Of more lasting importance were the treaties the two men signed to control the growth of nuclear arms. Nixon and Brezhnev sign the SALT 1 ABM Treaty (Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems) and the Interim Agreement on strategic offensive arms in Moscow In meeting with the Soviet leader, Nixon became the first president to visit Moscow. Fear of improved relations between China and America was leading the Soviets to better their own relations with America, just as Nixon hoped. It was a sign that Nixon's effort at "triangulation" was working. The announcement of the Beijing summit produced an immediate improvement in American relations with the U.S.S.R.-namely, an invitation for Nixon to meet with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev in Russia. Detente with the Soviet Union Nixon and Brezhnev meet in Russia, 1973 It was only a first step, but a decisive one, in the budding rapprochement between the two states. Nixon's visit to China in February 1972 was widely televised and heavily viewed. The announcement that the president would make an unprecedented trip to Beijing caused a sensation among the American people, who had seen little of the world's most populous nation since the Communists had taken power. As America's foremost anti-Communist politician of the Cold War, Nixon was in a unique position to launch a diplomatic opening to China, leading to the birth of a new political maxim: "Only Nixon could go to China." Before long, Nixon dispatched Kissinger to secret meetings with Chinese officials. Reversing Cold War precedent, he publicly referred to the Communist nation by its official name, the People's Republic of China.Ī breakthrough of sorts occurred in the spring of 1971, when Mao Zedong invited an American table tennis team to China for some exhibition matches. The president sensed opportunity and began to send out tentative diplomatic feelers to China. Ping-pong diplomacyĪ year before his election, Nixon had written that "there is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation." Relations between the two great communist powers, the Soviet Union and China, had been deteriorating since the 1950s and had erupted into open conflict with border clashes during Nixon's first year in office. So closely did the two work that they are sometimes referred to as "Nixinger." Together, they used the National Security Council staff to concentrate power in the White House-that is to say, within themselves. The instrument of his control over what he called "the bureaucracy" was his assistant for national security affairs, Henry Kissinger. He kept Secretary of State William Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird out of the loop on key matters of foreign policy. ![]() ![]() Nixon took office intending to secure control over foreign policy from the White House. He would play China against the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union against China, and both against North Vietnam Henry Kissinger, 1976 ![]() He would play China against the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union against China, and both against North Vietnam. Politically, he hoped to gain credit for easing Cold War tensions geopolitically, he hoped to use the strengthened relations with Moscow and Beijing as leverage to pressure North Vietnam to end the war-or at least interrupt it-with a settlement. Although his base of support was within the conservative wing of the Republican Party, and although he had made his own career as a militant opponent of Communism, Nixon saw opportunities to improve relations with the Soviet Union and establish relations with the People's Republic of China. It was in this arena that Nixon intended to make his mark. Kennedy, was far more interested in foreign policy than in domestic affairs. President Richard Nixon, like his arch-rival President John F.
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