nixon visits china and moscow definition

Nixon visits china and moscow definition series#

Under the cover of night, Kissinger boarded a private Pakistani jet to Beijing, where he personally asked the PRC leadership to approve an official state visit from the American president. While on a diplomatic trip to Pakistan, Kissinger feigned a stomach illness that would keep him locked away in his hotel room for several days. The biggest coup was Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing in July 1971 to meet face-to-face with the Chinese leader Chou Enlai. READ MORE: How Ping-Pong Diplomacy Thawed the Cold War

Nixon visits china and moscow definition series#

ping pong team to a series of exhibition games in Beijing in 1971, a cultural exchange that became known as “ping-pong diplomacy.” In a rare public acknowledgement of the warming relationship, the PRC invited the U.S. were severed, Nixon had to work through private back channels in Pakistan and Romania to make overtures to the Chinese, who proved receptive. Since direct diplomatic ties between China and the U.S. “‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ was a very Nixonian idea.” “Nixon and Kissinger cooked up this idea of pitting the Soviet Union and China against each other with the United States as a third corner of the triangle to create a stable balance of power,” says Evan Thomas, journalist and author of Being Nixon: A Man Divided.

By the late 1960s, frequent border skirmishes between the Soviets and the Chinese verged on all-out war. The PRC leadership worried that their well-armed Soviet neighbors had designs on expanding their territory into Asia. Despite their shared Communist ideology, there was plenty of mistrust between the PRC and the Soviet Union. The Chinese, it turned out, had their own strategic reasons to re-open dialogue with the United States. READ MORE: Communism Timeline The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger came to believe that by thawing relations with the Chinese and bringing them into the “society of nations,” America could gain a powerful new ally in its negotiations with both the North Vietnamese and the Soviets. While Nixon publicly portrayed himself as a populist hardliner, he was a close reader of history and a shrewd strategist. Eisenhower, had famously refused to shake hands with Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier and lead negotiator.īut as the tumultuous 1960s came to a close, the Nixon administration was facing several major challenges: a disastrous war in Vietnam, social strife at home, and stalled nuclear arms negotiations with the Soviets. At the conference, John Foster Dulles, then secretary of state under Dwight D. and China had come to diplomatic contact was 15 years earlier in 1954, when top officials from both nations attended the Geneva Convention to negotiate new political boundaries between North and South Korea, and North and South Vietnam. Nixon himself had won early political fame as an anti-communist hawk with his pursuit of Alger Hiss, a former State Department official accused of spying for the Soviet Union. The two sides hadn’t spoken for decades, and the United States was at war with the Communist North Vietnamese in China’s backyard. When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, it marked the 20th anniversary of the creation of the People’s Republic of China, and 20 years of frozen diplomatic relations between the United States and Communist China. President Nixon meets with his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, en route to China, 1972. WATCH: Watergate on HISTORY Vault China-U.S. In the words of one of his ambassadors, Nixon’s eight-day visit in February of 1972 was “the week that changed the world” and substantially altered the balance of power between the United States, China and the Soviet Union. Nixon, always a fan of the “big play,” had high hopes that his trip to China would be the kind of seismic geopolitical event that changed the course of history. The surprise announcement was the result of months of top-secret diplomacy between the Nixon White House and Beijing. “I have taken this action because of my profound conviction that all nations will gain from a reduction of tensions and a better relationship between the United States and the People's Republic of China,” said Nixon in his address. president to visit the People’s Republic of China, a Communist nation of 750 million that, next to the Soviet Union, was America’s fiercest adversary in the Cold War. On July 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon addressed the nation in a live televised broadcast to make an unexpected announcement: he had accepted an invitation from Beijing to become the first U.S.