ATAt the height of the Cold War, Americans and Europeans saw the Soviet Union and China as an inseparable bloc. It took the two communist giants being on the brink of war, in 1969, for Westerners to finally understand that harmony did not reign between them. US President Richard Nixon, advised by Henry Kissinger, seizes the opportunity to open relations with the People’s Republic in order to weaken the USSR. His trip to Beijing in April 1972 was a masterstroke.
Many are the strategists in the room who claim that the West should, on the model of 1972, but in reverse of this one, sacrifice Ukraine and ally with Moscow to make piece with Beijing. But as much as the West had underestimated the mutual hostility between China and the…
Consult our file: Beijing 2022: the cursed Games
