It appears to me that Nixon is generally credited with being a foreign policy wizard, an expert on foreign affairs, a genius who was eagerly consulted by Democratic Presidents (Clinton) and GOPers (Reagan, Bush) alike, and I don’t get it. What specifically were his credentials? Are we talking his overarching philosophy? If so, how would you describe it, as distinct from any other American President of his era? Are we talking his execution? (I was in favor of it.) If so, how did he execute foreign policy differently from others? I don’t get why people speak of him being a foreign policy savant. Vietnam, people! That must count on the negative side of the ledger, no? To me, that’s like “Except for that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”
well it helped he had Kissinger who was a foreign policy wonk with a huge w …
So: he had a NSA and a SoS with a heavy German accent?
I think when people are discussing this positively, they are giving him credit for reaching an understanding with China. These close ties and deep understanding accomplished important policy goals - like the selling of Pepsi from Szechuan to Yunan.
A heavy German accent and a knack for self-promotion. As a kid, only watching the news on Spanish or German TV you had to believe he [ETA: Kissinger, not Nixon] was the diplomatic king of mambo (picture a diplodocus dancing).
Nixon went to Peking, that was remarcable. I don’t remember any other deed of his that could be spun positive, but I did not pay much attention either. Why did other presidents consult him? IDK, perhaps they thought that a guy that can survive what he survived without going to jail is some kind of example.
I am deeply sorry but no, I don’t believe he was executed. 
“When we see the world in which we are about to move, the United States no longer is in the position of complete pre-eminence or predominance. That is not a bad thing. As a matter of fact, it can be a constructive thing. We now have a situation where four potential economic powers have the capacity to challenge on every front.”
“I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other."
– Richard Nixon, 1971
" Only Nixon could go to China "
That phrase is iconic. Because the visit to meet Mao Zedong and a new turn in relations between the United States and China was a reset of Richard Nixon’s own career long stance. He had been a hardline anti-communist crusader as a young congressman and had a pivotal role in the Alger Hiss case. There was also his famous kitchen ‘debate’ when he was Vice President with Nikita Khrushchev in which both leaders conversed through translators the merits of capitalism vs communism and the future for their grandchildren in their national systems at the height of Cold War tension. So for that man to become the President who opened the door of US and China relations it showed that his philosophy at that point was to deal with the world as it now and not how he wanted it to be and believed it would be ten or twenty years ago. It didn’t mean he had a sudden change of heart and believed communism was equal to capitalism. He still abhorred communism as an ideology which is shown in how he viewed his own citizens, on college campuses in particular, who were either students or professors showing support or sympathy to these ideals.
But I believe that Nixon was the first US President to publicly talk about how the country’s global dominance is waning, pluralism is inevitable, and it is not a bad thing. Detente was not invented by his administration but was popularized by it because again it showed a change in attitude through a willingness to reach out in good faith. Nixon took a healthy interest in studying the cultures of foreign nations and the personality traits of foreign leaders to make these meetings a success. Not basing it on stereotypes and scepticism that had previously dominated US foreign policy as well. As I mentioned above he was far more stereotypical about his own citizens in many ways. This was something he continued to do after leaving office pretty much for the rest of his life because on the international scene he was still seen as a statesman. He could never escape Watergate at home even as his image did start to get better over time but abroad they respected him even when he was at his lowest resigning in disgrace.
That’s why he gets the foreign policy plus points. The fact that over the timeline of his career US foreign policy did shift as he shifted. And his analysis and predictions were generally quite accurate.
There is a story about how when Jimmy Carter hosted Deng Xiaoping at the White House for a State Dinner in 1979 that the Chinese delegation requested that Nixon be invited. This was the first visit by a leader of the People’s Republic of China to the US. Carter normalized diplomatic relations with China but in recognition for Nixon’s role in helping initiate the process he did invite the former president back to the White House. I’m not sure if it was the first time since resigning that Nixon returned but it was a key step to his rehabilitation.
What this seems to mean, and what I agree with, is that Nixon adopted a nuanced approach to world politics that no one else could have adopted because, if anyone else had, Nixon would have been denouncing him, investigating him, harassing him as a Commie appeaser. So I give him a certain amount of credit for setting himself up to assume this role by posing for decades as a hard-line anti-Communist jingoist, but of course he destroyed the lives of many Americans in doing so.
Banning biological weapons, creating the EPA, Medicare expansion to pay for kidney dialysis. Nixon wasn’t all bad.
When Nixon died, there was a cartoon of him, giving the double handed victory pose at the Pearly Gates, and St Peter standing there holding two huge overstuffed files labeled ‘Good Dick’ and ‘Bad Dick’, and telling a cherub, “Cancel the rest of the day’s appointments. This one’s going to take a while.”
It wasn’t Nixon that started the diplomacy, but he ran with the ping-pong ball. Ping-pong diplomacy, in 1971 the US team was going to Japan for an international championship, and a chance encounter the team was invited to China. Nixon went a year later because of this. (Greatly paraphrased from the Wikipedia article.)
Nixon also brought detente to the US USSR relationship and negotiated the SALT treaty while at the same time negotiating an opening with China. This was quite tricky because the Soviets were bitter enemies with Maos China. Also, this was tricky for both the Soviets and the Chinese because it might seem like a stab in the back to the North Vietnamese.
I see what you did there.
Even if he weren’t a foreign policy expert, as presidents go, he would still be consulted by other presidents for foreign policy advice, simply because he was a president. When you’re President, there just aren’t all that many people you can seriously talk to about your situation. Doesn’t mean you’re going to do what your predecessors say, but you’re probably going to at least listen to them.
I doubt too many presidents in the future who aren’t reactionary idiots are going to consult Trump. That’s an excellent example of someone with no foreign policy chops, in that he had no idea of the impact of his actions.
The ping pong team going to China hardly forced Nixon to do so. It was an indication of a slight crack in the Chinese wall which Nixon and Kissinger picked up on.
I won’t disagree with that. He wasn’t forced to go, but because of the Ping-Pong team invitiation he did go later. Or at least my impression of it. I wasn’t too world-aware back then, but it was a big deal – China was the mysterious closed-off country suddenly letting people in.
With two recent exceptions.
If I were President I’d love to have a chat with a predecessor even with nothing specific in mind. It’s an exclusive club as you allude to. And I would love to hear old stories and pick their brain.
There is a tape recording of JFK briefing Herbert Hoover on the situation unfolding that history knows as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hoover had left the White House thirty years earlier and his America was a different world to Kennedy’s America. And the world at large was yet to experience a second world war when Hoover left office. The guy who beat Hoover was elected to four terms and died 15 years before Kennedy was elected. Yet Kennedy saw fit to respect their shared link of the presidency by briefing Hoover as well as his direct predecessor Eisenhower. And Hoover outlived Kennedy which is one of those hard to believe facts of history.
I’m not much of a Nixon specialist but my general view of foreign policy is that the secret of international diplomacy is that when you’re dealing across cultures and across languages, the universal constant is the shared culture of childhood.
As people mature, we take on the culture of our parents, but when we’re still young we are all pretty much the same: One kid wants a toy, so he takes it from the kid who has it; a boy likes a girl so he pulls her hair; and so on. It’s a shared experience and a commonly understood way of approaching the world. The leaders of many countries, who gained their position through nepotism and inheritance, may in fact have never truly needed to mature much beyond basic, childish instinct.
Your average Westerner, average diplomat, etc. looks at the world, they see rational actors, problems to be solved through negotiation, and multi-dimensional chess games to be played.
Nixon, I suspect, viewed the world stage more as a bunch of thugs, crooks, and needy man-babies all squabbling with each other.
That outlook is probably closer to the reality and, when your mental image matches reality, it’s easier to make the right choices on how to proceed.
What Nixon and Mao had in common is that they both perceived the USSR to be a greater threat than each other. Without a common enemy, there would have been no basis for a normalization of relations with pre-capitalist China.
You’re right, it was a big deal. And the importance was that Nixon and Kissinger read it, correctly, as an offer by Mao to normalize relations. The old, rigid anti-Communist Nixon could have easily ignore the overture.
More than that, he had been president at a time when there was a lot of major foreign policy stuff going on. So he had more experience dealing with high stakes foreign policy issues than even most presidents do.