The more things change, the more they stay the same
More than 51 years after President Richard Nixon's famous opening to the People's Republic of China nothing has changed.
In February 1972, President Richard Nixon met with Chinese leaders Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in Peking—an ostensible turning point in history that didn’t turn. After decades of intense hostility including the risk of nuclear war over Quemoy and Matsu, the United States courted Chinese friendship to counter the Soviet Union. (As recently as 1954, then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused go shake hands Zhou Enlai during the 1954 Geneva Conference over Vietnam. Mr. Nixon was then Vice President).
China did not need much courting. It had already fought battles with the Soviet Union over the Ussuri River in 1969. And the United States threatened to retaliate against the Soviet Union if it went forward with its planned nuclear attack on China in the same year.
Nixon and Kissinger were delirious with joy. The two believed they had changed world history more profoundly than the Renaissance and Reformation. But their delirium was misplaced. The PRC continued its industrial-scale suppression of human rights, including the Tiananmen Square massacre, the transformation of Hong Kong into a police state, and genocide of Uighurs and Tibetans. The United States continued its quest for world domination including containment of China with the Taiwan Relations Act and arming Taiwan, the Quad consisting of the United States, Japan, Australia, and India, to encircle China, and fortifying the United States military profile in the Philippines, Guam, and Australia. President Joe Biden issues new economic sanctions against China as regularly as the rising and setting of the sun. In response, China has become a semi-ally of Russia. A United States war with China inches forward every day. Doomsday clock is approaching midnight.
This bleak 51-year history of U.S.-China relations was predictable but for the choreography. The iron law of international relations, as certain as Newton’s law of universal gravitation, is that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Species and national narcissism prohibits recognition of this cruel and nasty truth. Thus, fighting over straws never diminishes. Peace peace a euphemism for halftimes before mindless fighting begins again.