Beyond Peace by Richard Nixon

Author:Richard Nixon [Nixon, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

VIETNAM, CUBA, AND NORTH KOREA: THE CLOSED DOOR OR THE OPEN DOOR?

The lessons of China are directly relevant to what our policies should be toward the three remaining hard-line communist states: Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea.

In planning the American opening to China, I set one basic threshold requirement. In the 1967 article in Foreign Affairs in which I first publicly stressed the need for such an opening, I argued that doing so the right way would require short-run pressures “designed to persuade Peking that its interests can be served only by accepting the basic rules of international civility.” For the long run, it would require “pulling China back into the world community—but as a great and progressing nation, not as the epicenter of world revolution.” In other words, China had to be brought into the world community, but it could not be allowed to shoot its way in.

When I wrote that, China was still an aggressive power and a serious threat to the security of its neighbors. On taking office in January 1969, one of the first things I did was to set in motion a series of initiatives aimed at achieving an opening to China in the right way. By the time of my initial visit to Beijing in 1972, China was still repressive domestically, but except for its brief invasion of Vietnam, it was no longer a direct military threat to its neighbors.

Of the three remaining communist states, North Korea clearly remains a serious, active threat, not only to South Korea but to the peace and security of the entire Pacific Rim. It has not yet crossed the threshold that I set more than twenty-five years ago for China. Until it ceases to be a threat, we should continue to treat it as the pariah nation that its leaders still persist in making it.

Vietnam and Cuba are like North Korea in that both are still run by repressive communist regimes. Between the two there are dramatic differences. But neither presents an active threat to the peace internationally.

Vietnam’s present leaders have turned the country’s extraordinary energies from external aggression to internal development. Like China’s leaders, they retain tight political control but are opening their economy to market forces. The result is that Vietnam is now on the verge of becoming a significant economic power. In Cuba, by contrast, Castro still gives lip service to world revolution. But his Stalinist economic policies have devastated the nation’s economy, and without his former Soviet sponsors, he no longer has the resources to pose a serious external threat.

In the cases of both Cuba and Vietnam, the question before us now is how we can best serve our own national interest, the interests of the people of those two nations, and the interest of the world community: by the closed door or the open door?

Of the two, Vietnam presents the easier choice. Though repressive, its government is solidly entrenched. Clearly, neither economic nor diplomatic pressures will dislodge it. The question is how best to open it further to the winds of freedom that are sweeping the world.

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