Again, the crucial details are left out of their memoirs, but they can be found in a U.S. Meanwhile, Kissinger and Nixon pushed China for its help on Vietnam. John Holdridge, a senior staff member on the National Security Council who was on the 1971 trip, later recounted that Kissinger “finally said what I had written for him on no two Chinas no one China, one Taiwan no independent Taiwan.” What Kissinger had secretly pledged then was that the United States would not support independence for Taiwan. had begun to back away from that position during Kissinger’s preliminary trip to Beijing in July 1971. That was the priority for Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, and Zhou.Īmerica’s formal, long-standing position had been that Taiwan’s status was “undetermined.” But without saying so in public, the U.S. Nixon and Kissinger were focused - and they kept the attention of the American press and public focused - almost entirely on the first issue: Who ruled the mainland? But much of the clandestine diplomacy surrounding Nixon’s trip involved the other question, the future of Taiwan. Indeed, at the time of Nixon’s trip, there was a growing movement among native Taiwanese for independence from Chiang’s occupying forces. It had been occupied by Chiang’s troops at the end of the Chinese civil war, but most of the island’s inhabitants did not come from the mainland. The first involved Chiang’s claims to govern mainland China. In other words, Vietnam (“Indochina”) was at the very top of Nixon’s list.Īs for Taiwan, two questions were being hashed out. 3) In Future - Reduce threat of a confrontation by Chinese Super Power.” What we want: 1) Indochina? 2) Communists - to restrain Chicom expansion in Asia. What Nixon and Kissinger hoped to get from China was help in ending the Vietnam War - that is, help in persuading North Vietnam to make a peace settlement.Īhead of the trip, Nixon had written to himself: “What they want: 1) Build up their world credentials. The president and his national security advisor viewed Taiwan as expendable.”
and China over Taiwan, we are all living with the consequences of the framework they constructed 50 years ago.Īs Georgetown University diplomatic historian Nancy Bernkopf Tucker concluded when transcripts of the talks were declassified: “Nixon and Kissinger wanted so intensely to realize their goal that they surrendered more than was necessary to achieve it, and the price was paid, not in the near term by the Nixon White House, but over the long term by the people of Taiwan and by U.S. Indeed, in today’s ongoing tensions between the U.S. In the carefully fudged Nixon-Kissinger formulation, the two Americans gave away little as regards the island, only the fictitious claims of Chiang and the Nationalists. On the “China card,” it can be argued that in reality Beijing played an “American card” against the Soviet Union, which had been skirmishing with China along their shared border.
Mike Mansfield and Ted Kennedy had also been seeking to go to Beijing Nixon and Kissinger asked the Chinese not to let them in.
For example, on the “only Nixon” argument: Democratic Sens.
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