President Donald Trump’s unorthodox diplomacy has alarm bells ringing around the world, not least in Washington, D.C. While much of the inside-the-beltway elite is horrified at the prospect of America supposedly reorienting toward Russia, administration insiders have hinted at an ambitious plan to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing.
They’ve raised the possibility of a so-called “Reverse Nixon” maneuver aimed at fostering a global balance of power more favorable to America. But can it work?
President Richard Nixon famously visited China in 1972, ending a 25-year freeze between Washington and Beijing. The table had been set for his diplomacy years earlier with bloody skirmishes along the Chinese-Soviet border in 1969. This fracture between the Eurasian communist giants effectively opened a door for Nixon.
Nixon’s decisive move on the global chessboard proved an immense geopolitical blow to the Soviets. Now, the Kremlin had to contend with powerful military blocs on both its western and eastern frontiers. And, as would become clear in the 1980s, the combination of America’s technological prowess and China’s immense demographic resources and hunger for modernization would prove more than a little unnerving for the USSR, which was already overextended.
Today’s world is very different, of course, but could Trump’s attempted rapprochement with the Kremlin bring about a similarly stunning transformation in world politics?
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