"We treated each other as adversaries," former United States diplomat Henry Kissinger said last year, on the fortieth anniversary of the normalization of relations with China. "We had no normal way of contacting the Chinese government at all except there was an embassy in Warsaw in which both sides could communicate messages to each other and in which the ambassadors met occasionally. There were 152 meetings of the Warsaw Ambassadors who never reached an agreement on anything."
While today China and the United States have embassies and regular contact, agreement seems to be becoming just as rare.
On Thursday, another Republican secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, appeared to refute Kissinger and Nixon's legacy on China, blasting the "old paradigm of blind engagement," and asking "what do the American people have to show now 50 years on?"
Pompeo was speaking after Washington ordered the closure of China's consulate in Houston, amid allegations it was linked to espionage and intellectual property theft. Beijing responded Friday, ordering the closure of the US' consulate in the southwestern city of Chengdu.
The developments come at a time "many had believed US-China tensions could not possibly get any worse," said Natasha Kassam, an expert on China and former Australian diplomat at the Lowy Institute.
Losing its consulate in Chengdu, she said, "would limit Washington's avenues for communications with Beijing, as well as outsiders ability to monitor and report on what is happening inside China."
Kassam compared it to the recent crackdown on Chinese state media in the US, which led to tit-for-tat expulsions of American journalists working in China, decimating the Beijing press corp and hampering reporting on the world's second largest economy in the midst of a global pandemic.
Many analysts who spoke to CNN in the wake of the consulate closures warned of spiraling tensions, as the removal of diplomats and avenues for talks makes it harder for both countries to understand the other's moves and creates a barrier to future deescalation.
"The US and China have spent the past three years ripping out the software of the relationship," said Jeff Moon, a former US diplomat in China. "Now we are literally ripping out the hardware."
Picking sides
Guy Saint-Jacques, former Canadian ambassador to Beijing, said the Trump administration's apparent push for economic "decoupling" from China could have "long-term geopolitical consequences."
Since the push for economic engagement ramped up with China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, the two economies have grown ever closer. In 2018, before Trump launched a series of tariffs against Beijing in the first salvo of his trade war, China was the largest US trading partner, with a total trade worth $660 billion, the largest source of US imports, and the third-largest US export market.
Many major US businesses, everything from manufacturing and technology to Hollywood and the NBA, all depend on China as
