I had to look up a famous incident.
On April 26, 1954, at the Geneva Conference on Indochina, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles wounded Chinese dignity by refusing the outstretched hand of Foreign Minister Chou En-lai. Seventeen years later, on February 22, 1972, arriving at Beijing airport, President Richard Nixon extended his hand as he walked toward Chou. Nixon's gesture represented a tremendous shift in Cold War international relations. What made a new Sino-American relationship possible were political and strategic concerns that brought both nations toward accommodation.
When Dulles encountered Chou, he saw the Communist regime as a virtual Soviet pawn possessing no legitimacy of its own. Minimizing Chinese nationalism, Dulles and his chief, President Dwight Eisenhower, saw China as a faithful member of a cohesive "Sino-Soviet bloc" dedicated to undermining American power and prestige in Asia and the Third World generally. Yet China was also poor and relatively weak militarily, and Dulles sought to isolate Beijing to reduce its influence, as well as promote internal disintegration and a split with the Soviet Union. Thus, keeping Beijing out of the United Nations remained an important U.S. diplomatic priority. asia.cnn.com
Seeing China purely as a Soviet puppet has to be one of the great diplomatic misreadings of the 20th century. I'm not quite sure, but I think there may have been a similar incident with Chou and maybe Rusk or Acheson that predated the Korean War. The fundamental blunder the US made in Viet Nam was even earlier, when it decided to support the reestablishment of French imperial rule in Indochina. It would perhaps have been wise for Dulles and company to have read their Palmerston.
"We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. " xrefer.com |
