Governor: do not panic, purge will be over by daybreak

Good time for #SHAFR2025 folks to be in DC! Last orders at College Park?!

Nixon said he ended the embargo on contact with China. In fact, already by 1966 the State Department had given 150 validations for Americans to travel to China. Few got in, but that wasn’t because the US government stopped them

This is what happens when you tell AI to be balanced

Madame Chiang Kai-shek spent the last decades of her life in the US. But first she was told to join a multi-year, heavily oversubscribed queue for Chinese immigrants to the country

Damn, things move fast

There’s no harder issue in US–China relations in our era. Carter gave Americans today the chance to continue to find the same compromise he did. RIP

Only now can we see what Deng gave away and what Carter won: the ability for the US to continue to exercise a meaningful say in the resolution of the Taiwan issue — while also maintaining a relationship with China.

Deng knew this was a big compromise. After normalisation, Beijing lost its leverage over the US to wind up its ties to Taiwan.

For a decade, US deliveries were <$400 million a year. But in the 1990s they began to exceed a billion, then, from Obama, they averaged billions a year.

Diplomatic normalisation in 1979 was a big win for China and its new leader, Deng Xiaoping, just as he began China's Reform & Opening. But Carter drove a hard bargain.

He got Deng to agree that the US could continue to sell arms to Taiwan after 1979.

Instead, Carter used the carrot of US science and technology to tempt Chinese leaders to upgrade relations with the world's most advanced country just as they were thinking about beginning major economic reform after Mao’s 1976 death.

Carter soon agreed to help upgrade China’s science and technology, but internally his administration knew they shouldn’t “play Santa Claus”. They knew that China saw the US as “a long-term adversary”.

Carter told his advisors to end Kissinger’s flattery of Chinese leaders.

He sent his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, to China to say that the US wanted to maintain close ties with Taiwan after diplomatic normalisation with Beijing. Initially, China refused.

Carter entered office shocked by what Nixon and Kissinger had given away on China.

“We just kissed their ass”, he remarked when he got access to the secret records of Nixon & Kissinger’s negotiations with Mao & Zhou Enlai.

Jimmy Carter would probably have said that establishing diplomatic relations with China was his greatest foreign policy achievement.

We might now think Carter was easy on China, but in fact he saw our moment coming much better than Kissinger and Nixon.

A short 🧵

When you know the singularity is coming but you want to sell as many laptops in the meantime

Thanks to Huang Yanjie for this generous review of Improbable Diplomats. doi.org/10.1080/1035...

You're right I should have had more on the Snail Incident! Covered in more depth in my recent CWH article.