A lot of elements aligned when Kissinger convinced Nixon to visit China.
LBJ was a star on Civil Rights but just couldn't bring himself to pull the plug on Vietnam, which Kennedy had slid into, taking the place of France. LBJ even asked for and received a very unpopular 10% income tax surcharge to pay for the increasing war expenditure on a current basis without debt.
Like any sensible candidate, Nixon was unwilling to continue the incredibly costly boondoggle.
Like the shifty criminal he was, Nixon had already arranged the Paris Peace Talks "peace / surrender" with North Vietnam in 1968 before he was elected president in violation of the Logan Act, which no one has ever been charged with. He began to implement this deal after taking office in 1969.
After two years of talks with North Vietnam, in 1971 it seemed attractive to reach out to China, both to play China against the USSR and to see what role China might be able to play in the Vietnam peace talks.
With the war in Vietnam essentially at an end, meeting with China was no longer meeting an active war enemy, and having worked on his reputation as an anti-communist, Nixon could afford to take the chance to dialogue with a communist nation that a liberal politician could not afford to do without backlash. In much the same way, politics being the world of opposites, only a liberal like Bill Clinton could afford to risk cutting welfare benefits.
There's a basic policy framework which posits that a hostile inwardly-focused nation like China, once engaged in the world trade regime, has too much at risk to cause problems with spurious wars and obstreperous behaviour. Even the costs that might be incurred in bringing in a new trade partner is less costly than war.
In Zhou Enlai (Chou en Lai) Nixon met a pragmatic mind who remained the head of China for two years after Nixon had left office.
Zhou Enlai was later replaced in 1982 by a corrupt little toad in by the name of Deng Xiaoping who's primary contribution to China's thought was "To be rich is glorious." Deng created a system where the relatives of communist party cadres would become China's new capitalists with the Chinese people being a slave population to be exploited.
Deng's relatives went on to own Anbang insurance company which had very profitable fingers in every single Chinese pie. - nytimes.com
Delicious self-enrichment schemes like the China model go viral. Beginning in 1991 the Russian KGB and other state officials / criminals implemented a similar self-enrichment scheme under the charismatic alcoholic Boris Yeltsin.
From the western point of view, bringing the under-employed populations of China and Russia into the western market economy led to reduced incomes among workers and a lot of lost jobs in western economies, but this cost is offset by the savings in less war.
Inevitably the winners in western economies, as in the former communist China and Russia, were not the same group as the losers and, under the right-wing ethos of western economies and the kleptocracy of the former communist leadership, there was no effective political mechanism for the winners to subsidize the losers as "that would be socialism" sort of claptrap.
The winners in both the East and West becme wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice - which naturally created the "populist" need for a Trump to lower the income tax rates for these most wealthy of wealthy. In the east it created a need for a dictator like Emperor Xi who could effectively quash the rising ambitions of China's new Middle Class for democracy. Total control of the internet is his chief aim. His most important job title is head of Party Propaganda, a job title China's prior leader did not hold.
The Waltons, owners of Walmart, China's tip of the spear, were one of the primary winners in the west.
In Mexico, Walmart sells "traditional Mexican handcrafted Christmas ornaments" made in China for far less than any peasant in Mexico could afford to sell them for - so in the process, the poorest peasants in Mexico lost a major traditional source of income. |
