A nation must think before it acts.
Senior Fellow Arthur Waldron Quoted by the Daily Beast on Effects of U.S.-China Trade
There is, at the same time, a perception that more than just trade is at stake. “Imagine what would have happened in the Cold War if we had strengthened the Soviet system with trade,” Arthur Waldron, the famed University of Pennsylvania historian, told me this week. “It would have been a disaster for us.”
And Waldron is on the mark. Henry Kissinger in On China, his 2011 book, recounts a conversation between Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong’s wily successor, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. Trade with the Soviet Union, Deng told the American, means “the U.S. is helping the Soviet Union overcome its weaknesses.”