Bush To Pull A “Nixon Goes To China” Card?

By Brodie Farquhar, 1-16-07

A major environmental/politics story surfaced last week in the British press, with the Guardian reporting that George Bush is considering a “Nixon goes to China” policy shift on global warming.

The Guardian attributes the story to senior Downing Street officials, who say Bush is preparing to make a major shift in his position on global warming when he makes his State of the Union speech later this month.

“Nixon goes to China” refers to President Richard Nixon’s 1972 surprise move to visit Red China and open a real dialogue with what the Republican playbook had long referred to as “the Red menace.” What Nixon actually sought was to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and Red China, once perceived as a Red monolith.

Nixon, who earned his political stripes as a notorious Redbaiter, was widely viewed as the only politician who could have reached out to Red China, because he had such solid, conservative credentials in opposing communism. No Democrat could have done so, said conventional political wisdom, because it would have been seen as some sort of appeasement by weak-on-Reds politicians. Since then, the phrase “Nixon goes to China” has emerged as a political shorthand for a political leader doing something historically significant and surprising, given his traditional political stance.
An oilman himself (albeit a spectacularly unsuccessful oilman), Bush has long followed the Big Oil mantra of either doubting global warming exists, or if it does exist, saying the U.S. can do nothing about it, because it would be too damaging to the economy.

The Guardian reports that “Tony Blair hopes that the new stance by the United States will lead to a breakthrough in international talks on climate change and that the outlines of a successor treaty to the Kyoto agreement, the deal to curb emissions of greenhouse gases which expires in 2012, could now be thrashed out at the G8 summit in June.”

In the wake of devastating mid-term elections which cost the Republicans control of the House and Senate, Bush may be seeking to re-position his administration on environmental issues, to provide some political cover for his last-gasp Iraq plan, in which he’ll thrown another 21,000 soldiers into the fray.

The Bush administration may have given an early signal of this policy shift when the Interior Department agreed to list the polar bear in Alaska, as an endangered species, because of melting polar ice, caused by global warming.

A Washington Post columnist has picked up on the rumor as well. Sebastian Mallaby tested this rumor (which has been pooh-poohed by an unnamed administration official) by asking James Connaughton, the head of the Council on Environmental Quality at the White House, what he thought of a carbon tax-and-trade system or a carbon tax? Connaughton appeared open to those concepts, reports Mallaby.

More significantly, Exxon appears to be distancing itself from the global warming skeptics the company has bought and paid for with grants to conservative think tanks. Just like Bush, ExxonMobile has looked at the new, Democratic Congress, and figured it might be time to change the game plan and cut the best deal they can, for the sake of Bush's tattered legacy and Big Oil's bottom line.

The New York Times had a "connect the dots" piece on global warming on Sunday -- a nice summary of where the scientific understanding is right now on global warming and man's hand in the issue.

Will it convince everyone? Nahaaa, not with conservatives making ever more convoluted arguements against taking action, even pleaing that such action would hurt the poor. (As if conservatives ever had any concern for the poor than the simplistic mantra of bootstraps.)

So, the question remains: will Bush pull a "Nixon goes to China" card in his State of the Union address?

Place your bets.


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