Abstract
When Richard M. Nixon became president in 1969, US–China relations had been frozen for 20 years. Nixon was well positioned to transform those relations: he enjoyed the confidence of US conservatives, and no one could reasonably accuse him of sympathising with communism. He had developed a realist world view that minimised the importance of ideology and of a state’s domestic system. The time was right for a new approach because China and the Soviet Union had come to see each other as deadly enemies. The US was bogged down in Vietnam and urgently in need of a relaxation of external pressure. Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972 initiated a process of normalisation and a shift in the international power balance decisively in favour of the West. But Nixon did not foresee China’s transformation along democratic lines and considered it a greater threat than the Soviet Union over the long run.
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