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