The Art of the Nuclear Deal
It was an audacious move, one of the riskiest in the history of modern diplomacy.
In 1972, when China was desperately poor and largely insular, President Richard Nixon, a staunch cold warrior, traveled to Beijing for historic meetings with Mao Zedong, the father of the Communist revolution there. At the time, the U.S. recognized neighboring Taiwan and its leaders, whom Mao had vanquished, as the true rulers of China. But the goal of Nixon’s visit was to change course. As Henry Kissinger, the architect of the president’s strategy later put it: “We wanted to see whether the beginning of
