This past week, U.S. President Joe Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco. Their in-person conversation—the first between the two leaders in a year—came at a diplomatic low point between Washington and Beijing, with dialogue having largely stalled over major issues including trade, technology, and climate change. Although there was no joint communiqué issued after Wednesday’s talks, both sides characterized the meeting as a success. “I firmly believe in the promising future of the bilateral relationship,” Xi stated, asserting his view that both countries are “fully capable of rising above differences.”
Writing for Foreign Affairs in 1972, the celebrated historian Barbara Tuchman explored whether such face-to-face meetings could set history on a different path. That year, Richard Nixon had become the first U.S. president to ever visit mainland China. His meeting with Mao Zedong opened the door to diplomatic relations between China and the United States after decades of stony isolation, culminating in full normalization in 1979. Seeing the impact of Nixon’s visit, Tuchman wondered whether the United States could have improved the relationship decades earlier and spared the world the consequences of the hostility that developed between Washington and Beijing. “If, in the absence of ill-feeling, we had established relations on some level with the People’s Republic, permitting communication in a crisis, and if the Chinese had not been moved by hate and suspicion of us to make common cause with the Soviet Union, it is conceivable that there might have been no Korean War with all its evil consequences.”
Tuchman’s inquiry was prompted by newly declassified documents that shed light on Mao’s request, in 1945, to meet in person with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. At the time, the prospect of civil war was looming in China, with Mao, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, squaring off against Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Nationalist Party, also known as the Kuomintang. The Chinese Communists “wanted to convince President Roosevelt that they, not the Kuomintang, represented the future of China,” wrote Tuchman. They felt “that if they could reach Roosevelt they could make this clear.”
But Mao’s request never made it to Roosevelt. The American special envoy to China at the time, Patrick Hurley, who favored maintaining unqualified U.S. support for Chiang, decided not to forward it to Washington. His decision went against the advice of U.S. career officers in China and the State Department who were practically begging Washington to take a more flexible approach. “Here is a beam of light on the most puzzling aspect of our China policy: why the information and opinions provided by experienced observers maintained in the field for the express purpose of keeping our government informed were so consistently and regularly ignored.”
That flaw in the U.S. foreign policy process proved to be a fateful one. If American leaders had “established relations on some level with the People’s Republic, permitting communication in a crisis,” rued Tuchman, “our history, our present and our future, would have been different.” Indeed, she wrote, “We might not have come to Vietnam.” Imagining an alternative path for the United States and China was more than an exercise in historical counterfactuals, wrote Tuchman. It was a reminder, rather, that different outcomes are possible, that “history is not law-abiding or orderly and will often respond to a breeze as carelessly as a leaf upon a lake.”