Ambassador Monica Crowley said Wednesday that President Donald Trump is one of the few world leaders capable of anticipating geopolitical shifts decades in advance, pointing to his approach toward China while discussing President Richard Nixon’s foreign policy legacy during Breitbart News’s “Celebrating American Greatness” policy event.
“They were America First presidents. Nixon was America First really before there was an America First, and they really were champions of the American worker, of the American people. They really loved this country, body and soul,” Crowley said.
Crowley, who worked for Nixon during the later years of his life, said similarities between Nixon and Trump made both men “top targets of the deep state because they were peacemakers and because they put America first.”
Discussing Nixon’s opening to China during the Cold War, Crowley said the former president viewed Beijing as a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union while the Vietnam War strained the United States.
“So what did Nixon do? Well, he looked at the global chessboard, and he understood that he couldn’t aggressively confront the Soviet Union at the time,” Crowley said. “So the best way to counterbalance the Soviet Union at the time was to open the door to China and use China as a counterweight against growing Soviet power. And it worked at the time.”
Crowley said Nixon possessed an uncommon ability to anticipate future global developments and compared that characteristic to Trump’s approach to world affairs.
“Nixon was absolutely brilliant, and he was a true visionary in the sense that he was one of the very few leaders — and I would put Donald Trump in this category as well — who could see what the world was going to look like 20, 30, 40 years down the road, and then make American policy in the moment as president to anticipate that world,” she said.
Crowley said Nixon opened relations with China to help counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but China later used trade and economic ties with the West to rapidly grow its power.
“What he saw happen over the next 30 years that he lived after that was that China then was leveraging its growing power and its billion-plus people to open up economically to the rest of the world and then use our money, via trade and other ways, to enrich and empower itself in a very fast period of time,” Crowley said.
Crowley recounted traveling to China with Nixon in 1993 on what she said was his final trip to the country, describing Beijing at the time as still emerging from what she characterized as an agrarian phase.
“The third lane over was bicycles, and that was packed — millions of people in those bike lanes. And the fourth lane over was for donkeys and oxen and carts, and that lane was also jammed,” she said while describing traffic patterns in Beijing during the visit.
She contrasted that experience with a 2019 trip to China while serving in the first Trump administration at the Treasury Department under then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin during negotiations over the Phase One trade agreement.
“In the space of one generation, China had become a nuclear and industrial superpower. The space of one generation,” Crowley said.
“I remember thinking: every American who has the resources to go to China must go and see with their own eyes what we are up against,” she added. “You can read about it. You can see it on TV. But unless and until you go there and experience what they have done in 25 to 30 years, you will not understand it.”
Crowley said Trump recognizes the scale of the challenge posed by the Chinese Communist Party while also maintaining a diplomatic relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“President Trump understands it. He gets that the CCP is an existential threat to the United States,” Crowley said. “So while he tweets and posts on Truth Social about how he’s got a great relationship with Xi Jinping, that Xi Jinping is highly respected — all of that is true — the president understands the nature of this threat in every way: strategic, economic, trade-wise, in every aspect.”
“And his priority is the United States and getting America into the premier position where we remain the world’s superpower in every part of that superpower portfolio, and China does not get to that point,” she continued.
Crowley said Nixon would likely support Trump’s current China policy if he were alive today.
“President Nixon understood that as well, and he set the table,” Crowley said. “And right now, President Nixon would 1,000 percent be behind President Trump and what he is doing.”
“He would have recognized 15 years ago, 20 years ago, that the orientation of China to the rest of the world had changed, and therefore American policy toward China had to change,” she added. “And he would not have allowed this kind of exploitation of America’s industrial base, the American people, and American workers to have occurred had he been president during that period of time — the ’80s and the ’90s and into the 2000s.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.