![]() ![]() I had begun working with Possony at the beginning of 1972, and he put me in touch with Haig in the White House. Kissinger traveled to China to meet with Zhou to set the stage for Nixon’s historic visit in 1972. President Richard Nixon’s special adviser, Henry Kissinger (5 CL), and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai (6 CL) pose with their delegations for a group photo in Beijing on Oct. Stefan Possony, with whom Nixon consulted. This was a fundamental principle of Haig’s mentor and one-time colleague of Kissinger, Dr. Haig, Jr., he understood the need to break apart the alliance between the PRC and USSR. Henry Kissinger, and particularly White House Chief of Staff Gen. Through the good offices of his national security adviser Dr. Nixon understood this Gordian knot required a new Alexandrian sword to cut through the complexity. The United States-engaged in a proxy war in Vietnam against the arrayed strength of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and in the Cold War against a Soviet-led bloc, including China-saw that the intractable global conflict required a major breakthrough if it was to achieve victory and the end of the Cold War, which had already been underway for a quarter-century. To understand how the United States took “the one less traveled by” and then became sidetracked, we need to go back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. Understanding this trajectory gives the opportunity for change.Īs the American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) noted: So many of the players who were known to me in this Great Game are now gone, but I recall enough from them and from my own work to piece together the framework of this transformation. This was a change worthy of Sun-tzu’s maxim: “To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” The pivotal change that led to the current global balance of power was achieved without a great interstate kinetic war. So how, a half-century ago, was the situation transformed for the United States-and, along with it, the West-and in a manner that has lain undetected since that time?įew observers, particularly 50 years later, are aware that the paths of the great powers have been anything other than a natural linear extrapolation of their paths at that time. Strategic success is associated with achieving identified goals and moving upon a trajectory determined by sovereign will rather than by an external force, especially the force of an adversary. ![]() The United States has, since the removal of President Richard Nixon in 1974, been moving along a strategic trajectory largely determined by its adversaries. ![]()
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