On a surface level, Nixon’s rapprochement with China could be seen as a softening of America's resistance to communism during the Cold War. He was granting diplomatic recognition to a communist regime which was responsible for the deaths of millions of Chinese, and was responsible for the egregious violations of human rights and civil rights.
On a deeper level, however, Nixon’s China policy was a clever way to play two communist nations against each other. From 1949, when the communists took over China, the Soviet Socialists had an alliance with China. Mao had a comfortable working relationship with Stalin.
But after Stalin died in 1953, China’s alliance with the Soviet Socialists began to deteriorate. Nixon saw this as an opportunity. When Nixon was in China, the Soviets worried that a close relationship between America and China would leave the USSR out. So Nixon visited Moscow in May 1972. At that point, the Chinese worried that America would develop a good connection to the Soviets.
Nixon was able to play the two communist nations against each other. Nixon’s successor, President Gerald Ford, recalls:
Our new ties with the Soviets were possible, I believed, only because the Soviet leaders were becoming concerned about developments within the People’s Republic of China. Both Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai were making increasingly antagonistic speeches toward the Kremlin. Nixon sensed that the Chinese leaders feared and distrusted the Soviets. Their long-standing border dispute was a festering sore. Mao had never forgiven the Soviets for mistreating him in the 1950s, and he was concerned about Soviet intentions in the Pacific. Skillfully, Nixon moved to take advantage of the split.
U.S. diplomat Richard Haass sees Nixon’s policy as a kind of balance. Nixon’s goal, according to Haass, was to make China and the USSR feel equally jealous of each other’s relationship with America:
The purpose of the policy developed by Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger was to use China as a counterweight to the Soviet Union and shape China’s foreign policy, not its internal nature.
The timing of Nixon’s visits to China and to the USSR must be understood in the context of the Vietnam War. It was not until 1973 that the final peace documents were signed, and that the U.S. began withdrawing its troops from Vietnam.
Both China and the USSR supported North Vietnam to varying degrees during the war. China’s support for North Vietnam was continued but reduced after 1968, when China began to reserve more soldiers and equipment for anticipated direct combat between the USSR and China.
In cementing China’s split from the Soviet Union, the United States gained leverage that contributed to the Cold War ending when and how it did.
Although China was interested in empire-building in southeast Asia, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, China was not as aggressive in the South China Sea region as it became after 1990 and especially after 2000.
China’s ability to pose a military and economic threat to the nations of the South China Sea regions was limited in the 1960s and 1970s. Nixon’s rapprochement with China cannot be seen as opening the door to the Chinese expansionism that the following decades would see. At the time of Nixon’s visit, lacked the military power and economic power needed to take control of the South China Sea.
