At the height of the Cold War, as the United States sank deeper into the Vietnam quagmire in 1967, Richard Nixon, who had lost the 1960 presidential election and would later become US president, wrote a famous article titled “Asia After Viet Nam”.
In it, Nixon examined Asia’s geopolitical landscape from a perspective that moved beyond Vietnam, which at the time dominated American strategic thinking.
Nixon saw an Asia in upheaval. In his assessment, the continent had moved beyond colonialism in its political thinking and was beginning to develop a distinct Asian consciousness of its own. He also believed Asia was rising rapidly and could eventually become a more important centre of global power than Europe, particularly because of its accelerating economic growth and increasing openness to the world.
He pointed to non-communist experiences such as Japan and South Korea as distinctive development success stories and argued that assuming Asia would inevitably become communist represented a failure of American strategic vision.
On China, Nixon identified the country as a central danger and a revolutionary communist power demanding serious attention, while rejecting the idea that military force should be the only way to deal with it.
“Nixon believed that the United States could not leave China outside the international system forever.”
Nixon stressed that Washington could not permanently keep China outside the international system. He proposed a model based on applying pressure in the short term before eventually opening the door to Beijing in a way that would contain the perceived threat without triggering a costly confrontation.
About a year later, amid deep domestic divisions in the United States caused by the Vietnam War, Nixon won the 1968 presidential election.
He soon began translating the China component of his earlier argument into policy. His administration eased some restrictions on China and used Pakistan as a secret channel of communication between Washington and Beijing.
The breakthrough did not take long.
Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger secretly travelled to China, where he met Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and prepared the ground for Nixon’s landmark visit to Beijing in February 1972.
That visit reshaped the Cold War landscape and opened the door to a normalised US-Chinese relationship.
Between Kissinger’s secret trip and Nixon’s public visit, Beijing had also regained China’s seat at the United Nations, an outcome that only a few years earlier had appeared almost unimaginable.
Nixon’s Breakthrough Into the Communist Bloc
Between 1972 and 2026, comparisons between the two eras have again become difficult to ignore.
At the height of the US-Iranian confrontation, President Donald Trump arrived in Beijing in May to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping, reviving memories of Nixon’s meetings with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in 1972.
Questions quickly followed over the similarities between the two visits.
Superficially, the scenes may appear comparable. Historically, however, the contexts are fundamentally different. China is no longer the China of Nixon’s era, the United States is no longer the same country it was in 1972, and the international system has undergone profound transformation.
Before the US opening to China, formal relations between the two countries had been severed since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Washington, along with most of the international community at the time, recognised the government in Taiwan, which called itself the Republic of China.
Despite Nixon’s concerns about China before entering office, Beijing was not then a global pole comparable to either the United States or the Soviet Union, the two principal powers of the Cold War.
China was a poor country with a gross domestic product of around $113 billion and a population estimated at about 862 million, meaning per capita income was only around $132.
Its economy was closed, centrally planned and state-directed. This was before the reform and opening period that began in 1978, while Chinese foreign trade throughout the 1950s and 1960s remained extremely limited.
The United States, by contrast, had a population of around 210 million and a GDP of approximately $1.28 trillion, with per capita income of roughly $6,000.
Washington led the global economic system. The Soviet economy competed with it to a lesser degree, operating as a closed system but controlling an economic bloc across Eastern Europe.
“China at the time had no serious external ambitions and maintained only a limited presence, revolutionary rhetoric and scattered political relationships.”
China had no serious external ambitions at the time. Its international role was limited, its rhetoric revolutionary, and its political relationships scattered.
The United States, meanwhile, was the world’s leading nuclear power. It had inherited much of the influence once exercised by European powers, led NATO, and maintained influence and a military presence close to energy sources and major supply routes in the Arabian Gulf and Iran, in addition to possessing most of the other attributes of global power.
The Soviet Union had also established the Warsaw Pact, built an enormous nuclear arsenal, and attempted to challenge the United States across virtually every theatre, including the Middle East through its relationships with Egypt and Syria and its support for leftist movements worldwide.
In short, there was a global strategic arena, and China remained far from being fully engaged in it.
Washington recognised that the communist bloc was fracturing as the Sino-Soviet dispute intensified.
Relations between Beijing and Moscow had deteriorated from the late 1950s as ideological differences sharpened following Stalin’s death.
Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong viewed Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, as having deviated from communism and abandoned the global revolution.
At its core, the ideological disagreement was also a struggle over leadership of the communist world.
China rejected a subordinate position under the Soviet Union and sought to forge an independent course after initially receiving Soviet support.
Their paths diverged further when Moscow withdrew Soviet experts from China and halted technical assistance, dealing a serious blow to a number of emerging Chinese projects.
The dispute escalated following China’s first nuclear test in 1964 and reached a peak in March 1969 when the two powers fought a military border clash.
“Extending a hand to China became an American strategic choice aimed at weakening Moscow internationally.”
Faced with a powerful Soviet adversary and a weaker communist China increasingly distinct from Moscow, Washington saw an opening.
Engagement with Beijing became an American strategic choice aimed at weakening Moscow internationally, penetrating the communist camp, reshaping the Cold War balance, reducing pressure on the United States in Vietnam, isolating Hanoi diplomatically and expanding American influence at the expense of its principal rival.
China, meanwhile, wanted to escape the international isolation it had experienced for nearly three decades and weaken Taiwan’s position by developing its own relationship with the United States.
Nixon’s visit therefore helped create conditions for internal changes in China that, over the following decades, would drive its integration into the global system.
The arrangement was a short and medium-term gain for the United States, but a long-term advantage whose benefits China would increasingly harvest over time.
What Washington Failed to Anticipate
At the time, the United States did not anticipate that China might eventually occupy the position once held by the Soviet Union as its principal strategic competitor.
Even when American policymakers considered such a possibility, they largely approached it through a strategy of partnership and containment.
This is one reason John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and one of the leading theorists of political realism, later criticised the trajectory of US engagement with China.
Mearsheimer argued that Henry Kissinger could not properly be described as a hardline realist given his support for opening relations with Beijing.
Even Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter and one of the most prominent American strategic thinkers of the Cold War, underestimated China in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.
Brzezinski argued that China lacked the ability to become a global pole and suggested that its geopolitical limits were defined largely by its geography and surrounding region, making it a major regional power rather than a global one.
In practice, however, China’s movement towards greater openness continued to deepen, and the country’s development trajectory did not reverse.
When Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, the mindset of the Chinese state underwent a fundamental shift with the launch of the “Four Modernisations” in agriculture, industry, defence and technology.
Economic development was elevated above other national priorities.
Despite setbacks during some periods, the reform trajectory continued, expanding economic openness and eventually producing a market economy deeply integrated into the global system.
The United States was not removed from that process.
Under President Bill Clinton, Washington launched its “comprehensive engagement” policy with China in 1993.
The policy was grounded in a liberal assumption that expanding trade, encouraging Chinese participation in market economics and global commerce, and integrating Beijing into international institutions would make China more deeply embedded in the international order created and led by the United States.
“China expanded its global economic presence at limited cost while the United States carried much of the burden of securing and protecting trade routes.”
The decisive turning point came when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
China subsequently became known as the “factory of the world”, benefiting from access to global markets, while the United States benefited economically from the inflow of low-cost Chinese goods.
Within a relatively short period, China expanded its global economic presence at limited cost.
Through its naval forces and security policies, the United States bore much of the burden of securing and protecting global trade routes, while Beijing focused on expanding its production base, increasing exports and reaping the rewards of economic growth.
When Washington Began to Worry About Beijing
During the administration of George W. Bush, which was deeply occupied with the war in Iraq, American concern over China’s rise began to take clearer shape.
In 2005, US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick argued that China should become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system, helping protect it rather than simply benefiting from it.
The larger shift came with the 2008 global financial crisis.
The crisis weakened Western economies while strengthening China’s confidence in its place within the global economy.
From that point, US strategic attention increasingly focused on China as the rising centre of gravity in the international system, and new policies and concepts emerged for dealing with Beijing.
In 2011, then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the future of global politics would be decided in Asia.
She identified six key areas for American policy: strengthening alliances, deepening relationships with emerging powers led by China, expanding the role of regional institutions, increasing trade, maintaining a strong military presence, and promoting democracy and human rights.
“The American approach to China gradually shifted from an economic framework to a geopolitical one.”
This marked the beginning of Washington’s strategic pivot towards Asia.
From then on, US policy towards China increasingly shifted from an economic framework to a geopolitical one.
In a 2020 White House report, the Trump administration said its approach represented a fundamental reassessment of how the United States understood China, acknowledging the existence of a long-term strategic competition between the two systems.
The 2022 US National Security Strategy under President Joe Biden went further, describing China as the only competitor possessing both the intention and the capacity to reshape the international order.
Trump’s China Is Not Nixon’s China
The challenge posed by China lies in the fact that it represents something unprecedented in American history.
The United States long celebrated the post-Second World War international order it had led as a system capable of absorbing those willing to participate in it and marginalising those who opposed it.
From the liberal perspective, the model came to appear almost as an embodiment of the “end of history”.
China, however, emerged from within this very system according to its own formula.
It benefited from rules Washington believed it controlled, operated within them, and gradually became one of the most influential actors in the system itself.
At extraordinary speed, China came to dominate major areas of global manufacturing and trade.
Its GDP increased from less than half a trillion dollars in the early 1990s to around $19.5 trillion in 2025.
Chinese exports rose from roughly $60 billion to around $3.5 trillion.
Trade with the United States climbed from about $5 billion to more than $440 billion, of which only around $143 billion consisted of US exports to China, according to 2024 data.
China’s industrial output also expanded dramatically, from approximately $100 billion to $120 billion to around $4.5 trillion to $4.7 trillion.
China consequently became the world’s largest manufacturing power and largest exporter of goods, as well as a major player in supply chains upon which the US economy itself depends.
“China became the world’s largest manufacturing power, the largest exporter of goods and a central player in supply chains on which the American economy depends.”
China’s influence also expanded within international institutions that the United States had helped create and consolidate.
Beijing became the second-largest contributor to the United Nations regular budget after Washington, with only a narrow gap separating the two.
This occurred as the United Nations faced a severe liquidity crisis between 2025 and 2026 due to delays by member states in paying their contributions, led by the United States itself.
A similar pattern can be seen in peacekeeping, the World Trade Organization, climate financing and other areas where China’s role has continued to expand as American engagement has declined.
In other words, Washington has increasingly distanced itself from some of the very institutions through which it once exercised global influence, while China has become more deeply embedded in them.
China is also working to reduce the centrality of the US dollar in the international financial system.
Russia and a growing number of countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America have joined China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, known as CIPS, alongside a broader increase in the use of the yuan for commercial settlements.
The yuan does not yet rival the dollar’s dominant position, but it is opening gaps in the dollar’s monopoly over the international financial system.
China has also attempted to challenge the petrodollar model by introducing the yuan into energy trade, particularly with countries under US sanctions such as Russia and Iran.
One of China’s most powerful sources of leverage lies in critical minerals used across advanced technology industries.
China dominates global refining chains for these minerals.
Beijing leads the refining of 19 out of 20 strategic minerals, with an average share of around 70 per cent of total global refining.
That means a significant proportion of clean-energy and advanced technology supply chains pass through Chinese factories.
The dominance is even clearer in rare earths, graphite, lithium and cobalt.
By 2035, China is expected to remain the supplier of more than 60 per cent of refined lithium and cobalt and around 80 per cent of battery-grade graphite and processed rare earths.
China has not neglected its military capabilities either.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated Chinese military spending in 2025 at around $336 billion, the second highest in the world after the United States, following annual growth of 7.4 per cent.
At the same time, Beijing closely observes wars involving the United States and seeks to draw operational and technological lessons from them, including from the latest confrontation with Iran.
Drawing on this financial, economic, industrial and technological strength, China has presented countries around the world with a model of economic cooperation different from that offered by the United States.
It has emphasised direct investment without domestic political conditions at a time when Western financing has become increasingly difficult to obtain and politically costly.
“Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has expanded its presence across a large number of countries.”
Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has strengthened its position across many countries occupying strategic locations along trade routes, energy corridors and international waterways.
It has done so through investments in ports, railways, industrial zones, energy networks and telecommunications.
Examples include Gwadar Port in Pakistan, which gives China access close to the Gulf and Indian Ocean; Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka, located near one of the most important maritime routes in the Indian Ocean; Piraeus Port in Greece, which has provided China with a maritime and commercial gateway into Europe; China’s base and port investments in Djibouti near the entrance to the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab; and Chancay Port in Peru, which strengthens China’s presence along Latin America’s Pacific coast.
Chinese influence has also extended into soft power.
Beijing has developed a discourse aimed at appealing to countries across the Global South by stressing respect for sovereignty, non-interference in domestic affairs and multipolarity, in contrast with criticism of Western hegemony.
This is the China Trump visited in 2026.
It is fundamentally different from the China Nixon opened relations with in the 1970s.
Trump in Beijing
Trump arrived in China in May for his second visit, one that differed in appearance as well as substance from his first.
The second visit was less extravagant and ceremonial than the first, when China had received him with considerable fanfare.
The US-Chinese relationship has now moved away from the pursuit of partnership towards the management of rivalry.
China itself has also moved beyond the period in which Western acceptance was treated as a political achievement, entering an era of serious and sometimes harsh competition.
Given the scale of power on both sides and the deep interdependence between their economies in production, consumption and supply chains, neither country wants to slide into direct confrontation.
The potential costs would be enormous and the consequences difficult to predict.
Managing the rivalry has therefore become the most realistic option, particularly across the main points of friction: technology, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, Taiwan, influence in Asia, and China’s role in the Middle East amid the war with Iran.
“The US-Chinese relationship has effectively moved from the search for partnership to the management of conflict.”
Trump sought to use the visit to secure economic achievements that could be promoted ahead of the US midterm elections.
His objectives ranged from increasing Chinese purchases of American aircraft and agricultural products to easing restrictions on US companies and exploring new trade arrangements that could reduce the trade deficit, a longstanding concern dating back to his first term.
He also sought Chinese cooperation over the war with Iran, consistent with his preference for personal relationships, direct channels and rapid agreements over institutional and bureaucratic processes.
Following the visit, the White House announced that China would purchase at least $17 billion annually in US agricultural products between 2026 and 2028, in addition to previous commitments involving soybeans.
Washington also spoke of improved access for US beef and poultry to the Chinese market.
Beijing, however, described the understandings as preliminary and said they would be completed in later stages.
This meant Trump secured a political and economic headline he could promote, but not necessarily a final agreement with all its terms concluded.
Trump also announced that China had agreed to purchase 200 Boeing aircraft, although expectations had pointed to a larger deal and insufficient details were released.
The most heavily promoted outcome from the American side was an agreement to establish or activate frameworks for trade and investment dialogue, explore reductions in tariffs on selected goods and address certain non-tariff barriers.
In other words, the visit did not resolve the existing disputes.
It created a negotiating framework for managing them.
On the most sensitive issue, the war with Iran, Trump did not secure tangible Chinese support for ending the conflict, despite thanking Xi for maintaining neutrality during the war.
China, for its part, still depends on the United States in several critical areas.
These include the most advanced semiconductors, precision equipment used to manufacture them, artificial intelligence chips and semiconductor design software.
Beijing therefore fears the continuation of US restrictions in these sectors because of their impact across large areas of Chinese industry.
The United States still possesses the capacity to lead a Western technological coalition capable of restricting China’s access to advanced technologies.
The same applies in other areas, including finance and global supply chains, where China continues to require a degree of stability.
“Beijing’s interest at this stage is to gain time and preserve the stability of the existing system.”
Beijing’s interest at this stage is therefore to gain time, maintain the stability of the existing economic order and achieve breakthroughs in selected areas.
In practical terms, China achieved that objective at a summit that ended without an explosion in tensions, mutual humiliation, major escalation or fundamental concessions.
China’s most significant symbolic gain was the consolidation of American recognition of its position as a global power that cannot be bypassed.
The visit also reinforced the reality that the United States is no longer capable of managing the international system alone.
This was reflected in the nature of the reception, the confidence Xi displayed in dealing with Trump, and Trump’s own rhetoric, which appeared more accepting of China’s new status, both in his general tone and in some of his references to Taiwan.
A New Balance of Power
Trump’s visit to Beijing several weeks ago can be seen as illustrating the world’s new balance of power in much the same way Nixon’s visit reflected the balance of power at the beginning of the 1970s.
The United States remains the world’s leading power, with enormous political and financial influence and continued leadership in advanced technologies and industries, both within its own borders and through its network of allies and partners.
At the same time, China is now widely recognised as a competing global pole.
Beijing nevertheless understands that its priority at this stage is to preserve stability and gain time, which increasingly appears to be working in its favour as the United States becomes entangled in multiple wars and recurring crises, including disputes with its own allies and tensions within the international order it once sponsored.
If Nixon’s visit strengthened the strategic position of the United States against the Soviet Union, Trump’s visit consolidated China’s own position.
In the Middle East, available indicators suggest that China is not prepared to submit to the American vision, even though it is also unwilling to enter into confrontation in defence of its partners.
Nixon’s visit once helped create a new balance of power that gave the United States a strategic advantage while also opening the door to China’s long and gradual rise.
Trump is now confronting a very different reality.
Washington has entered a phase in which it must manage coexistence with China’s ascent, a rise that has become an established reality that can no longer be ignored or bypassed.
