's own Republican party were deeply invested in maintaining the Taiwan fiction. If they got wind of what he intended, they might light a backfire that would preemptively spoil the operation.

Luckily Nixon had just the man to carry out the job. Except that it wasn't luck. Henry Kissinger was a strategic thinker after Nixon’s own cold heart. Indeed, Bismarckian realpolitik came more naturally to the German-born Kissinger than to the Quaker-raised Nixon. After winning election in 1968, Nixon appointed Kissinger to be national security advisor.

The two plotted their coup in strictest secrecy. Kissinger would fly to Pakistan, an American ally from the early years of the Cold War, on a seemingly ordinary diplomatic mission. He would claim physical indisposition of the sort that afflicts visitors from rich countries to poor. The reporters following him would welcome a few days off to see the sights. A Pakistani plane would fly Kissinger over the Himalayas to Beijing. The world's first notice that something was afoot would be photographs of Kissinger sipping tea with Mao in the Forbidden Palace.

The mission proceeded as planned. Republican right-wingers were flabbergasted by having been betrayed by one of their own. Japan and other American Asian allies were equally nonplussed. Were they to be sacrificed to this new alignment?

The Soviet Union was most shocked of all. For a quarter century China had been its ally against the United States. Now the Kremlin feared that China would become America's ally against the Soviet Union.

This was the reaction Nixon was counting on. He made the most of it. The White House announced a forthcoming visit by the president himself to Beijing. Shortly afterward, the president would visit Moscow.

Moscow was the true target of Nixon’s China gambit. Lenin once wrote that the road to Paris ran through Beijing (although he used the earlier name for the Chinese capital, Peking, which made the epigram more alliterative, even in Russian). For Nixon it was the road to Moscow that took the eastern detour. Nixon wanted to ease the tension at the heart of the Cold War, and he needed the Kremlin’s cooperation. By making nice to China, he would encourage Moscow to make nice to Washington.

It worked. By the time Nixon got to Moscow in the spring of 1972, the Soviet government was willing to endorse several “principles of detente,” starting with “peaceful coexistence”—the idea that the contest between capitalist democracy and communism didn’t have to result in the annihilation of either. The principles also included a commitment to arms control, which produced the first caps on the nuclear arms race.

Detente was a great triumph for Nixon, applauded around the world—except among Republican conservatives, who set out to undermine it. Nixon’s former friends on the right called him a traitor and were delighted at his Watergate downfall, which left detente without its author. They mobilized behind Ronald Reagan, who was elected in 1980 on a promise to revive the Cold War. Reagan did just that in his first term, only to resurrect the Nixon script in his second term. Before Reagan left office, he and Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev were best buddies and eager arms-controllers.

From the shadows Nixon muttered: I told you so.