Getting China to open up as a market and labor pool cemented the Sino-Soviet split and provided a way for the stagnating American economy to expand further while further breaking domestic labor and providing more cheap consumer goods to keep the public placated and passive. They just assumed it would naturally progress into China also becoming more vulnerable to subversion and a reactionary takeover that would enable it to be made into a client state like Japan or South Korea.

Just because they were cynical, scary monsters it doesn't mean they weren't also white supremacist capitalist ideologues who were fanatically confident in the divine superiority of their own system and who struggled to accurately gauge the strength and resolve of peoples they saw as inferior to themselves. They also just constantly fucked up all of the time, but had enough of a material and institutional advantage that they won anyways because they could just throw more money and guns at the worst people they could find at any given moment and some of them would do enough violence to accomplish the US's goals, and they were still aware enough to know that the lie machines they were funding were inherently dishonest about their positions and methods instead of this gormless "well if the lie machine says it it must be the earnest and genuine truth, oh how benevolent and kind the lie machine is with its eternal quest to spread truth" bullshit that modern liberals do or the credulous sobbing and pissing themselves that more reactionary liberals do out of sheer contrarian confusion.