Instead of asking, “Why did the U.S.-China rapprochement happen in 1972?,” this study began by posing the broader question, “How did China, after having been America's most implacable enemy, become its friend and even tacit ally during the Nixon administration?” It sought the origins of the policy of bilateral rapprochement in American officials' ideas about reconciliation with China in the decade preceding Nixon's presidency, and it investigated the creation and implementation of rapprochement during the Nixon administration. At the heart of this attempt to situate the U.S.–China rapprochement within the wider discursive and policy-making context of the time is a skepticism about the orthodox realist balance-of-power explanation of events and its ability to account for the process of change. These doubts, in turn, reflect and build upon recent developments in two disciplinary fields – the increasing engagement with theory on the part of some diplomatic historians, and the rise of constructivist approaches in political science and international relations.

The last two decades have produced a greater awareness of the utility of theory within the discipline of history, so that there has developed a steady stream of historical works informed by various theoretical stances derived from the humanities and social sciences. Diplomatic historians have readily employed the political science concepts of bureaucratic politics, public opinion, and ideology and have more recently introduced into their works theories of corporatism, cognitive psychology, world-systems, and dependency.