America at 250: Nixon Goes to China, With Jeremi Suri

SURI:
The extraordinary thing, it’s still … I find this astonishing. Here you have Kissinger going in July ‘71 and then Nixon in Feb. ’72. These are the only cases I know of this kind of visit by American leadership without a pre-agreed agenda. They had developed within the White House a culture of secrecy. This is the way this White House operated.

LINDSAY:
Early on in the morning of February 21st, 1972, President Richard Nixon boards Air Force One in Guam and departs for the People’s Republic of China. After stopping briefly in Shanghai, he arrives at Capital Airport near Beijing, then called Peking, where Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai meets him. They begin a week-long dialogue that alters world politics.

GETTY IMAGES:
For President Nixon, a sudden change in schedule. A surprise meeting with Mao Zedong.

LINDSAY:
After decades of hostility and almost no direct communications, China and the United States signed the Shanghai Communiqué. It begins the process of normalizing relations between the two countries. Why did Richard Nixon, who had made his career taking a tough anti-communist line, decide to visit China? What made the trip so consequential and how do the decisions made that one week fifty-four years ago affect U.S. foreign policy today.
From the Council on Foreign Relations, welcome to The President’s Inbox. I’m Jim Lindsay. Today I’m speaking with Professor Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Professor of Global Leadership, History, and Public Policy at the University of Texas. Jeremi, thank you very much for joining me.

SURI:
Great to be with you, Jim.

LINDSAY:
In recognition of 2026 being the 250th anniversary of American independence, Jeremi, we are devoting one episode of The President’s Inbox every month to a pivotal moment in the history of U.S. foreign policy. President Nixon’s 1972 trip to China certainly qualifies on that score. A recent survey I did with members of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, which you help with, thank you, ranked Nixon’s opening to China as the 14th best decision in U.S. foreign policy history.
I should note that you have written an excellent book on Henry Kissinger, Henry Kissinger in the American Century. Kissinger, of course, served as Nixon’s national security advisor and played a pivotal role in the opening to China.
But I imagine a lot of people listening to our conversation find it hard to imagine why one presidential trip to China would be of historical import. Donald Trump, for example, is going to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping four times this year. So give me the historical context that made Nixon going to China so consequential.

SURI:
Well, it was a totally different world, Jim. The United States did not even recognize that Mao Zedong’s government was the legitimate government of China, and there had been no official meetings between heads of state from China and the United States since the Chinese Communist Revolution. So this is the first time you have the then leading figure of world communism, Mao Zedong, meeting with, shall we say, the leading figure of world democracy and capitalism, Richard Nixon.
People never thought they would see those two men in particular meet, because, as you said in your introduction, Richard Nixon had made his career going after people in the State Department, Alger Hiss and others, who he said were soft on communism. And so, to see the arch anti-communist meet with now the leader of the communist world was really earth-shattering.

LINDSAY:
So what led Nixon to put his staunch anti-communist credentials on the side and to pursue this opening with China?

SURI:
Well, from the mid-1960s on, Richard Nixon was focusing on the ways in which the United States could enhance its position in Asia, in particular in light of the Vietnam War, which from the mid-1960s was not going well for the United States. There were different points of view. Nixon was not an opponent of the Vietnam War, but he was clear-eyed enough to see that the war was not going well, and it did appear at that time that Chinese communist influence and Soviet influence were increasing in Asia.
And so, Nixon’s thinking was that … and you can see this evolving particularly in an essay he writes for foreign affairs in 1967, where he is thinking about the ways in which the United States can outmaneuver the Soviet Union, which is still the number one threat, and opening relations with China, even though it’s a communist country, splitting China from the Soviet Union, as we had in part split Tito in Yugoslavia from the Soviet Union. This seemed like a good opportunity for him.
The second point that has to be made is Nixon had a flair for the dramatic, and he understood how dramatic it would be if he was the one who opened relations with China rather than Lyndon Johnson or Hubert Humphrey or someone else.

LINDSAY:
So help me understand this, Jeremi. Nixon wrote indicating an openness to developing relations with China in 1967 in that foreign affairs piece, but he didn’t run for president in 1968, pledging to go to Beijing, correct?

SURI:
That’s correct. This was a big surprise. Most people didn’t take his foreign affairs essay seriously. I mean most people didn’t read it. We like to think everyone reads these things, but of course-

LINDSAY:
And everyone should read foreign affairs. I want to be very clear there.

SURI:
And so, it wasn’t that people thought this was a position he held, nor had he said in print that he would go and meet with China. He ran for president, saying he had a secret plan to end the war. His secret plan was then-

LINDSAY:
He would always tap his coat pocket as if the plan was just inside his jacket.

SURI:
I know. It’s really quite extraordinary. Whatever he had in there, we don’t know. He didn’t have a secret plan. But his position was that the war was not going well. Lyndon Johnson had mismanaged the war, but that he would manage it better, and that by managing it better, we would win quick and get out. I think that is in part why people voted for him. They didn’t want to lose the war in Vietnam, but they didn’t want to escalate forever either.

LINDSAY:
So why would China be willing to entertain Richard Nixon? Again, bitter feelings between the two capitals. U.S. soldiers and Chinese soldiers fought in the Korean War. Obviously a lot of the propaganda coming out of Beijing was quite hostile to the United States. Chinese, as you mentioned, were supporting North Vietnam and the Vietcong. What was happening on the Chinese side that led to a willingness to probe the possibilities of an opening?

SURI:
Well, so to some extent, this is still a mystery, we have to say. We don’t have access to archives in China in the way we do. You can go and do research at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and get a lot of really good, hard information. It’s hard to do that, of course, with China. But scholars will point to three factors that I think together pushed Mao in this direction.
One was the worsening split between the Soviet Union and China. Following Stalin’s death, and certainly following the late 1950s, the border tension between China and the Soviet Union increases, and as many historians have written, also a kind of rivalry as to who’s the top dog in the communist world increases. China and the Soviet Union actually came to blows, military skirmishes, in 1969 on their border.
So on the one hand, Mao is concerned then about growing rivalry with the Soviet Union, and he sees the United States as perhaps being an assistance in that, at least separating the United States from the Soviet Union in any emerging detente there.
Second, Mao is dealing with major convulsions and disruptions in China that he’s created in part through the cultural revolution, and he’s desperate now to open some kind of relation with outside powers that will bring products, quite frankly, bring food and other items into China and bring some stability to China’s relations.
Then the third thing … The first two were the ones that historians have pointed to for a long time. They’re geopolitical points. There does appear to be in the records we do have for now a fascination with the United States. It does appear that especially as he was getting older, he’s becoming an old man, he really wanted to open relations with the U.S. He saw it as a kind of capstone of his own career at some level.
It wasn’t that he overnight decided he wanted to have a relationship with Richard Nixon. It’s more that the United States was a great power in the world, and if he was a great leader before the end of his life, he should have some relationship. Scholars appointed to his interest in the United States, is reading about the United States in the early 1970s. And so, I think there’s that personal quality. We know this, Jim, on our end, too. Presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, toward the end of their careers, they want to reconcile with their adversaries.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, I remember, I guess, in 1970, Mao gave an interview to an American journalist, I think Edgar Snow, in which he said that he was open to having President Nixon come visit China, whether as a private citizen or as president.
I’m curious, though, from the vantage point of the White House, Nixon takes the oath of office. He has multiple crises and challenges in his inbox, but he’s thinking about an opening to China. How does he go about doing it given that we have very hostile relations? Again, there was a tradition in which American diplomats, if they came across Chinese diplomats, would refuse to acknowledge them, famous like John Foster Dulles refused to shake hands at the 1954 Geneva Conference.
So what were the mechanics inside the White House by which they got themselves into a position in which they could have this opening?

SURI:
So there were discussions going back to the Lyndon Johnson administration, and what we should give credit to is what’s happening in the State Department. There were a lot of individuals at the State Department, including Marshall Green, who’s one of the Asian experts in the State Department. They are talking in ‘67, ’68, in Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, about this and trying to game out what would this look like?
The problem is just the one you articulated, Jim. There’s no natural place for a direct communication. When Nixon comes into office, the White House looks to put this into action. Henry Kissinger, here’s where he really becomes important, he puts this within his own personal portfolio as that the…

LINDSAY:
He’s national security adviser at this point. He’s not secretary of state.

SURI:
That’s correct.

LINDSAY:
That’s William P. Rogers.

SURI:
That’s correct. That’s correct. One of the things Henry does from the very beginning is to actually try to move this issue out of the State Department portfolio and make it exclusively his own portfolio, in part because he believes this needs to be done in a nontraditional way.
What he begins to do, and I’ve written about this, is act like the suitor to the popular girl in high school by trying to put out feelers through friends. And so, their efforts in Warsaw, where there still are some discussions between American and Chinese diplomats happening, so he tries to go through Warsaw, he tries channels through Yugoslavia and through Pakistan. In each case, he’s asking American friends who are also in communication with the Chinese to express an interest in the United States warming and opening relations with China.
There then are some symbolic moves. The Nixon administration, following Kissinger’s lead, reduces some of the trade sanctions on China to make it easier for China to import food from the United States and things of that sort. They watch carefully in the China press and they notice, for example, that the Chinese press publishes Nixon’s inaugural address, which was a rare thing to do.
So there’s a kind of indirect feeling out that’s going. The part I find funny is they’re constantly looking for a response. Did she call me? Did she smile my direction? But it needs to be clear, we are the suitors to the Chinese in the way Kissinger is doing this. I think he’s just throwing jelly at the wall to see what will stick. He wants it to be secret, which is why he doesn’t want it done through the State Department, because he wants to be the…

LINDSAY:
Why does he want to keep it secret? Why is that important to the administration?

SURI:
Great question. I think two reasons. First, they’re afraid that other Republicans, including Governor Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, and others, will condemn them for doing this. They understand very well that this could be compelling once it’s done, but the process is something that can easily be undone by people in your own party. Second, they don’t want to be embarrassed if the Chinese say no way, if the Chinese don’t want to go out with them. They don’t want to be embarrassed.

LINDSAY:
Okay. One of the symbolic things that happens on this march to Nixon’s trip is the invitation I think in 1971 for an American table tennis team, which is in Japan, playing in a tournament, to come to China. Now I have to admit I’m old enough. I actually remember when it happened and how big the story was. I mean it’s very seldom that table tennis dominates the national news media and the headlines, but that in fact happened. Was that a significant breakthrough?

SURI:
Absolutely. It was a significant breakthrough, not just because they played table tennis, and by the way, the Chinese table tennis players were so much better than the American table tennis players. But what it did is it opened a different view of China. I remember in doing my research going into the library, and one of my favorite things, Jim, is to find old magazines, read them in glossy form. Life Magazine did a whole issue on these angelic-looking American table tennis players who are in China and their trip to the Great Wall, their meetings with the Chinese.
It changed the image Americans had of China. Instead of seeing crazy red guards, we now saw Chinese youth interacting with American youth in a friendly way. This is significant. It created a different general attitude for Americans in looking at China.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So how does Kissinger finally land the girl, to extend your metaphor. I know Islamabad figures into it.

SURI:
Yes.

LINDSAY:
So tell me how that comes about.

SURI:
Yeah. So the United States uses Pakistan, as it tried with Warsaw and Yugoslavia and others. It uses Pakistan as a communications device, as an interlocutor with China. Zhou Enlai sends a note to the Pakistani leadership, saying, this is in early 1971, that they will accept an American emissary.
Then there’s a discussion between Nixon and Kissinger about who that should be. In sort of Dick Cheney style, Kissinger nominates himself. While he’s on an official visit to Pakistan, with the collaboration of the Pakistanis, he says that he’s sick, that he has to go back to his room, to his lodgings because of a bad stomach. He secretly, along with Win Lord, gets on an unmarked airplane and flies into China and meets in July of 1971 with Zhou Enlai and then with Mao Zedong.

LINDSAY:
So, Jeremi, I have to ask you. How did the Nixon White House keep this under wraps? Because most presidents have trouble keeping their staff from talking.

SURI:
Well, first of all, Nixon and Kissinger held things very close. This was a strength and a weakness. It meant they were not consulting with a lot of other people, but they held things very, very close. In this case, and it’s also true for Nixon’s visit in ‘72, what’s odd about it, Jim, is there’s no agenda set in advance. Often these things leak because the agenda, the security, all the logistics-

LINDSAY:
You start putting things on paper.

SURI:
Precisely. The extraordinary thing, still, I find this astonishing, here you have Kissinger going in July ‘71, and then Nixon in Feb. ’72. These are the only cases I know of this kind of visit by American leadership without a pre-agreed agenda. They don’t even know who they’re going to meet with when they land. There’s very little security, no translators. They bring, I think, one translator for Nixon’s visit.
So they held it very close. I mean that’s really … And they had developed within the White House a culture of secrecy. I mean so part of it is this is the way this White House operated.

LINDSAY:
Okay So, Jeremi, help me understand. Kissinger goes to Beijing. He conducts the negotiations. There’s an agreement that Richard Nixon can come to Beijing and meet with Mao. What then happens? How does Nixon or the Nixon administration let the world know that Nixon is about to go to China?

SURI:
So one small thing. The Chinese, even in Kissinger’s visit in July ‘71, never commit that Mao will meet with Nixon. They invite the president to come. But it’s really interesting. Nixon takes a big risk because he does not have an ironclad agreement that when he gets there, Mao is going to meet with him. Mao handles himself, it’s really interesting, as more of a philosopher than Communist Party general secretary. Of course he’s both, but this is the image he tries to create for himself.
The meeting with Zhou Enlai is very much about just trying to set basic guidelines for this discussion. Zhou Enlai wants it clear that the United States will recognize, as always, that there’s one China. The idea is that this will be … It’s not supposed to be a substantive negotiation. It’s supposed to be a get to know you, a first date in some ways.
So this is a secret trip. The White House for the president does not preview the press or anything on this. When the president goes, it’s then announced that he’s there, and then he comes back and says, “We have changed the world. We have changed the world.” So it is a trip that Nixon takes with very little predicate in the American public. The idea is to really show the meeting as an end in and of itself.

LINDSAY:
But help me understand what happens in that six months between when Nixon announces to the world, because they didn’t sit on it.

SURI:
No.

LINDSAY:
Shortly after Kissinger returns, maybe even before Kissinger returns, Nixon announces this trip. Give me a sense of what the reaction was in the United States, Jeremi, to this big announcement, because this was a bombshell.

SURI:
Absolutely. I mean the announcement that this will happen, and there’s really not much more said than that but that he will visit, really actually is very controversial. It’s controversial because many Republicans are not happy that Nixon is doing this. But there’s a fascination among Americans, if we can say mainstream Americans, whoever they are. There’s a fascination with the president doing this.
So I don’t think it’s fair to say that Americans react and say, “Oh, this is great. This is going to change the world.” I think that’s after he visits. It’s more either this is something interesting we should learn from or this is something that’s horrible.
Ronald Reagan is against him going. William F. Buckley is against him going. I think I mentioned this before. Internally, people like Pat Buchanan are against the trip. So there are efforts to undermine it, but Nixon’s pretty determined to do this. I think, as far as we can tell, most Americans are curious to see what will happen.

LINDSAY:
My sense, Jeremi, is that Nixon wanted to announce the trip as soon as it was locked down because he wanted to present the rest of the world with a fait accompli. He didn’t want it to be nibbled to death in preparatory stage. He just wanted it, in essence, to change the nature of the discussion, particularly among Republicans, because now they were torn between their desire to want to sustain support with Taiwan and their opposition to the communist Chinese. But also they had this political responsibility to be loyal to a president of their own party. Meanwhile, the Democrats, many of them had been arguing for finding ways to-

SURI:
Right, right.

LINDSAY:
So it changed the political conversation.

SURI:
I think that’s right. I think that’s right. I think my reading of the archive also, Jim, is maybe Nixon came to that instinctively. But I think actually what really was driving him was he wanted a big announcement and he wanted it to be his.

LINDSAY:
He liked drama.

SURI:
He liked drama, and I think there was a cost in that. Everything you said a makes a lot of sense for the domestic political calculation. But we need to remember, he had not briefed our allies. The Japanese learn about this from the press.

LINDSAY:
They were quite unhappy.

SURI:
Yes. And so, there’s a cost there. Maybe there’s a gain in backing your own Republican supporters into taking this on, but there’s a cost with allies, and I do think that’s a cost the United States pays throughout the 1970s with countries like Japan.

LINDSAY:
So, Jeremi, set the scene for me. Richard Nixon boards Air Force One, flies to Shanghai, then it flies to, at that time, Peking. He doesn’t have a set agenda. There’s no agreed upon communique ahead of time, as is normally the case. Not even one, as I understand it, where they’ve got 80 percent of the text done and a bunch of things are in bracket. He gets there. Is he expecting to receive a big, tumultuous greeting? If so, what does he find when he gets off the plane at Capital Airport?

SURI:
So when he lands, he’s greeted by Zhou Enlai, not by Mao Zedong. He’s greeted by Zhou Enlai. It is a warm greeting, but it’s not the full pomp and circumstance that a president would normally get and that presidents now get when they arrive in China.

LINDSAY:
Was there a big crowd of Chinese waving American flags or anything like that?

SURI:
No. It was mostly Chinese government officials. If you look at the photos, it’s a large crowd, but they’re government officials, not ordinary citizens. As far as I can tell, the Chinese government kept citizens away as much as possible. There really weren’t large crowds. You don’t have the situation of Nixon going into crowds in the way Reagan would when he went to the Soviet Union. This is a society that’s not exposing its people to an American leader.
Right now Nixon and Kissinger and their entourage are whisked to the lodgings that they’re going to have. Then very quickly, thereafter, just within a few hours, Zhou Enlai comes around and takes them then to meet Mao. So the president hasn’t even really recovered from his trip. Then that’s where we have these famous photos of Nixon and Kissinger sitting beside Mao and Zhou Enlai in what looks like a professor’s study. It’s messy like mine. There’s books all over the place. That was intentional on the Chinese part, too.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So the visit lasts for six or seven days.

SURI:
Yes.

LINDSAY:
I think the night that Nixon has met Mao, there’s a banquet in the Great Hall in China. Toska, Iran, I believe at some point Nixon even quotes Mao back to himself about this being the hour for action. What unfolds over the remainder of President Nixon’s time in Beijing?

SURI:
Two things. Their visits and, for the Chinese, this is paying deference to Chinese culture. The barbarians must come and visit the Great Wall and visit our shrines. But for-

LINDSAY:
I must say, having visited the Great Wall, it is quite something.

SURI:
I agree.

LINDSAY:
I mean it is worth visiting.

SURI:
I totally agree. I totally agree. And so, there’s that. For Nixon, this is also showing that only Nixon can do this. We have opened and created now a connection to this great country. As an aside, Kissinger was not in any way a China expert, but his view of the world, and this goes back to his sort of 19th century thinking about great powers, is that there were great centers of culture. Germany and China were two of them.
And so, for Kissinger, this is also a way of showing that the great American culture is now connecting to the great Chinese culture. He would never have the same positive view of Russian culture that he has of Chinese culture.
So all of this is on display. That’s one part of the visit. The other part is what you previewed before, the haggling over what becomes the communique from the visit. It builds on the Shanghai communique, and it’s designed to take us where we are today, where the United States will open relations with Peking, later Beijing, that will be our main Chinese partner. But of course we do not cut off Taiwan and we get to this one China, two countries.

LINDSAY:
So I have to ask you, Jeremi, because one of the things that did not happen during Nixon’s visit to China is that we did not establish formal diplomatic relations. That won’t come until the Jimmy Carter administration. Why didn’t Nixon go that extra mile and just establish diplomatic relations with Beijing? I say that against the backdrop. Most countries decide whether to extend recognition or not based on whether a government controls territory.
Recognition is not a good housekeeping seal of approval. It’s just an acknowledgement of reality. Americans have taken, unusually, a different approach, often seeing recognition as a reward. So why didn’t Nixon go that extra step?

SURI:
Well, there are two reasons. One is American, one is Chinese. The American reason was there was not yet a consensus on how to handle this with regard to Taiwan as well, and there’s a great deal of congressional opposition. It’s worth reminding people that the president does not control American diplomacy alone. All of our treaties have to go through Congress, and he did not have the votes. This was actually … It took a lot of work for Brzezinski and Carter to get us there.
So there’s the American side of the story, and then there’s the Chinese side, which was also that the Chinese wanted to show that they were having relations with the U.S., but they weren’t ready yet to commit to many of the things that come with full diplomatic recognition. One of them would be the creation of a full embassy, which they knew well doesn’t just include diplomats, but includes all kinds of American personnel.
When we open the liaison office that we do, the George H.W. Bush, for example, is our liaison figure. Not really a full diplomat, but our liaison to China. It’s a much smaller facility, and it gives the Chinese much more control over what’s happening there.
So it takes a long time to get to ‘79. Some historians, as you know, have also criticized Nixon and Kissinger for, in a sense, taking their eye off the ball, being more concerned with the atmospherics than the logistics. There’s a lot of work to building diplomatic relations, especially with two societies that have not had them for fifty years.

LINDSAY:
I want to note on the issue of atmospherics, Jeremi, that the presidential delegation that went to Beijing in 1972 totaled thirty-seven people. The U.S. press delegation was eighty-seven people.

SURI:
Wow. Wow.

LINDSAY:
There was obviously a heavy component of TV people there, including Dan Rather.

SURI:
Yes.

LINDSAY:
I think getting back to your sense that Richard Nixon wanted something dramatic that would play on American television sets back home, because television, at that point, has now really emerged as the medium for communicating with people. I should also note 1972 was a presidential election year. Even though you would’ve thought Richard Nixon was going to win in a landslide, he wasn’t so sure, and he was not averse to pulling out all his stops. Part of the reason why he did not complete his second term.

SURI:
That’s absolutely right. One of the reasons, to connect that back to the issue of diplomatic recognition, not to open full relations with China was then you would have to cut off Taiwan. Then in that situation, that would have electoral costs for Nixon. So he’s trying to play both sides here by opening relations with China, but not fundamentally altering the relationship with Taiwan, which is not a full diplomatic relationship either, but would come under question if that were done.

LINDSAY:
So, Jeremi, Richard Nixon finishes his trip. He calls it the week that changed the world. Again, presidents love to grade their own homework. They’re generally very generous graders. But how far off the mark is Nixon in saying that? What is your takeaway as the historical significance of this trip?

SURI:
I don’t think it changed the world. That’s an overstatement. That’s an exaggeration, which is not unique to this president at this moment. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t significant. It is significant.
I think it has three immediate huge effects. The first one is the most obvious. It does cause panic in Moscow. It puts the Soviet Union on the defensive. Brezhnev’s government was moving toward trying to manage its relationship with the United States through detente. This had really started with salt in the late ‘60s, an arms control negotiations. They wanted to manage that relationship and still pursue their own bad behavior in places like Angola and elsewhere. This made it harder now because the United States had certain leverage, and the Soviets were worried about being encircled by U.S.-Chinese collaborative interests in the West and the East.
So it gave the United States a kind of upper hand with the Soviet Union. This was Kissinger’s argument, and it was right, I think.
Second, it did cause the Chinese to begin to pull back some of their support for North Vietnam. They never fully cut off North Vietnam, and the war doesn’t end because of this, but it does give the United States a little more leverage. It’s helpful to be opening relations with the country that’s supporting another country that you’re fighting.
Then third, I think, and this might be the most enduring element, it begins what is a long shift in American attitudes towards China. I always like to make this point to my students, Jim. In the 1960s, Americans viewed the Chinese as crazy communist people. The image you would see are of these fanatics, and the cultural revolution played to that image.
This returns us to what historians have long written about from the late 19th century, this American view of China as a great civilization and a place we want to do business with. In the 1970s, if every China person will buy one of my T-shirts, I’ll be a very rich man.
That switch from crazy communists to capitalist opportunity, that doesn’t happen overnight. But this trip is a turning point, and it begins that shift, especially because much of the anti-Chinese rhetoric had come from Republicans, and now the Republican Party’s on the other side of that issue.

LINDSAY:
So, Jeremi, in closing, as you look back at this moment in American foreign policy, what are your takeaways? Are there lessons there for us today, either positive in terms of things to do or negative in terms of things to avoid?

SURI:
I think there’s some of both. I mean I think the positive lessons are ones that we still need to think through and apply. Number one, I don’t think the United States ever really benefits from not having relations with other powerful countries. I don’t think it is benefit of the United States that we have not had relations with Tehran since 1979. This is not in any way to apologize for Tehran’s behavior, but what Nixon and Kissinger understood was you have to talk to your adversaries. There’s something to be gained both politically and substantively in that. Too often we’ve used Wilson’s non-recognition of the Soviet Union as a way of conducting ourselves. So that’s one lesson.
I think a second lesson is that the United States has to work through partners. This is only possible because our partners in Pakistan and elsewhere help with this. Bilateral relations, even in this kind of setting, are really multilateral relations. We’re part of a diplomatic community, and we need to remember that.
Then third, I think, of the positives, it is that the Chinese do have an interest in working with us. We need to remember that today. As ideologically imbued as Mao was, he was a communist through and through and hated many elements of American foreign policy and our domestic ideology. He didn’t want to go to war with the United States. So people can be hostile to us and still not bent on war with us. That’s where the world of diplomacy comes in.
A few negatives. I do think there were real costs to having this held so closely in the White House, because, we just talked about this, it took a long time to get to full recognition. The spade work was not done. The option memos were not actually imbibed within the planning of the White House. Quite frankly, in some ways, Brzezinski had to recreate this process to move it forward.
The second thing is that for someone like Richard Nixon, all the atmospherics of this, I think it actually contributed to a dangerous disdain for diplomats and others, and I think that harmed us if we then talk about other regions, Chile and elsewhere, where the White House was not listening to the experts who could have prevented us from making a lot of mistakes. So just because you go outside the experts one time doesn’t mean you can forget the experts in the future.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I’ll close up this episode of The President’s Inbox. My guest has been Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Professor for Global Leadership, History, and Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. You can find more of Jeremi’s work at his Substack, Democracy of Hope, and at his podcast, This is Democracy. Jeremi, as always, a real pleasure to talk.

SURI:
I enjoyed it very much. Thank you, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Today’s episode was produced by Justin Schuster with Director of Video Jeremy Sherlick and Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Our recording engineers were Jorge Flores and Antonio Antonelli. Production assistance was provided by Oscar Berry and Kaleah Haddock.