Trump’s Pyongyang Moment
On July 15,1971, Richard Nixon made the stunning announcement that he would be the first U. S. president to visit Mao Zedong’s China. “There can be no stable and enduring peace without the participation of the People’s Republic of China,” Nixon said. The fact that Nixon had made battling communism a hallmark of his political career up to that point made the news all the more shocking. But the summit, which took place six months later, altered history. It upended the balance of power in Asia and laid the groundwork for decades of friendship—or at least begrudging respect—between China and the United States. And it guaranteed that China, the world’s only major Communist power besides the Soviet Union, would tilt closer to Washington than to Moscow.
