A metaphor involving a politician who does something unexpected and out of character, sometimes because he or she has the political stature to do so. It refers to Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to the People’s Republic to improve relations at a time when the president had a reputation as an ardent anti-Communist.
As reader Courtney Stadd notes, it’s often expressed in the sense of “Only Nixon could go to China” or “It took Nixon to go to China.” With President Obama, it’s repeatedly come up in the context of pursuing a deal on nuclear weapons with geopolitical enemy Iran. As The Atlantic’s James Fallows said on The Charlie Rose Show in January: “I think with Iran, there is the potential for a smaller-scale version of Nixon in China in terms of an achievement that really does improve things in the entire world if they can make this happen.”
The New York Times’ Juliet Lapidos also invoked it in a recent article about conservative activist Grover Norquist making the case for prison reform, a topic mainly of interest to Democrats. “He wasn’t making the Nixon-in-China argument that conservatives should act because they can withstand ‘soft on crime’ attacks,” Lapidos wrote. “Rather, he was saying that liberals cannot be trusted.” And when right-wing Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts joined liberals in upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer dubbed it “the judiciary’s Nixon-to-China.”
Nixon’s China visit has become a staple of popular culture, even inspiring a modern opera. And in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, when Captain Kirk escorts the once-hated Klingon chancellor to Earth for peace negotiations, Mr. Spock refers to “only Nixon could go to China” as “an old Vulcan proverb.”