The communist regime that came to power in Beijing in 1949 had engaged in military conflict with the US through its intervention in the Korean War of 1950-53. According to one Russian diplomat, the Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko ‘went about for weeks with a black expression’. He told aides: ‘We’re using the China thaw to get the Russians shook.’ The potential Sino-American rapprochement was a threatening development for the Soviets and a blow to their self-esteem because Nixon clearly intended visiting Beijing before Moscow. Nixon announced his opening to China just as the Soviet Union was holding out over a new détente. Nothing great can be accomplished without taking risks.’ ‘The more you risk if you lose’, he once remarked, ‘the more you stand to gain if you win. The more sophisticated Nixon used unpredictability, secrecy and risk-raking as instruments of global leadership to keep enemies guessing about his intentions and get allies to toe the line. In Trump’s case, his constant disruption of established patterns is intended to make himself the one who must be satisfied or the deal is dead. Like Trump, Nixon had a penchant for dramatic initiatives in the international arena. One month later, on 15 August 1971, Nixon was back on television to announce a bombshell decision to unilaterally close the gold window, the linchpin of the postwar international monetary system established at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. On 15 July 1971, onetime arch-Cold Warrior Richard Nixon went on television to make the stunning announcement that he would visit the People’s Republic of China, at the time the United States’ bitterest enemy, in early 1972. Astonishing as these developments seem, they are nowhere near in scale to the surprises sprung by another US president nearly half a century ago. In June 2018, Donald Trump torpedoed the G7 Quebec summit meeting at risk of provoking a trade war over import tariffs with the United States’ allies and, just days later, cosied up to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, hitherto America’s bitter enemy, in their Singapore summit.
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