Henry Kissinger on China
Henry Kissinger was not only the first official American emissary to Communist China, he persisted in his brokerage with more than 50 trips over four decades, spanning the careers of seven leaders on each side. Diplomatically speaking, he owns the franchise; and with “On China,” as he approaches 88, he reflects on his remarkable run.
To the degree that Washington and Beijing now understand each other, it is in good measure because Kissinger has been assiduously translating for both sides, discerning meaning in everything from elliptical jokes to temper tantrums. At every juncture, he has been striving to find “strategic concepts” that could be made to prevail over a history of conflict, mutual grievance and fear. As President Nixon’s national security adviser, then secretary of state for Nixon and Gerald Ford, and since 1977 as a private interlocutor extraordinaire, Kissinger has been unwaveringly committed to surmounting what he considers the legitimate Chinese resentment of American interference in their internal affairs and Americans’ distaste for China’s brutal suppression of ethnic, religious and political dissent.
The surprise buried in his lumbering review of Sino-American relations is that the much ballyhooed Nixon-Kissinger journeys to China in 1971-72 turned out to have been the easy part. “That China and the United States would find a way to come together was inevitable given the necessities of the time,” he writes. “It would have happened sooner or later whatever the leadership in either country.” Both nations were exhausted from war (Vietnam, clashes on the Soviet border) and domestic strife (antiwar protests in Nixon’s case, the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s). Both were determined to resist Soviet advances and so could quickly agree to make common cause. The menace of Moscow took the leaders’ minds off confrontations in Vietnam and Taiwan and quelled their ritual denunciations, whether of international imperialism or Communism. They decided that the adversary of my adversary was my pal, and for more than a decade that was fruitfully that.