Nixonian Geopolitics and the U.S.-China Rivalry.

• Author: Sempa, Francis P.

INTRODUCTION

Even before he became President of the United States in 1969, Richard Nixon envisioned and recommended a U.S. policy shift to exploit the growing Sino-Soviet rift. In October 1949, when Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China after achieving victory over the Nationalists in the Chinese civil war and subsequently forged an alliance with the Soviet Union, U.S. policymakers were faced with Sir Halford Mackinder's nightmarish geopolitical vision--the potential of a politically unified Eurasian landmass. Mackinder in 1919 had warned Britain, and indirectly the United States, that control of the key power centers of Eurasia would enable a sufficiently armed and organized great power or alliance of powers to use the human and natural resources of Eurasia to build sufficient sea power to overwhelm the world's remaining insular powers (i.e., Britain and the United States) (Mackinder, 1962). Mackinder's indirect warning to America in 1919 was repeated more directly by the Dutch-American political scientist Nicholas Spykman in 1942 and 1944 (Spykman, 2007, 1944). U.S. policymakers took note and devised a grand strategy that was initially laid out in a classified national security document known as NSC-68 in early 1950. That document declared: "Soviet domination of the potential power of Eurasia, whether achieved by armed aggression or by political and subversive means, would be strategically and politically unacceptable to the United States" (NSC-68). Hence, the policy of containment.

Richard Nixon, who served in the Pacific during World War II, was a U.S. Senator in the early 1950s, and in 1953 became President Eisenhower's Vice-President. He was, therefore, to borrow a phrase from Dean Acheson, "present at the creation" of the U.S. policy of containment based on the geopolitical warnings of Mackinder and Spykman. During that same time period, Henry Kissinger, a refugee from Germany who served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, was beginning his academic career at Harvard University and writing his doctoral thesis on the diplomacy and statesmanship of the Concert of Europe in the wake of the wars of the French Revolution and Empire (Kissinger, 1957). Both Nixon and Kissinger were intellectually attuned to the lessons of Munich and the concept of the balance of power. Almost twenty years later, they would embark, as President and National Security Adviser, on a diplomatic revolution worthy of the statesmen who constructed a world order in the wake of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. Their diplomacy and grasp of geopolitics is worth emulating today as the United States confronts a new peer competitor in the 21st century.

THE BIRTH OF TRIANGULAR DIPLOMACY

The birth of Nixonian geopolitics and triangular diplomacy was in an article Nixon wrote in 1967 in Foreign Affairs (Nixon, 1967). "[T]aking the long view," Nixon advised, "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." China, he wrote, needed to be pulled "back into the world community" (Nixon, 1967, 1980). Nixon understood that the Sino-Soviet split was wider than many Americans believed, but he also viewed China as a hostile power. Nixon's goal as president was to further exploit the Sino-Soviet rivalry but in a way that made China less hostile to the United States. The U.S.-Chinese rivalry reached back to 1949-1950. The two nations almost went to war over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu near the Taiwan Strait when Nixon was vice-president. China was providing supplies and other assistance to our communist enemies in the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, Nixon also pursued detente with the Soviet Union in an effort to relax tensions at a time when the Soviets had essentially achieved nuclear parity with the United States. Detente was an effort to lessen the ideological confrontation with the Soviets while simultaneously continuing the geopolitical competition. This was diplomacy in the style of Bismarck, one of whose admirers was Henry Kissinger. Nixon's and Kissinger's worldviews were compatible. They shared a knowledge of classical geopolitics, an understanding of history, and a preference for realpolitik. Nixon and Kissinger also understood the constraints of domestic politics under which they had to operate, including the political...