When Chef Peng had a rstaurant in New York in the 1970’s, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was one of his loyal customers. Photo Credit: Taiwan Business TOPICS
The News Lens
Date: 2016/12/05
By: Edward White
Does the historic Trump-Tsai call mark the beginning of the end for America’s long-held strategy with
When Chef Peng had a rstaurant in New York in the 1970’s, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was one of his loyal customers. Photo Credit: Taiwan Business TOPICS
China?
The Dec. 2 phone conversation between U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) may signal Washington’s longstanding approach to Taiwan and China, developed by Henry Kissinger, could be drawing to an end, a visiting academic in Taiwan says.
The rapprochement between the U.S. and China during the 1970s was spearheaded by Kissinger, who served as national security advisor and secretary of state under President Richard Nixon, and continued in the latter role under Nixon’s successor, President Gerald Ford.
As U.S.-China scholars have noted, under Nixon, the U.S. pursued closer ties with China, at the expense of Taiwan, as Nixon felt it was “intrinsically important because of China’s size and inevitable importance” and also because he “saw China as a useful counterbalance to the Soviet Union.”
“To Nixon and Kissinger the overarching geopolitical significance of a relationship with China justified eliminating all intervening obstacles,” late historian Nancy Bernkopf Tucker said in an analysis of Sino-U.S. relations of the 1960s and 1970s, published in The Journal of American History in 2005. [FULL STORY]
