The Worst Part of Nixon’s Legacy Isn’t Watergate. It’s China.

Nixon and his dumfuks

Jihad Watch : My latest in PJ Media:

On July 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon shocked the world by announcing that he, who had built his political reputation on fighting Communism (and earned the incandescent hatred of the American Left in doing so), would become the first president to visit Communist China. And that, my friend, is where our present troubles began. The visit took place in February 1972 and led, several years after Nixon was out of office, to U.S. recognition of the Beijing government as the sole legitimate government of China and the withdrawal of that recognition of the Taiwanese government, the Chinese Nationalists who maintained a relatively free society on that island after the fall of the mainland to totalitarianism.

For opening the U.S. to Communist China, Nixon has been heralded as a great, far-seeing statesman. A common assessment of his presidency goes along the lines of “Well, yes, he was a crook, but on the other side of the ledger, he did reach out to Mainland China.” Nixon himself was aware of the significance of what he was doing, saying while in China: “This was the week that changed the world.”

Writing in the Washington Post in February 2012 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the event, David Ignatius opined that “Richard Nixon is hardly a role model, overall; he was a devious president who encouraged illegal actions by his subordinates. But he was a clever strategist — never more so than in the opening to China that culminated in his February 1972 visit to Beijing.” The composer John Adams even wrote an opera, Nixon in China, celebrating the visit; in it, the Nixon character sings triumphantly that he has now made history.

No doubt about that. But not all history that is made is good. The coronavirus pandemic has finally made it clear, if it wasn’t already, that Nixon’s visit to China, insofar as it paved the way for the normalization of relations with the People’s Republic, was one of the most misguided and damaging aspects of his presidency, far outstripping Watergate. The outreach to China enabled the legitimization of a bloodthirsty Marxist-Leninist regime that enslaves and brutalizes its own people. That Chinese people were “willing” to work for starvation wages led to the wholesale destruction of numerous American industries, as it became much more common in the United States to see goods of all kinds labeled “Made in China” than “Made in the USA.”

Trump was the first President to address this problem, and was roundly excoriated as a racist for doing so. But imagine how much better off economically the United States would be today if our manufacturing that was outsourced to China had remained in this country. What’s more, we wouldn’t be dependent upon a rapacious Communist dictatorship for basic necessities.

There is much more. Read the rest here.