February 1, 1969: "I noted in your January 31 report the interesting comments from a Polish source. I think we should give every encouragement to the attitude that this Administration is ‘exploring possibilities of rapprochement [sic] with the Chinese.’ This, of course, should be done privately and should under no circumstances get into the public prints from this direction. However, in contacts with your friends, and particularly in any ways you might have to get to this Polish source, I would continue to plant that idea."

Richard Nixon wrote this memorandum to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in the opening days of his new administration, nearly five decades ago. As history would have it, that communication would become one of the many baby steps that put the president of the United States in Beijing in 1972. By breaking Mao Zedong’s great wall and laying the foundation for the normalization of relations, Nixon dramatically changed history forever, and in doing so he cauterized China’s emerging nuclear-weapons risk.

Flash forward to today and Donald Trump’s recent interview with Bloomberg restating the campaign remark that he would be willing to meet with Kim Jong-un were the conditions right. Off the cuff—or a trial balloon—Trump’s observation recalls Nixon’s China outreach, prompting the question: could a Trump meeting with the North Korean leader reduce nuclear concerns posed by Pyongyang? It would take some doing, but the Nixon history with China suggests it is plausible.

However, success would come at a price, and Trump would have to take the audacious step that President Lyndon Johnson initiated and Nixon sealed vis-à-vis China: namely, halt U.S. efforts to stem Pyongyang’s nuclear program and work to normalize the North as a nuclear-weapons state. How and why the United States settled on this course in handling Mao’s China has much to teach about how to deal with Kim’s Korea today.

How and why the United States settled on the course it did in handling Mao’s China has much to teach about how to deal with Kim’s Korea today.

Serious U.S. concern over nuclear China began with the arrival of the Kennedy administration. When John Kennedy assumed office in 1961, the president, like Donald Trump today, faced a world of trouble stretching from the Soviet Union, across Europe, to Cuba on to Southeast Asia and beyond. But the most concerning specter was Beijing’s nuclear rise. At the time, the United States viewed "Red China," as Washington called it then, as the most implacable, bitterly hostile, bellicose, ideological adversary of all—a North Korea on steroids. It was, after all, Mao’s China that ousted the U.S.-supported nationalist government in 1949, fought U.S. forces to a standstill in Korea, contested Washington in the Taiwan Straits, and supported wars of national liberation while at home it communized the country at the cost of millions of lives.

In the words of Walt Rostow, one of Kennedy’s key foreign-policy advisors, the possibility that such a China would get its hands on the bomb "was likely to be historically the most significant and worst event of the 1960s." But this would be the China with which the United States would eventually deal.

However, in the run up, stopping the nuclear threat became a priority, which set in motion an intense U.S. government review that lasted several years. The Joint Chiefs of Staff evaluation gives insights into a dozen or so options that the administration considered, including diplomatic pressure, support of a nationalist invasion of the mainland, and the dropping of tactical nuclear weapons on Beijing’s nuclear sites.

At the time of Kennedy’s death, with advisors stumped, it would be left to Lyndon Johnson to decide whether or not to act militarily. On September 15, 1964, key members of the president’s team met to make their recommendation: there would be no military action to halt the looming Chinese weapons test. In the event that conflict broke out with China at some future date, "we would expect to give very close attention to the possibility of an appropriate military action against Chinese facilities." After they reported to the president in the Cabinet Room, Johnson signaled his approval.

With the assumption of Nixon’s presidency, China’s public reputation as Asia’s bête noir had only grown as commentators characterized Hanoi as Beijing’s "lips" in the ongoing Vietnam War that had killed thousands of U.S. servicemen. But the Nixon administration saw something else further north: deeper cracks in the Sino-Soviet alliance that had burst into seven months of border skirmishing in 1969, prompting Moscow to threaten to use nuclear weapons. Kissinger characterized the scare in his notes to Nixon following his 1971 visit to Beijing: "I believe they are deeply worried about the Soviet threat to their national integrity… and see us as a balancing force against the USSR."

By bringing the two countries—the United States and China—into a more or less ordinary relationship, normalization eliminated the underpinnings of nuclear stress.

For Nixon, the Sino-Soviet dispute, the tumult unleashed by the Cultural Revolution, and China's willingness to talk opened an opportunity to turn international politics on its head. The Shanghai Communiqué that Nixon negotiated laid the foundation for the normalization of diplomatic relations. Mindful of Kissinger’s concession to Zhou En-lai in 1971 that the United States would not push nuclear arms control on China, normalization itself offered an effective substitute. By bringing the two countries into a more or less ordinary relationship, normalization eliminated the underpinnings of nuclear stress. As a result, today China’s nuclear weapons barely play in the dialogue between the two countries despite periodic dustups.

Looking at the U.S.-China experience in the mirror, could the Trump administration apply a similar template to North Korea? As Nixon took advantage of the confluence of circumstances to open China and neutralize nuclear concerns, there are today a confluence of issues that, in their own way, could spur a Nixon-like solution.

First, the United States and its allies have exhausted the arms control road to halt Pyongyang’s bomb. The diplomatic course has simply lost credibility, which is evident in the North’s repeated walk back from arms-control agreements, such as the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the 1991 agreement with South Korea to keep the peninsula nuclear-free, the 1994 Agreed Framework with the United States, the 2005 Six-Party Talks nuclear elimination agreement, and the 2012 nuclear-and-missile freeze.

Second, despite continued hope that there must be a sanctions threshold that would break Pyongyang’s commitment to the bomb, countless UN Security Council efforts have failed, and there is no reason to believe that tightening pressure, even from lukewarm China, will change a regime that defines survival and nuclear weapons as synonymous.

Third is an absence of viable alternatives to stem Pyongyang’s nuclear enterprise. Military action risks a new Korean war that could result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. An attempt to freeze the North’s nuclear research, development, and manufacturing process as a step toward disarmament would fail given that Pyongyang is resistant to verification. Additionally, the revived Sunshine Policy proposed by the new South Korean government holds no more realistic promise of North Korea’s nuclear disarmament than the failed decade-long effort that began in 2002.

No doubt Kim would receive Washington’s proposed nuclear acceptance as a tremendous victory. But a deal would require resolution of a host of other matters.

This leaves the untried path of containing the nuclear risk by normalizing North Korea. Nixon brought a political advantage in his China effort as an unrequited Cold Warrior. As a result, no one could accuse him of selling out. Trump brings his own advantages as an unorthodox politician and dealmaker. Arguably, now that Pyongyang is on the cusp of becoming a full-fledged nuclear-weapons state, it may be willing to deal with the United States as an "equal." Success would face several tests: North Korea’s interest in normalization, its possible push of unacceptable demands, and nuclear blackmail.

As Nixon leaned on Kissinger to explore the Polish conduit to Beijing, Washington began to look for an opportunity to meet with Mao through other countries with Chinese connections, like Pakistan and Romania. Today, the Trump administration could take advantage of ongoing Track II diplomacy.

For some years now former U.S. diplomats, intelligence officers, and scholars have taken meetings with North Korean officials multiple times in Singapore, Berlin, Beijing, and Oslo to hash out issues. While the meetings have not resolved sticking points, a new round exploring nuclear legitimization in normalization as the arms-control equivalent would mark an entirely new footing. A more forward approach would rely on secret U.S. emissary meetings with North Korean counterparts to air normalization possibilities. Were Pyongyang to show interest, the next steps would include subcabinet discussions and follow-up talks at the foreign minister level, which would eventually lead to Donald Trump meeting with Kim Jong-un.

No doubt Kim would receive Washington’s proposed nuclear acceptance as a tremendous victory. But a deal would require resolution of a host of other matters. Would Kim be satisfied with the traditional trappings of normal relations—the exchange of ambassadors, open lines of communication, the lifting of sanctions, commercial engagement, and such military confidence-building measures as a mutual reduction of forces near the North-South border? Or, with the wind at his back, would he press for additional impossible demands? For example, were normalization to include a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War, would Kim insist that relations include the vacating of the U.S.-South Korean alliance, removal of all U.S. troops, and the lifting of the U.S. nuclear umbrella, which would make Seoul a sitting duck to nuclear intimidation?

Such nonstarters would kill the deal, a matter that U.S. interlocutors in preliminary talks would make clear. To buck up the U.S. bargaining position and reassure South Korea and Japan that they were not being sold out, optimally Washington should have a new defense/deterrent posture in place prior to the negotiation, or at a minimum a plan for such posture. How far and what direction the defensive revamp would go is a matter for debate.

In the now long history of nuclear affairs there comes the time when no means are left to halt proliferation.

The range is broad. For example, should it include placement of a nuclear deterrent in South Korea? Some South Koreans have called for a domestic nuclear arsenal, but the option has gained little traction. Little discussion is heard about returning U.S. nuclear weapons—Washington removed the arsenal in 1991. Efforts to do so would meet fierce Chinese—as well as North Korean—opposition and even South Korea would be wary. But as Pyongyang’s nuclear capability evolves, should plans be in place in the event Seoul—or a nuclear-shy Japan—become open to a rethink? Or at a minimum has the time come for implementation of less provocative alternatives to show U.S. commitment to the South and to buck up deterrence generally by the porting of large U.S. naval vessels in South Korea or the rotation of heavy bombers through the country’s air bases?

Naturally, accepting a nuclear North Korea butts against the instinct to resist. But the U.S.-China experience provides a positive endorsement. It also comports with a broader reality: in the now long history of nuclear affairs there comes the time when no means are left to halt proliferation. The result: concerned nations had to adjust as Washington did to Moscow’s nuclear acquisition, as the Kremlin adapted to nuclear Britain, France, and China, and as India and Pakistan did to the bombs spread to South Asia.

We have come to a similar crossroads in efforts to address nuclear North Korea. At worst, the failure of a Nixon-like Trump outreach will leave the United States, South Korea, and Japan where they are today, pouting as they hope that the isolation of Pyongyang will force it to bend and that ballistic missile defense will work. At best, normalizing nuclear North Korea offers the opportunity to cauterize the nuclear risk by reducing tensions as normalization cauterized nuclear China.

Given the absence of good alternatives, the path is worth the shot.
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Bennett Ramberg is a Pacific Council member. He served as a policy analyst in the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in the George H. W. Bush administration. He is the author of three books on international politics and the editor of three others. Ramberg has been published in over a dozen professional journals and magazines including Foreign Affairs, the New Republic, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and others.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.