U.S.-CHINA POLICY DURING THE NIXON PRESIDENCY (1969-1974)
This section discusses the transformation in American policy toward the PRC which occurred during the Nixon administration. It focuses not only on the complex and interrelated set of international and domestic events which led to a fundamental change in the American approach but also analyzes how and why it became possible for both countries to reorient their policies toward each other and bring about more stable Sino-American relations. The rapprochement between them proceeded in three distinct phases: (i) the opening to the PRC (1969-1970); (ii) near-normalization of relations (1971-1972); and (iii) partial consolidation of the new relationship (1973-1974).
Initial Overtures and the Reshaping of American Policy
Primary American and Chinese Concerns in 1969
When the Nixon administration came to power in January 1969, it faced a number of foreign and domestic policy challenges. It inherited from its predecessors a stalemated war in Vietnam, which together with the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin King, and the cultural, racial and social unrest of the 1960s, resulted in deep divisions in the body politic. American economic preeminence was threatened by the resurgence of Western European and Japanese industry, declining American productivity and international competitiveness and the growing weakness of the dollar. Geopolitically, American resources were spread thinly around the world. In the Middle East, Israel's Arab neighbors, smarting from their humiliating and decisive defeat in the Six Day War in 1967, were preparing for another armed confrontation with Soviet military and economic assistance, the outbreak of which, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, would soon produce significant destabilizing effects on the world economy as the Arab nations wielded their retaliatory 'oil shocks'.
The rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union had ...