4 April 2025

 

Trumps overture toward Moscow is reminiscent of the American rapprochement with China in the 1970s. This was a strategy designed by Henry Kissinger which was ultimately aimed at isolating the Soviet Union. Is Trump attempting a reverse version of this Cold War strategy, and if so, how realistic is this approach?

One of the most striking features of Donald Trump’s foreign policy so far has been a series of overtures toward Russia. Trump already played into Putin’s hands by stating that Ukraine should never be allowed to join NATO, calling it “unrealistic” that Ukraine would regain all the territories occupied by Russia. Recently, he imposed sky-high import tariffs on many countries, except for Russia. The climax was perhaps the public humiliation of Ukraine’s President Zelensky on February 28 in the Oval Office. There, Trump made it clear where he stands.

 

Various explanations have been put forward for the Trump administration’s striking 180-degree turn away from Europe and toward Russia. Perhaps it is a step-by-step strategy that will ultimately result in a comprehensive ceasefire later this year. Trump can then take credit and fulfill his election promise: “to put an end to endless wars.” With a successful truce in Ukraine, Trump can call himself a “deal maker and a peacemaker,” as he frequently did during his election campaign and in his inaugural speech. If this requires far-reaching concessions to the aggressor, which is Russia, so be it.

 

Not Russia but China

But perhaps we see a larger, more strategic move from Washington or at least an attempt to do so. The Trump administration has made it clear that China—not Russia—is the only real “systemic threat” to the US. In that context, conservative commentators have long pointed to the danger of the Chinese-Russian “no limits partnership” and the need to “break Russia away” from it. The influential strategist Edward Luttwak wrote that Russia has “military technology, cheap oil, access to the Arctic Ocean, and a land route to Western Europe” to offer China.

 

Russia’s dependence on China as a ‘strategic enabler’ in the Ukraine war is also a cause for concern, according to Luttwak. He concludes optimistically that Trump—unlike Biden—is well aware that forcing an outcome of that war favorable to Putin presents an opportunity to pull him away from Beijing. The ultimate goal is to isolate further and ultimately weaken China, which already has few regional allies.

 

In a campaign interview with radical right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson in October 2024, Trump said the following about this:

 

“We are a nation in very serious decline. And look at what these stupid people have done. They [meaning the Biden administration] have allowed Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and others to get together in a group. This is impossible to think.“

(…).

”The one thing you never want to happen is, you never want Russia and China uniting. We united them, because of the oil. Biden united them. It’s a shame, the stupidity of what they have done.”

“I’m going to have to un-unite them, and I think I can do that, too. I have to un-unite them.”

 

‘Reverse Kissinger?’

If driving Russia and China apart is indeed what Trump is attempting, the question arises as to how realistic and sensible this is.

 

The history Trump refers to in the interview is the American rapprochement with communist China in the early 1970s. One of the architects of this strategic move was Henry Kissinger, security advisor and later Secretary of State to Richard Nixon. Kissinger was an important driving force behind the policy of détente during the Cold War and an outspoken representative of the ‘realist school’ in international relations – a school of thought in which strategic interests in decision-making generally take precedence over ideological values.

 

The goal of détente was to de-escalate tensions with the Soviet Union, especially after the heightened tensions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and to end the wars, particularly the one in Vietnam in which America was increasingly bogged down. To diplomatically isolate the Soviet Union and pressure Moscow to cooperate in ending the Vietnam War, Kissinger secretly sought rapprochement with another communist superpower: Mao Tse-Tung’s China. In June 1971, Kissinger traveled secretly to China. In February 1972, Kissinger achieved success and brought Nixon, as the first American president ever, on an official state visit to Beijing.

 

Trump may now be pursuing the opposite: a rapprochement with Russia to weaken China. Analysts are therefore talking about a ‘reverse Kissinger’. It may in fact, have been Henry Kissinger himself (he died in 2023) who introduced this idea to Trump during his first term.

 

Deteriorating relationship

We must first of all realize that the situation today is incomparable to that of the 1970s. After the Chinese communists, led by Mao, emerged victorious from the bloody Chinese civil war in 1949, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic signed a “friendship treaty” in 1950. Stalin promised the impoverished and partially devastated China, among other things, assistance with reconstruction and military aid in the event of an attack by Japan. But after Stalin died in 1953 and the subsequent ideological de-Stalinization under Nikita Krushev, the Soviet Union and China gradually drifted apart, both ideologically and geopolitically.

 

During the 1960s, both countries claimed a dominant position in Asia. In 1969, the two communist superpowers even fought a brief border conflict in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. That same year, the Soviet Union even threatened to launch a nuclear attack on China, after which the US announced that it would in that case retaliate. With his opening to China, Kissinger was not so much trying to separate China from the Soviet Union, but rather to take advantage of an already severely deteriorating relationship between the former communist empires.

 

Long-term partnership

Today, the Chinese-Russian “no limits” partnership is of a completely different order. China and Russia share an important strategic objective: to break American global hegemony. Moscow and Beijing are both revanchist, imperial powers with territorial ambitions – in Ukraine and other former Soviet countries, and in Taiwan, respectively. The US has been the main obstacle to this in recent decades. This makes the Chinese-Russian partnership, in which Iran and North Korea also play a role, an anti-American coalition in the first place. The countries support each other politically, militarily, and economically in various alliances, including the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). These shared long-term strategic goals, ever-closer economic relations, and ideological similarities give the Chinese-Russian axis a strong foundation.

 

After decades of Russian resentment, failed attempts at rapprochement, and NATO’s expansion to with countries that Russia continues to regard as its sphere of influence, mistrust between Russia and the West remains deep. Many American voters, both Democrats and Republicans, see Russia as a threat and believe that Trump’s rapprochement with Moscow has already gone too far. Electorally  Trump can therefore count on little support for his attempts at rapprochement. After all, much of Kissinger’s success was due to his secret diplomacy. The fact that Trump is making his rapprochement with Moscow in full public view does not help in achieving any greater strategic goal. For Russia in particular, Trump’s opening offers enormous opportunities in the short term.

 

America as a ‘normal’ Great Power

Trump’s intention to play China and Russia off against each other is too limited in scope and poorly executed to be truly successful. Putin and Xi share a long-term anti-American agenda, and compared to Xi, Trump has little to offer to Putin. At least, not in the current world constellation, where America still has no true equal in economic and military terms. However, there is a way in which Trump can play Russia and China off against each other and thereby weaken China. This is by removing the strategic rationale behind their alliance. Paradoxically, this means that he must reduce America to an ‘ordinary’ superpower, abandon its ‘exceptionalism’ and accept a more or less level playing field with other superpowers.

 

To establish this new American role on the world stage, and thus render the Chinese-Russian partnership superfluous, Kissinger comes back into the picture. It requires a new form of ‘détente’ with both Putin and Xi, two dictators whom Trump says he respects and calls “friends.” As in Kissinger’s time, this involves talks on, for example, limiting the number of nuclear weapons. Another feature is the de-escalation of existing conflicts, the recognition of each other’s right to exist (in Kissinger’s words: “There is no alternative to coexistence”) and, perhaps even each other’s spheres of influence.

 

By claiming control over areas of strategic importance to the Western hemisphere, including Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada, Trump may already have taken a step in this direction. By adopting an expansionist stance himself, he is deliberately undermining his own credibility in condemning the expansionism of Russia and China. A greater gift to Putin and Xi is hardly conceivable. For small countries such as Ukraine and Taiwan, the world is becoming considerably less secure. And while Washington recently deepened its military cooperation with Japan, a crucial partner in the Pacific, it is putting unprecedented pressure on its traditional and important transatlantic allies. One of the big questions for Europe is then whose sphere of influence Trump thinks that Europe should belong to.