Editor's Note

The first article in this issue, by Yafeng Xia, discusses why and how Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders, who had been vehemently opposed to the United States since the 1950s, sought a dramatic rapprochement with the U.S. government in the early 1970s. The growing tensions between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC), culminating in large-scale armed clashes in 1969, prompted Mao to reassess key aspects of Chinese foreign policy, including relations with the PRC's erstwhile "number one enemy," the United States. Mao found a receptive audience in Washington, DC, where President Richard Nixon and his chief assistant on national security affairs, Henry Kissinger, who had come to office in 1969 pledging to end U.S. involvement in Vietnam on acceptable terms, believed that Chinese mediation with the North Vietnamese and Vietcong would greatly facilitate the task of achieving a settlement. Yafeng Xia traces the public signals and secret contacts that led to the resumption of U.S.-Chinese ambassadorial talks and the advent of "ping-pong diplomacy," and he recounts the back-channel negotiations that eventually resulted in Kissinger's secret visit to the PRC in July 1971 and his public visit three months later, paving the way for Nixon's own highly celebrated trip to China in February 1972. The signing of the Shanghai Communiqué at the end of Nixon's visit symbolized the breakthrough in Sino-American relations, albeit one that came at great cost to the long-standing U.S. commitment to Taiwan. Yafeng Xia's analysis of Chinese policymaking vis-à-vis the United States during this crucial period not only underscores Mao's dominance of PRC foreign policy but also reveals that, contrary to speculation in the West, Mao and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai encountered no organized opposition within the Chinese leadership in their efforts to improve relations with the United States.

The next article, by Norrie MacQueen, examines how Portugal's refusal to succumb to the pressures for decolonization in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s resulted in a largely intractable situation for the Portuguese government by the early 1970s, when anti-colonial guerrilla wars in its three African possessions—Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique—were coming to a head. Portugal throughout this time was under authoritarian rule, first a regime headed by António de Oliveira Salazar from 1932 to 1968 and then an initially promising but ultimately disappointing government headed by Salazar's protégé, Marcello Caetano. The unsavory nature of the Salazar and Caetano regimes raised a host of thorny questions for Portugal's allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including the United States (which had long enjoyed access to the Lajes air base in the Portuguese Azores) and Great Britain. MacQueen focuses on how the British government sought to balance its allied relationship with Portugal, on the one hand, and its desire to preserve strong ties with African states, on the other. Ironically, if Portugal had responded earlier to the pressures for decolonization when Cold War tensions were at their height, Britain and the other NATO countries might well have been more accommodating of Portuguese concerns. But by waiting until the 1970s, when East-West détente had taken root and the United States was pulling out of Vietnam, Portugal's European allies were less indulgent. After the main guerrilla organization in Guinea-Bissau declared the territory's independence in September 1973 and sought recognition of the new state from the United Nations (UN), Britain had to craft a UN voting strategy that would minimize the damage to its standing in Africa. The overthrow of the Caetano government in April 1974 and the subsequent removal of Portuguese troops from Guinea-Bissau resolved the matter before Britain paid higher costs, but MacQueen's case study illustrates how the combination of Portugal's belated decolonization and the dynamics of UN politics in the early 1970s created problems for the Western alliance.

The third article, by John Soares, Jr., analyzes the Carter administration's policy vis-à-vis Nicaragua and El Salvador in the latter half of 1979 and 1980. Soares argues that Carter was not as na...