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Interested readers who have access to it should consult Jussi Hanhimaki's " 'Dr. Kissinger' or 'Mr. Henry?' Kissingerology Thirty Years and Counting." Diplomatic History 27.5 December 2003. It provides a useful framework for the issue of the "opening" of China, drawing upon a wide breadth of international scholarship. Incidentally, Hanhimaki has also published a biography on the man at the center of it all, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. My own opinion on what Professor Horne has mentioned is that normalization of relations with China is on balance a good thing. If I understand him correctly, Nixon was wrong to engage China because, in the end, it added one more nation to the list of competitors, a nation that will soon overtake ours in geo-strategic dominance. This is a fair point, and one that is not talked about often enough in the United States, unless you count the protectionist pretensions of Lou Dobbs. Of course, on the credit side, one cannot simply ignore a nation so large in land mass and population, a country with nuclear capabilities which could project power along lines of commerce throughout East Asia. One could argue that if the United States did not seek out a parley with the Chinese, they would eventually do so, on their own terms and in such a way that would be more menacing to US interests. I'd be interested to see what others thought on the same issue. Neil Bhatiya Independent Scholar Wappingers Falls, NY --------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mark Safranski <zenpundit@yahoo.com> In his post, Dr. Horne voiced concern that Nixon's opening to China, being far from a diplomatic masterstroke, opened the door to a long range rival for the United States. This is not a new view of China, considering that Napoleon Bonaparte is once alleged to have remarked about the decaying, distant, Chinese empire of his day," ...let her sleep". At a certain point, Western statesmen like Charles DeGaulle and Richard Nixon realized that, at least for longitudinal strategic reasons, leaving the Chinese who constituted a quarter to a fifth of humanity, " isolated in their rage", was simply unwise. In my view, they were quite correct. China is so vast that, given a different economic and political system than Maoist Communism, China would rise over time despite any efforts to strangle it's growth, short of a nuclear war. Would it be smarter for the United States government to cooperatively integrate a slowly rising China into the international system over time or deal with an emergent, hostile, superpower China that finally forced its way into the community of nations on its own terms ? That was the choice that Nixon and Kissinger perceived at the time, especially Richard Nixon it should be emphasized, and they took large risks to implement a long term vision of opening China instead of going for the easy, short-term, view. An accomplishment that will be more highly regarded by history as time passes, rather than less. Mark Safranski Independent Scholar
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