Judge Foreign Policy Decisions by Their Immediate Impacts

Judge Foreign Policy Decisions by Their Immediate Impacts

There’s a story that in 1972, Zhou Enlai told Henry Kissinger that it was too early to judge the impact of the French Revolution. As it turned out, this was a misunderstanding, and Zhou was actually talking about the 1968 student protests in France.Regardless of what really happened, when the story is mistold, it is held up as a demonstration of Eastern wisdom, reflecting the Chinese propensity to take a very long view of history. Simple Western…