Trump Is the New Nixon

THE NOBEL PRIZE for Peace might be a step or two beyond the horizon but Donald Trump andVladimir Putin entered the Guinness World Records on Tuesday, March 18, 2025 with the longest telephone conversation in the history of America-Russia relations. They spoke for two-and-a-half hours, which means their agenda encompassed a world far wider than the war in Ukraine. Message: Russia’s isolation is over.

There are now only two nations in the Ukraine negotiation hall. Ukraine and its fierce partisans in Europe are in the waiting room. If there is an evolution from a partial, uncertain ceasefire to a Contract for Peace, it will be because of two signatures on a contemporary modern parchment. The policy pursued by the Joe Biden White House, with loud applause from muscle-free London, Paris and Berlin, to inflict an economic and political quarantine upon Russia that would cripple its economy and ruin its military strength is in deep coma.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth has begun in Western Europe. If you are President of Futility in Paris, the decibels fade before they reach the Champs-Élysées. In his latest soundbite Emmanuel Macron has exhorted Europe to stop buying American arms, on the assumption that they are finally willing to build the arsenals they should have stocked from the 1980s. The pathos must be evident to everyone except Macron. Even if anyone listens, the makers of the Rafale fighter jets might get first orders in 2040, but only if Dassault Aviation has switched to production of near-invisible nuclear drones.

If you are Prime Minister of the Helpless trying anxiously to be helpful from Downing Street, your word will not travel much farther than the media headquarters in Fleet Street or Wapping, where the principal strategic objective is triumph in the war of words rather than any war of blood and gore. If you are the Aluminium Chancellor of Berlin, you can celebrate passage of a defence budget that will radically improve the Home Guards by 2026 and if all goes well help the army by 2035. Washington and Moscow know this.

The Iron Chancellor of Germany between 1871 and 1890, Prince Otto von Bismarck, has been out of fashion for a couple of generations. A revival can begin with his famous remark made in 1867: “A conquering army on the border will not be stopped by eloquence.” If Western Europe’s leaders had been as committed to security as they are to the cadence of their voice, Russia would have held talks in 2022 over Ukraine’s slide into NATO. An equitable peace is likely when two antagonists negotiate from positions of strength. A weakling pays a price for peace. The historic lesson for the unfortunate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is simple and stark. A cat’s paw is never more important than the cat.

Neither Trump nor Putin is famous for eloquence. Putin has a laconic tongue; Trump is temperamentally exuberant. Putin is never going to be underestimated now, not by his worst enemies, but Trump faces the familiar hurdles placed before an iconoclast who challenges a well-entrenched establishment. It is almost heretical in European media to trace any logic in his policies, while his adversary Joe Biden’s stop-start incoherence was advertised as deep thought.

Remove the flab and the skeleton of strategy becomes evident in the 150-minute telephone dialogue. Donald Trump is emerging as the Richard Nixon of 2025.

In 1970, at the coldest point of the Cold War, when American confidence had been shaken by virtual defeat in Vietnam but its military might remained unquestionable, President Nixon realised that the partnership of the Soviet Union and China added up to far more than the sum of their parts. His National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, playing a strategic role akin to Ajit Doval for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, went on a secret mission to Beijing which eventually broke the Russia-China axis. In another decade, this development, compounded by grievous mistakes like the misadventure of Afghanistan, led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

History, unlike popular imagination, does not do exact parallels. 2025 is not 1970. Communism is a fiction in China. Russia and China are nationalist powers today, not tied by some ideological umbilical cord. President Xi described China’s ties with Russia as unbreakable during his visit to Moscow in March 2023. He also said he had a peace plan for Ukraine. Two years later Putin is discussing peace with Trump, not Xi, because Washington has leverage over Ukraine. China had good intentions, which are always a variable commodity.

Trump, who does not get camouflage, was candid after the telephone conversation. He wants to disrupt, if not break, the Russia-China entente. He is transparent; his administration is realistic. The true challenge to America over the next three decades will come from China, not Russia. China has the economic heft and is picking up pace in high-tech innovation. It has invested heavily in a global embrace. Xi believes in a Chinese destiny as the pre-eminent world power, which he is confident can be achieved without war. He is prepared for war if war becomes necessary but would prefer a less volatile route towards his objective. He knows that the collateral benefits of economic domination are regional subjugation. China cannot be the primary global superpower if it cannot control the Himalayas to its south or exploit the vast mineral wealth of Russian Siberia to its north-west.

Russia does not have the demography or the tech for such ambitions. It has security concerns, which are legitimate. Four decades ago, Moscow was impotent when its strategic borders crumbled under an onslaught led by America and Western Europe. Kyiv is far closer than the Berlin Wall. In Washington’s estimate, if such concerns are addressed, there can be a return of détente and America can focus its sizeable energies towards limiting the dragon’s firepower.

That is the confrontation of the 21st century. America fought out of isolationism to make the 20th its century. It must defeat the Chinese siege if it wants to preserve its superpower citadel. Nixon’s breakthrough came with his visit to Beijing and a meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong. A Trump visit to Moscow would be less dramatic than a Putin trip to Washington in 2026; but either way it would be eventful, spreading its impact over the coming decade. Russia can buy a Contract for Peace because it has no more wars left to fight. Since we are becoming dependent on the Iron Chancellor for our corrective dose of intellect, another quotation may not be amiss: preventive war, he said, is like committing suicide for fear of death.

NATO was created to challenge the Soviet Union. America’s NATO allies became flatulent, but that did not prove deleterious because the potential of Soviet hegemony was punctured without a direct war that might have turned nuclear. But it required an economic and geopolitical alliance. America will seek allies in its confrontation with China but call them friends to avoid the charge of militarism. The terminology will be less abrasive. The world is as hard as it ever was, but language has softened. A rose by any other name is still a rose. So is a thorn.

Richard Nixon, architect and mason of the China breakthrough, never got the Nobel. It went to Henry Kissinger in 1973, not for a secret trip to Beijing but for protracted negotiations with Vietnam to finish the paperwork of a lost war. That’s what happens when the West European establishment does not like your politics, or your personality. But half-a-century later the world remembers Nixon, not who won the Nobel in 1973.

Chinese President Xi JinpingDonald TrumpRichard NixonUS politicsUS-ChinaUS-Russia relationsVladimir Putin