In the summer of 1971, an airplane carrying the U.S. National Security Advisor Henry KissingerAbove. Himalayas heading towards Beijing, on a secret journey that changed the course of history. At the time, Communist China was internationally isolated, locked in bloody border disputes with its former ally. Soviet Union. Kissinger realized that there was a golden opportunity for America to penetrate the Communist camp and change the balance of power. Cold War radically.
The secret visit set the stage for the U.S. president’s visit Richard Nixon in 1972, which opened the door to US recognition of China and attempts to contain it within a world order dominated by United States. This rapprochement was not based on good intentions, but on careful geopolitical calculations for both sides: Washington needed to neutralize Beijing to prevent Moscow from expanding its influence in Asia and prevent any future chance of coalescence between the two largest blocs in the communist world, while China found in Washington a necessary tactical ally to counter the Soviets, who had become an existential threat to its stability.
Now, more than half a century later, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trumpis contemplating a similar equation, but in reverse, through the so-called “Reverse Kissinger” policy. During his second term, Trump is trying to move Russia away from its alliance with China and reintegrate it into a new system of relations with the United States, through a settlement of the war in Ukraine seems to be somewhat siding with Russia, according to some observers. Recently, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubioin no uncertain terms, that United States “Establishing a relationship with Russia rather than leaving it entirely dependent on China.”
But geopolitical realities say that this idea is nothing more than an attempt to “mechanically project” a successful historical maneuver onto the completely different contexts that shape today’s reality. What has changed in five decades to make Trump’s idea an impossible gamble and a misreading of the geopolitical requirements of both Russia and China?
Why was Kissinger’s plan possible?
When President Nixon entered White House In 1969, Sino-Soviet relations were in a state of extreme division and tension. What began as ideological differences between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and Chinese leader Mao Zedong About leadership Communist movement and the interpretation of Marxist propositions, soon developed into a real confrontation.
By the late 1960s, relations between the two communist states reached the point of direct military confrontation in 1969 on the Ussuri River, where bloody armed clashes resulted in hundreds of deaths. These confrontations made Beijing realize that a direct military threat could come from its northern neighbor, the Soviet Union, before it could come from the West, creating fertile ground for rapprochement with the United States.
On the other hand, China was almost completely isolated internationally at the time, after the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 greatly weakened the Chinese economy and created a huge internal chaos that affected the stability of the government and society.
In the absence of any serious international partnerships, technology or foreign investment, Beijing desperately needed an outlet to alleviate these pressures. Here came Kissinger, with a tempting American offer: Open diplomatic recognition, open economic ties with the world, and much-needed technological cooperation.
From the American perspective, rapprochement with China was a flexible response to the imperatives of political realism and a successful step toward weakening the Soviet Union.
Moreover, at the time, the US was tragically involved in Vietnam WarThe Nixon administration believed that disengaging China from the Soviet Union would make it easier for Moscow to support Vietnam North Vietnam is more complex, and will give Washington greater freedom of military and political maneuver in Southeast Asia.
Domestically in the United States, public opinion was ready to embrace such a historic rapprochement due to fatigue from Vietnam War and a general desire to reduce international tension. At the same time, the Soviet Union was suffering from major economic and military difficulties that made it less able to counter this sudden American move.
It was this environment that made Washington willing to make substantial concessions to Beijing, including recognizing the principle of “One China“, and abandoning the Taiwan as the official representative of the Chinese state in United Nations Security Council in favor of Beijing, which strengthened the position of Mao Zedong and gave him the justification for this sharp turn in his foreign policy.
The point here is that Kissinger and Nixon would not have been able to bring about this historic shift within the Eastern camp unless the conditions in the camp itself were favorable and Mao was willing and able to benefit from the trade-off. Today’s Russian-Chinese relations are not at the same stage, and the Russian president’s Vladimir Putin to the Chinese president Xi Jinpingis not like the relationship between Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev.
Russia and China Alliance of Mutual Necessity
since The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Sino-Russian relations began to grow steadily. In the same year, the two countries signed a joint agreement to regulate many of their border disputes, the last of which was later addressed in the 2004 agreement on the eastern part of the border. In 2001, the two countries signed a friendship treaty, a 20-year agreement that provides a foundation for strong and sustainable relations.
In 2008, the financial crisis hit Russia, exposing several structural vulnerabilities in its Western-dependent economy, and in the same year NATO held aNATO) The infamous Bucharest summit, which opened the door for discussion of Ukraine and Georgia’s accession to the alliance and signaled U.S. intent to expand NATO membership in Eastern Europe.
A few years later, Ukraine was coming out of the Russian cloak completely after the Washington-backed revolution of 2014, which prompted Russia to invade and take control of Crimea in the same year. These developments pushed Moscow to strengthen its eastward orientation and deepen its alliance with China. This trend was reinforced with the coming to power of President Xi Jinping in Beijing in 2013, who adopts an ambitious and exceptionalist rhetoric to counter the unilateral US hegemony over the world.
On February 4, 2022, on the sidelines of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in a grandiose hall to announce to the world the beginning of a new era of bilateral relations. The announcement was unconventional, coming amid tensions between Moscow and the West over Ukraine and Putin’s preparations for his all-out invasion that shook Europe.
Meanwhile, economic ties between the two countries have grown significantly, with China’s growing need for energy sources and Russia’s reliance on oil and gas exports to support its economy. By 2023, trade between the two countries amounted to about $190 billion, with an agreement to increase it to $250 billion by 2030.
This coincided with the construction of the Silla-Siberian pipeline (Power of Siberian) which pumps about 38 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to China annually, with plans to double the amount via the Power of Siberia 2 line to 100 billion cubic meters by 2030.
But economic cooperation, while substantial, has only been a prelude to deeper bilateral cooperation in the military and security spheres. Since 2018, the frequency of joint military exercises has increased significantly, with Chinese troops for the first time in Vostok 2018, Russia’s largest military maneuvers since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 2021, the two countries conducted joint naval maneuvers in the Sea of Japan, followed by joint air maneuvers involving strategic bombers that flew near the airspace of South Korea and Japan (US allies). These military maneuvers were clear messages indicating the extent of coordination between the two countries’ militaries in the face of common challenges in Asia.
The relationship was not limited to the economy and the military, but also extended to diplomatic and strategic aspects. In Security Council International, China and Russia used veto (veto) simultaneously against Western resolutions related to Syria Venezuela and Myanmar. In 2022, the two countries also announced an agreement to enhance cooperation in the fields of advanced technology and cybersecurity and space, sensitive sectors that have always been contentious in international relations.
At the level of the broader view of the international system, the visions of Moscow and Beijing are remarkably close, and the two countries share regional and international attempts to engineer alliances and institutional structures parallel to the Western structures through which US hegemony is exercised, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is described as a project to build an “Eastern NATO,” as well as BRICSand other cooperation frameworks.
Historically, the status of this relationship is very different from the relationship between China and the Soviet Union. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Sino-Soviet relationship was based on a shared communist ideology, but soon disintegrated due to disagreement over the global leadership of the communist movement. In contrast, the Sino-Russian relationship today is based on clear pragmatism, geopolitical calculations and a rational balancing of common interests in the face of US-Western hegemony.
Although Beijing took a cautious stance on the war in Ukraine, it helped Russia bypass the sanctions and did not respond to US efforts to economically paralyze Moscow. When the European Union China has emerged as the largest buyer of Russian oil, taking advantage of significant discounts offered by Moscow. In just the first six months of the war, China increased its imports of Russian oil by 55 percent compared to the same period a year earlier.
At the same time, China actively supported Russia in the financial and monetary sphere. When Western sanctions began to affect Moscow’s ability to use the dollar and euro in international trade, Beijing expanded the use of the Chinese yuan in its trade transactions with Moscow. According to an April 2024 Reuters report, the proportion of Russian-Chinese trade transactions settled in yuan and rubles rose from about 20 percent before the war to more than 85 percent in just two years, sharply reducing the impact of Western financial sanctions.
Trump today has nothing to compensate Russia for cutting or reducing its relationship with China. Moscow does not need international recognition as Beijing did in the early 1970s, nor does it need to be saved from a powerful neighbor threatening its borders, while its battle today is with the West itself, not China.
Alliance restrictions don’t mean separation
All of the above does not necessarily mean that the alliance between Russia and China will result in a joint force or a permanent alliance. There are unbridgeable contradictions between the geopolitical imperatives of the two countries, but they all fall short of the priority of jointly confronting Western hegemony.
Although the two countries are geographically contiguous across the world’s longest international border, more than 4,200 kilometers long, Russia’s main population centers are located further west in its European neighborhood away from China, while most of China on the coast, dropping sharply west of the annual rainfall line, with plateaus, arid mountain ranges, and rugged terrain in northern and western China. Hence, there are no deep connections between the Russian and Chinese peoples, and the distant origins of Chinese and Slavic civilizations are radically different.
On the other hand, geography imposes different strategic priorities on Russia and China. Securing the western depth of Russia’s borders is a top priority for Moscow, most urgently in Belarus and Ukraine, and next in the Baltic, while geography determines Beijing’s priorities of maritime freedom in the east and breaking the encirclement imposed on it through tight chains of US military bases and networks of Washington’s allies.
In addition, Chinese and Russian strategic mindsets differ in terms of prioritizing foreign deployment and ways of extending influence and hegemony, as China tends to quiet economic expansion and development cooperation with countries around the world, which is likely to turn into political and security influence in the future, while Moscow tends to direct security areas and present itself to target countries as a provider of local security and support for regime stability through extensive networks of security companies and arms suppliers.
This disparity is what reduces the effectiveness of common collective vessels that bring them together, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), as the two sides differ on how to use and develop them. But these bilateral differences fade dramatically when it comes to confrontation with Western influence, emphasizing that Trump has very limited chances of reversing Kissinger’s path again.
How is Putin dealing with Trump’s intentions?
Trump is not the first U.S. president to seek to contain Russia and reduce its hostility to the West by offering economic and diplomatic inducements in exchange for limiting its presence as a single global power, but these plans have always failed.
In the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Biden sought to “repair” bilateral relations with Moscow by establishing a dialogue on strategic stability during his meeting with Putin in June 2021. At the meeting, Biden characterized Russia as a “great power” to assuage concerns Moscow from being treated as China’s junior partner.
But Russia, according to Stratfor’s analysis, saw this as a sign of Washington’s weakness and declining power, and the Kremlin later assessed that the U.S., regardless of which party is in office, will likely eventually return to the idea of “resetting” relations with Russia for the same strategic reasons. The Kremlin’s confidence in this assessment likely reassured Putin when he gave the order to invade Ukraine. He knew that the next US administration would almost certainly seek a détente with Moscow, meaning that any initial US response would be short-lived and thus unable to break the Russians’ resolve.
Currently, Trump is once again trying to offer Moscow trade and economic incentives such as the promise of lifting economic sanctions, cooperation on rare metals, Arctic exploration, and others, but all of these incentives reveal to Putin the Trump administration’s main weakness: its unwillingness to engage in this war and its lack of belief in its justification or priority.
It is true that the results of the war – so far – have not been in line with Putin’s ambitions, and Moscow is still stuck in Ukraine, unable to control the capital Kiev, change its political system, or extract a US or Western position pledging to neutralize Ukraine, but on the other hand, the West has not been able to defeat the Russian invasion or convince the Russian leadership to fail.
Instead, disagreements have begun to plague the Western alliance over the limits of support for Ukraine and the feasibility of continuing the war, giving Putin a huge moral boost to continue his war, regardless of his cautious and tactical response to calls for negotiations, even if they result in limited truce agreements.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported, citing “informed sources,” that the US president told European leaders in a phone call that the Russian president is not ready to end the war, as he believes he is in a victorious position.
In this context, the attempt to contain Moscow and isolate it from Beijing is, in essence, an attempt to reverse history. Putin has not yet achieved his deep objectives from the war in Ukraine and is not ready to give it up after such enormous sacrifices, Kiev is also not ready to give in to Moscow’s demands after all this blood, and Trump is not ready to fail to fulfill his promises and appear weak in front of Putin, and this is the dilemma of the war that cannot be helped by simplistic recall of historical events whose contexts have changed decades ago.
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2025-06-03 00:26:00
