Political scientists have a name for why only Nixon could open relations with Mao’s China, or why only a Likud hardliner like Begin could make peace with Egypt: they call it the Nixon-to-China effect. The standard account explains why the public finds these moves credible. It doesn’t explain why the hawk’s own side goes along instead of revolting. Twenty-five centuries ago, Taoist philosophy already had the answer: trust, in two directions at once. The hawk had to trust the outsider’s view already inside them — the same trust Zhuangzi’s Cook Ding places in internal spirit rather than external eyes. The hawk’s cohort, in turn, had to trust that movement toward the other side would not leave them exposed — the same trust Sai Weng placed in the idea that experienced misfortunes may not necessarily be as bad as they seem.

A known puzzle in political science

Economists Alex Cukierman and Mariano Tommasi formalized this effect in a well-known 1998 paper, “When Does It Take a Nixon to Go to China?” Their model shows that a politician who crosses their own ideology sends the public a more credible signal than one who doesn’t — voters assume the move must be necessary, not just habit.

But the model only ever considers two players: the politician and the public. It never asks whether the politician’s own camp trusts them enough to let the policy through. Tellingly, the authors’ own conclusion makes a similar point: they suggest a more dovish leader like Hubert Humphrey would have faced far harder opposition attempting the same opening to China — not from his own party, who already leaned that way, but from the Republican hawks who held real power to obstruct and had no reason to extend him any benefit of the doubt. Yet even there, their explanation for why a hawk like Begin succeeded is that he convinced voters the deal was good — not that he kept his own side’s trust. Correct information, perfectly updated, still produces nothing if the people with power to block implementation have no reason to trust the messenger isn’t a Trojan horse for the other side. That’s the piece missing from the standard account.

What yin and yang already knew

The Tao Te Ching, written in part as advice to rulers, makes a broader claim underlying this whole mechanism: every bounded whole — call it “the One,” whether a nation, a family, or any other community — survives not by one faction defeating the other, but by someone trusted on one side reaching toward the other, and being followed.

Correct information, perfectly updated, still produces nothing if the people with power to block implementation have no reason to trust the messenger isn’t a Trojan horse for the other side

This insight has a classical image: yin and yang. In the symbol, the white field contains a black dot, the black field a white dot — neither side ever fully pure. That dot is the opposing side’s view, already inside the person who will eventually cross, long before they decide to act on it. When they finally do, their own side follows — not because they’re certain how it will turn out, but because they trust this person enough to set aside their own long-held position — and if enough of that side follows, a merely nominal whole becomes, for a moment, genuinely One.

The pattern across history

History offers this pattern at every scale: government, workplaces, communities, and families torn by long-standing rifts. In each case, someone whose loyalty to the offended side is beyond question extends the first gesture toward reconciliation — and others follow, because it comes from someone who has already proven they are not selling their own side out.

At the national and international scale, the examples sharpen further. Nixon, whose anti-communist credentials were unimpeachable, opened relations with Mao’s China in 1972 — a move that would have destroyed a more dovish president, but which Nixon’s own hardline base absorbed and, over time, made a bipartisan foreign-policy consensus. Reagan, denouncer of the “evil empire,” negotiated arms reductions with Gorbachev that most of his own coalition ultimately accepted as strength rather than surrender — and Gorbachev was crossing just as far, risking his own standing within the Party to open the Soviet Union to the West. Sadat, who had led Egypt into war against Israel only four years earlier, flew to Jerusalem and offered peace — a move a more dovish Egyptian leader could never have survived politically. Begin, a hardliner in his own right as founder of the Likud party, could reciprocate for the same reason.

NAFTA did not stay settled, because there had been no true One to unsettle in the first place.

Clinton, working the opposite direction across the pole, secured enough Democratic votes in Congress to pass NAFTA — a business-friendly trade framework built by the Republican presidents before him. But it wasn’t labor that came around; it was legislators usually aligned with labor who broke ranks, trusting a fellow Democrat. The sinologist Paul Fischer has observed that classical Taoist writers drew a sharp line between norms that arise from genuine consent and those imposed by fiat from above. By that test, NAFTA fails: organized labor, the actual constituency the crossing needed to win over, opposed it throughout, on grounds later proven largely correct — a merger of law, never quite of will.

When the crossing never really happens

NAFTA did not stay settled, because there had been no true One to unsettle in the first place. Trump’s coalition rebuilt it into USMCA in his first term, campaigning explicitly against NAFTA’s legacy; by its 2026 mandatory review, the administration that built USMCA was itself declining to renew it, while more than a hundred Democrats in Congress separately pushed to renegotiate it as a failure for workers. The wheel had turned again — the right’s crossing challenged by the right, the left’s old accommodation abandoned by the left. This is not a flaw in the theory; it is the theory. Nothing a Taoist framework predicts stays fixed. The white dot that expanded into the black field does not remain there forever, immune to reversal — it recedes, reappears elsewhere, and the wheel keeps turning, exactly as Sai Weng’s fortune kept turning, never resolving into a final verdict of good or bad.

A more patient discipline

What follows from this is not cynicism about progress but a more patient discipline: the crossing itself, not any particular crossing’s permanence, is the achievement. Wu wei in the political sphere, frequently and superficially described as action-through-inaction, is not passivity — it is the trained sense of when your own credibility is the resource the whole most needs spent, and the willingness to spend it toward the opposite pole precisely because you can afford to. Those who wait for a final, unchanging rapprochement between opposing sides misunderstand what the Tao was ever describing. Rapprochement is never a finish line to cross and keep. It is part of the same turning as everything else, sustained only by the recurring practice of trusted people crossing over — and a society healthy enough to keep letting them benefit the One. The Tao does not ask them to surrender their convictions; it asks only that they follow the ones that are truly their own — trusting the dot already inside them enough to let it move when the moment calls for it, and follow their own Te, the particular shape the Tao takes in each of them.