It helped create a geopolitical monster.. This is how Kissinger's secret trip to China changed the Cold War

While China this month celebrated the centenary of the birth of the Chinese Communist Party and warned its enemies that they were "banging their heads with a steel fence," this month also marks the 50th anniversary of a more optimistic moment in Sino-American relations: former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's secret trip to Beijing. in 1971.

This is what Bloomberg writer and political scientist Hal Brands sees in an article that initially explained that the meetings of Kissinger, who was then National Security Adviser to President Richard Nixon with Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, put an end to decades of hostility between the two countries and paved the way. A historic strategic partnership.

Today, as China and the United States move toward confrontation, according to the author, “It is tempting to view the opening to Beijing as the beginning of nearly 50 years of wrong engagement along with a strength, which is fundamentally hostile, although it is important to remember that the opening began as a smart policy. and militancy that helped win the Cold War and changed China's relationship with the world."

Brands highlighted that the rapprochement between the United States and China at that stage was, and for a long time after that, contrary to expectations, recalling that China in the fifties and sixties of the last century was, to the rest of the world, a rogue state in the true sense of the word, as it was much more extreme than Its communist ally is the Soviet Union.

He pointed out in this regard that the policies of Chinese leader Mao Zedong led to the deaths of tens of millions of his people in what was known as the "Great Leap Forward" campaign and the Cultural Revolution.

Beijing has also fought two undeclared wars against the United States, in Korea and Vietnam, as well as encouraging rebellion in the developing world.

Brands, a professor specializing in Henry Kissinger at Johns Hopkins University, said that the United States decided to play on the tension between Beijing and Moscow, which nearly entered into a military confrontation at the end of the sixties, and that made Mao, who was suffering from complete isolation after the madness of the Cultural Revolution, convinced that he must The use of "distant savages" (the Americans) to keep out the "near savages" (the Soviets).

China celebrates the 100th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Communist Party of China (Reuters)

The result, according to Brands, is what he says in his new book, The Twilight Struggle, that a subtle diplomatic dance led to Kissinger's trip to Beijing, followed by Nixon's visit the following year, culminating in the emergence of a tacit alliance that changed the Cold War.

Since the Soviet Union then had to contain two powerful adversaries working against it, this was a source of concern for Moscow, as it had to stand up to two arch-rivals, NATO and China, according to Brands.

There is no hope for an improvement in US-Chinese relations in the near term, and the search for a major diplomatic breakthrough could in fact be dangerous if Washington's attention is diverted from urgent measures to bolster its defenses in the military, technological, and economic spheres of competition.

The writer asserts that this new partnership facilitated the economic reforms that propelled China toward capitalist prosperity after Mao's death, representing an ideological dagger at the heart of Moscow's stagnant socialist model.

Thus, according to the author, China broke its international isolation, gained access to global institutions and the global economy, and proceeded to receive valuable intelligence, technology and military goods from the United States, as well as aid, trade and investment from America's close allies such as Japan, and this means in many ways that The opening forged by Kissinger created the global conditions for China's rise.

Fifty years later, Brands says, this may seem like a huge mistake, as the United States created a geopolitical monster, and naively assumes that it will become soft on the side. Nevertheless, Kissinger and Nixon were initially realistic, according to the author.

The American administration at that time realized, according to the author, that restoring relations requires some abhorrent moral concessions, such as abandoning Taiwan, one of America's most loyal allies, and seducing Mao, and this means that the moral price of reconciliation was high, but it was not higher than the moral and strategic benefits that It brought superiority to Moscow and victory in the Cold War, according to the writer.

For Brands, the real problem came later, as the Tiananmen Square campaign in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later were supposed to promote a fundamental reassessment of US policy toward Beijing and put an end to the marriage of geopolitical interests inaugurated in 1971.

Instead, the writer says, Washington has tripled its engagement with China, hoping that the forces of globalization and liberalism will eventually lead to a brutal, stubborn regime change, and the stalemate in that policy, as well as the United States' addiction to trade with China, has kept it going for a decade. at least.

At the moment, Brands argues, there is no hope for an improvement in US-Chinese relations in the near term, and the search for a major diplomatic breakthrough could indeed be dangerous if Washington's attention is distracted from urgent measures to bolster its defenses in the military, technological, and economic spheres of competition.

But the openness of Kissinger and Nixon to China is a reminder that staunch enemies reconcile from time to time, even if it takes many years and much turmoil to come to pass.