A contradiction is emerging in US China policy.
Trump has made multiple conciliatory moves toward China this year—the latest being his overtures to convince China to resume purchases of US soybeans after his tariffs encouraged China to diversify away from the US. But the domestic and global pressures that incited US rivalry with China to begin with have only grown, and Trump’s Pentagon continues to fashion its war machine primarily for war scenarios against China.1
The US will be able to muddle through without resolving this contradiction as long as Trump is alive, but when he’s gone, the ability to avert intensified “great-power competition” with China will depend on how much strength the voices of cooperation and restraint will have gained amid Trump’s diplomacy.
In The Rivalry Peril, Mike Brenes and I explicitly advocate for a renewed détente with China. This newsletter frequently makes the case for Sino-US détente in a thousand different ways. And with US politics under MAGA control, a collaborative relationship with China is more urgent than ever for those of us who wish to avoid an avoidable nuclear war.
But I’m also a student of the original Sino-US détente in the 1970s, and my understanding of that history gives me pause about the elitist, self-dealing, personalistic way that Trump conducts himself—with China and in general.
Nixon’s détente with Mao was orchestrated in a manner that facilitated mass death. Even putting aside the brittleness of how Sino-US rapprochement was realized, it indirectly involved the killing of so many people half a world away and it didn’t have to.
We can learn something from that, not to guide our choices today—since US “choices” are in the hands of a few politicians and oligarchs—but to anticipate why even things that seem good will go awry because of how they are done.
Secret, Racist, Elitist Détente
Nixon had multiple motives for deciding to thaw US relations with China.
He sought some kind of strategic equilibrium with the Soviet Union, and triangular great-power diplomacy was a plausible way of doing that. And he wanted help getting US troops out of Vietnam “with honor,” and he thought China could help with that.
Yet, Nixon was also pressured from his left domestically—Democrats were already in something of a race to open relations with China. Nixon wanted to beat his opponents to a diplomatic move that was destined to happen anyway so that he could grab the credit politically. (I mention this in Pacific Power Paradox)
But Nixon and Kissinger were nothing if not secretive, racist, and elitist. If these are epithets, they’re well earned.
By “secretive,” I mean lying to the public and Congress about both what they were doing and why they were doing it.
By “racist,” well, Nixon’s and Kissinger’s anti-Indian racism is legendary.
And by “elitist,” I mean that the image of “China” they developed from engaging the regime drew from narrow channels of engagement with the CCP’s most powerful people only—a thin, jaundiced, self-serving base of information. Imagine if your only impression of Asia was from attending the Shangri-La Dialogue ever year…
Initially, top-down engagement was the only way to do détente, but elitist path dependency eventually had actual consequences. George H.W. Bush (whom Jim Baker called America’s “China desk officer”) and his administration 20 years later were caught off guard by the popular (mostly economic) grievances that led to the Tiananmen uprising and subsequent massacre. Why? Partly because they were not dialed in regarding societal conditions in China except as refracted through elite-counterpart talking points.
In the context of being secretive, elitist, and racist, Nixon and Kissinger used realpolitik reasoning to conclude it was worth pursuing the same basic policy (opening China) that pragmatism or political expedience would have also recommended. A warming of relations with China was overdetermined, but the pathway to making it happen could have followed peacemaking, capitalistic, or dark-hearted reasoning—Nixon chose the latter reasoning.
In a counterfactual world where Nixon, rather than go to China, instead would’ve said, “Fuck China,” his Democratic opponents likely would have proceeded with a more gradual and less grandiose version of Sino-US détente anyway. That matters because shrewd Machiavellian calculation is not what changed the world here. To the contrary, it was that veneer of realism that Kissinger manipulated to do détente—a good policy—that change the world in a worse way than it might have had he not been the guy in charge.
From Détente to the “Blood Telegram”
With Nixon’s imprimatur, Kissinger chose to engage China in ways that literally sacrificed over 300,000 Bangladeshis. How exactly?
The receipts for this entire account come from the famous “Blood Telegram,” a cable written by US Consul General to East Pakistan Archer Blood, and the eventual book by the same name.
You have to remember that, circa March 1971, Pakistan was a military dictatorship and a staunch US ally, whereas India was a giant non-aligned (though democratic) country.
East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, just had a regional election where the winner (Sheik Mujib-ur-Rahman) had promised greater autonomy (not independence) for his people. Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s military leader at the time, responded by ordering the mass slaughter and detainment of Bengalis, encouraged by Rahman’s runner-up.
The Kissinger Nixon administration suppressed the Blood telegram and the intelligence about a genocide going down in East Pakistan because Yahya happened to have close ties to the CCP, including Zhou Enlai. Kissinger knew about what was happening and ignored it because he wanted Yahya to help him secretly make nice nice.
Because Mao and some in his inner circle were also interested in exploring a rapprochement with the United States for their own reasons, Kissinger had a range of options for how to engage the CCP. For the most part it didn’t have to be secretive, and it certainly didn’t have to go through Pakistan, even though Pakistan was positioned as a node of convenience.
None of this information is new, but the way people metabolize Kissinger’s emboldenment of Bangladeshi slaughter is by taking the Blood-telegram facts on the face of it—certainly horrific and a moral abdication—rather than recognizing that those facts emerged because of the contrived centrality of Pakistan to the particular way that Kissinger went about orchestrating Sino-US détente.
I recount all of this because, no matter what your politics, bad history can only ever produce bad strategy. We need to understand that détente paid off in many ways. But détente was setup from the jump in a dark-hearted way that made it both very costly for brown folks half a world away and made it inherently fragile and reversible.
I’m hoping that a new Sino-US détente can be rekindled under Trump and Xi. But I worry a lot about how it might happen, who stands to gain personally from it, and at whose expense it might come.
Everyone appears to be misunderstanding how China is depicted the forthcoming National Defense Strategy, which I’ll address separately.