FROM PING PONG TO TWITTER DIPLOMACY

More evidence this is not the your father's age of diplomacy

Any of you old enough to remember “Ping Pong Diplomacy” in the Nixon years? Communist China had been in the political equivalent of a Covid lockdown for a decade. President Richard Nixon was determined to open the country up. A series of ping-pong matches were set up between players from the United States and the People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s that provided the opening for Nixon, in February 1972, to visit China. The term “Ping Pong Diplomacy” was used to describe the unofficial exchanges that led each country to talk to the other.