The (Ab)normalization of U.S.-Chinese Relations

Patrick Tyler

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 1999

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Summary:  Only Nixon could go to China, but even the architect of America's opening to the world's most populous communist power had to leave full normalization of U.S.-Chinese ties to his heirs. Jimmy Carter knew when he took office that he would take the final difficult step. But no one imagined that the China breakthrough would come as a result of all-out civil war between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose competition reached startling depths. At every turn down a very long road, momentous decisions on Taiwan and Cold War strategy jostled with bitter personal rivalries.

Patrick Tyler is former Beijing Bureau Chief for The New York Times. This essay is adapted from A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China, a Century Foundation book published in 1999 by Public Affairs. All rights reserved.

CABINET WARFARE

Only Nixon could go to China, the saying ran. But even Richard M. Nixon, the architect of America's opening to the world's most populous communist power, could not complete the full normalization of U.S. ties with the People's Republic of China (PRC). Indeed, he and Gerald R. Ford, as well as their secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger, developed significant reservations about whether the final step was at all possible.

AND SO IT WAS LEFT TO THEIR HEIRS.

By the time he ran for president, Jimmy Carter had adopted the Democratic Party position on China -- that the process of normalization, or recognizing Beijing as the sole government of the Chinese and breaking formal ties with Taiwan, should be completed. Carter understood that Taiwan was a political problem that had to be solved, but he was willing to lead the country to a new state of relations, one that reflected the reality of modern China.

There was never any doubt in Carter's mind that he would be the president who took the final difficult step, and he said as much when he outlined his foreign policy goals for those who would serve under him. No one had imagined, however, that when the China breakthrough came, it would come as a result of all-out civil war within the Carter administration, or that Carter's achievement on China would rise from a destructive collision of personalities and from the irreconcilable world-views of his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, and national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose poisonous competition would add to the perception that Carter had lost control of his presidency and his own political destiny.

The night of Carter's victory in 1976, Vance, Brzezinski, and their wives gathered at the New York apartment of Richard C. Holbrooke, a rising Democratic foreign policy specialist. It was neutral territory for the competing clans. They watched the returns come in until after midnight, then parted cordially, wondering who would get the upper hand as Carter's chief strategist.

During the weeks that followed, as the president-elect grappled with forming his cabinet, the Democratic scion Averell Harriman led an effort to open a secret channel between Carter and the Soviet leadership, cutting Brzezinski out of the loop. Harriman's intervention seemed a preemptive strike to ensure that the management of Soviet policy (and, therefore, China policy) remained in what the traditional Soviet specialists considered safe hands. They believed that the worst manifestation of triangular diplomacy -- the game that Nixon and Kissinger had begun -- would be to play the China card to pressure Moscow and play on its fear of encirclement. That could only lead to miscalculation, or even war. Harriman and Vance did not want to confront the Soviet Union as much as they wanted to engage it in an extended process of arms reduction and diplomatic cooperation to defuse conflicts in the Third World.

Three weeks after the election, Harriman returned to the United States from Moscow, where he had seen Soviet leader ...

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