Washington’s policy of engagement toward Beijing has been embraced, with a few bumps along the way, by eight successive U.S. presidents—an incredible record of continuity. The approach was born in 1972, when the fervently anti-communist President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, set off for Beijing to make a game-changing proposal: The United States and China should end their decades-long hostility by allying against the Soviet Union.
