"It is like saying that for the cause of peace, God and the Devil will have a high-level meeting." - Rev. Carl McIntire, on Nixon's China trip

Rev. Carl McIntire’s Fiery Critique of Nixon’s China Trip: “God and the Devil at the Negotiating Table”

In a dramatic and provocative statement that captured the ideological divide of the Cold War era, prominent conservative minister Rev. Carl McIntire likened President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to Communist China to a hypothetical meeting between God and the Devil. “It is like saying that for the cause of peace, God and the Devil will have a high-level meeting,” McIntire declared, casting the diplomatic overture as a moral compromise with an irredeemable adversary.

Nixon’s trip to China, which culminated in the Shanghai Communiqué and paved the way for normalized relations between the U.S. and the People’s Republic, was widely hailed as a masterstroke of realpolitik. However, McIntire—a staunch anti-communist and founder of the International Council of Christian Churches—viewed it as a dangerous capitulation to an atheistic regime responsible for persecution, oppression, and the suppression of religious freedom. His analogy framed the encounter not as diplomacy but as a Faustian bargain, where the pursuit of détente came at the expense of moral clarity.

McIntire’s rhetoric resonated with many on the far right, who saw Communism as an existential evil that could not be reconciled with American values. To them, Nixon’s outreach to Mao Zedong’s regime was tantamount to legitimizing tyranny. The reverend’s fiery condemnation echoed the sentiments of a faction that still clung to the binary worldview of the early Cold War, where compromises with ideological adversaries were unthinkable.

Yet, history has largely vindicated Nixon’s strategy. The China trip reshaped global geopolitics, counterbalancing Soviet influence and opening economic ties that would transform both nations. Still, McIntire’s stark warning serves as a reminder of the deep ideological rifts that such diplomatic maneuvers can provoke. His words endure as a testament to the tension between pragmatic statecraft and uncompromising moralism—a debate that continues to reverberate in American foreign policy to this day.

Was Nixon’s outreach a necessary step toward global stability, as his defenders argued, or a cynical betrayal of principle, as McIntire believed? Decades later, the question lingers, illustrating the enduring complexity of balancing ideals with the messy realities of international diplomacy.