As Basil Fawlty might say: “Who do you think you are? Henry Kissinger?” And according to a subset of geopolitical thinkers, Trump is, in fact, something even cleverer than Kissinger: a “reverse-Kissinger” or even a “reverse-Nixon”, as the US military historian Edward Luttwak has declared. While Nixon went to China to isolate Russia, Trump, they tell us, will go to Russia to isolate China.
The argument, propounded by Trump hacks and pundits from Vivek Ramaswamy to David Pyne, is that China is by far the greater threat to American hegemony than Russia. In this they are surely correct. China’s domination of manufacturing, its technological edge in many strategic fields, its control of supply chains and its massive military build-up make it by far the more daunting adversary.
Russia is, by comparison, an economic, demographic and technological backwater. Its main sources of bargaining power are its land mass and natural resources. In return for ready access to these, China helps its neighbour evade western sanctions and floods it with products to replace those made so expensive by Russia’s economic isolation. Japanese cars on the roads of Siberia have been replaced by Chinese; WhatsApp by WeChat.
Disrupting this arrangement, so Ramaswamy or Luttwak claim, could deliver substantial gains. Russia is giving China valuable kit such as jet engines, as well as access to the Arctic or Middle East, and it provides an impregnable back-up supply line of raw materials if Beijing ever faces a maritime blockade. A Russia that took a more neutral stance between East and West might supposedly deliver benefits to the US, like a supply of minerals or the sale of icebreakers to establish trade routes in the Arctic; or perhaps ultimately even use of central Asian military bases, as during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.
The problem with this analysis is that it exaggerates both the strength of the Sino-Russian “axis” and the US’s ability to turn things around. Despite overwhelming incentives on both sides, for example, Beijing and Moscow have still been unable to strike an agreement to build a second gas pipeline, known as Siberia 2, to more than double Russian gas shipments to China. On the other hand, while it’s true that China might view its loss of Siberian territory centuries ago with regret, Beijing’s energies are directed seaward, at Taiwan, not across the Amur River.
“There is no Russian alliance with China,” says Artyom Lukin, a professor of international relations in Vladivostok; and, “Russia is definitely not ready to fight for China” over Taiwan or anything else. At the same time, any direct threat from China, he said, feels “very long-term and hypothetical”. In short, any Nixon-inspired backflip engineered in the US feels out of time by a decade or so. After all, what form would the offer really take? Russia gets full western sanctions relief in return for what? Not trading or sharing technology with China? Isn’t that just another form of unenforceable sanction? As for America getting its hands on Russian raw materials or drawing on Russian help to explore new trade routes, why replace one remote, unreliable supply chain with another, especially when the western hemisphere and Africa are so rich with opportunity?
The simpler and more compelling explanation for Trump’s attitude to Russia — which also has the benefit of being explicitly laid out by the US secretary of defence Pete Hegseth, JD Vance and others — is that the US is retreating in Europe to shore up its position in Asia. They’re doing it brutally because Europe hasn’t listened to warnings and kind words, which have been emanating from Washington since at least the Obama “pivot to Asia” in 2011. Europe will be forced to accept its share of responsibility, where Nato becomes an alliance of European land forces backed only by US naval and intelligence support, a policy called “dormant Nato” by Sumantra Maitra, a fellow at the Trump-aligned think tank the Center for Renewing America.
There are some rather large missing pieces to this strategy, however. Where does the retreat end and how will the new borders of the new US-backed zone be delineated and made credible? During his infamous sit-down with President Zelensky of Ukraine, Trump was asked by a Polish journalist whether the US would stand behind Poland if it were threatened. His answer was an immediate and unequivocal yes: “I’m very committed to Poland.” So what about the Baltics? The president hesitated, winced, mentioned that the Baltics, like Poland, were “in a tough neighbourhood” before adding, without huge conviction, that “we’re committed”. I’m not sure I would bank on that if I lived in Tallinn.
So how can we ensure this new Nato, or Nato replacement, is safely and credibly established, with its dubious US backing and ambiguous borders? When pressed, self-styled American realists and Trump supporters fall back on the argument that Russia, if it’s given its due in a grand bargain over Ukraine, will become a safely “satiated power”. Tummy full, the great bear will roll over and busy itself in licking its wounds. Or as Maitra put it: “Russia is a shadow of its former self, and even though it has captured bits and pieces of Ukraine, the misadventure has come with a crippling cost. Russia is unlikely to be a continental threat anytime soon.”
This rather skips over the part where Russia’s appetite, after years of successful nibbling around its southern and western borders, was repulsed on its way to Kyiv by a barrage of anti-tank missiles and furious Ukrainians. It misunderstands Putin’s motives for the war, which were not just about Nato but are rooted in religious, cultural and demographic anxieties. It assumes Putin is haunted more by the loss of young conscripts and Nord Stream shipments than by his failure to “regather the lands” of “Ancient Rus”. It replaces evidence about who Putin is, based on his behaviour, with an illusory version of the man based on wishful thinking
The America First brigade are right that Nato is dangerously imbalanced and over-reliant on the US. And the Americans are right that, if Europe wanted, we could marshal the resources to contain Russia with far less help. They are also correct that US interests are better served by saving its strength for the continuing rivalry with China and that there is nothing eternal or inevitable about Russian alignment with its neighbouring superpower.
But if Trump is about to embark on some supposedly ingenious mission to hug the bear, in the expectation that he will achieve a meeting of minds over China or that a great Eurasian realignment is on the cards, he is about to be severely disappointed. There is no evidence that Russia stands humbled and ready for a deal to serve American interests. Washington should not mistake a couple of half-hearted icebreakers for a deep and meaningful conversation.
