Nixon signed the EPA into law and opened diplomacy with China. He also signed the first nuke treaty with the Soviets.
Libs might rewrite the history on Nixon in another fifty years
EPA was a major mistake.
Opening up China was reasoned.
I’m rather neutral on the nuclear treaty.
Reagan believed in those also. It’s one thing I wasn’t real comfortable with. How could you trust or verify the U.S.S.R. to carry though?
I think Nixon is fixed in their minds. He’s the buggy man they will never get tired of pointing to.
Folks may think that opening up China was a poor move due to the way the trade was exploited to our loss. China was opened up in 1972. Our trade deficits with China did not surpass those with Japan until the year 2000, 27 years later.
The initial goal was to open up a closed society that had gone nuclear, and play it off against Russia. I’m not convinced that didn’t happen pretty much the way we wanted it to.
Around 1992, the trade went ballistic. Some of us trashed the idea on the basis of lost jobs in the U.S., the transfers of technology with a clearly intent enemy, and the destabilization it would ultimately deliver.
I said at the time that our young men and women would wind up dying in large numbers due to the trade fiasco, and that we would be lucky if people on the mainland didn’t suffer the same fate.
I do not blame Nixon or Kissinger for this. Bush/Clinton were the ones who ushered in that massive destructive trade.
Our corporations were also only too eager to kill jobs here for a buck.
None of them had the slightest bit of concern over national security and our own economy.