Consolidating or Saving the U.S.-China Rapprochement

This chapter traces and offers some explanations for the transition, in practice, from a rapprochement relationship in which China was characterized as a former enemy - a fellow realist power with whom the United States cultivated a mutual distrust of the Soviet Union, and toward whom the United States tilted covertly while pursuing a superpower detente -to a relationship that encompassed more intimate diplomatic and military ties with a China represented as a tacit ally. The latter contained a much more overt anti-Soviet focus, within which Kissinger emphasized offering strategic reassurance to the Chinese and the development of conceptual and domestic opinion bases for a closer security relationship, while bargaining for more favorable terms of diplomatic normalization. 

In this context, Kissinger tried further to construct the tacit alliance he envisaged, at first discursively in his presentation of the outcome of his dialogues, then by offering Beijing various means of strengthening bilateral military ties. 

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