Is Trump Really Doing A ‘Reverse Kissinger’?

A new phrase has grabbed the Beltway by its collars. US President Donald Trump, the argument goes, is driving a wedge between Russia and China by placating Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and making for him the world, meaning Europe, he wants. The fact that Trump hasn’t asked for concessions from Moscow—a half-hearted threat of fresh sanctions on a heavily sanctioned state notwithstanding—has even given ballast to rekindled conspiracy theories of Trump being a Russian agent. To be honest, there is nothing to say the Kremlin doesn’t have kompromat on the president—just as there is no evidence to say it does. But the humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office was the last straw for Trump’s critics.

To return to China, Henry Kissinger, who had persuaded his boss Richard Nixon to proceed with the “opening” to Mao’s regime, had also opined: “…I think in 20 years your successor, if he’s as wise as you, will wind up leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese. For the next 15 years we have to lean towards the Chinese against the Russians. We have to play this balance of power game totally unemotionally. Right now, we need the Chinese to correct the Russians and to discipline the Russians.”

That was shortly before Nixon left for Beijing in 1972. It didn’t happen in 20 years but Kissinger was sailing close to soothsaying in that the Soviet Union was collapsing exactly two decades later. No US president teamed up with the Russia that emerged. It was too soon. And China wasn’t yet a threat to the US. It was just beginning to help American businesses get rich—and getting rich itself—which it kept doing, and thus the reluctance on the part of Big Tech or the media to see Beijing as the enemy, even today.

It is more than 50 years after Kissinger’s prediction that the mask of ambiguity and amiability has fully slipped from US-China relations. Trump, the argument goes, is now doing the Reverse Kissinger—bringing the Russians on board against the Chinese.

There are many reasons why this is unconvincing.

For one, Kissinger and Nixon were not really driving a wedge between two allies back in the day. The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic had already pulled away from each other thanks to the Sino-Soviet Split. The US overestimated and overinvested in China. It wasn’t apparent then but it was sharpening the knife for its own back. Russia and China today, however, are mutually dependent best friends. True, Beijing is the senior partner in this “friendship without limits” and Moscow’s lifeline but Xi Jinping cannot afford to lose one drop of Russian oil or its market. Bilateral trade between the two is around $250 billion while Moscow and Washington barely trade $50 billion.

The US, with or without Trump, is a long way from weaning Russia away from its Chinese lifeline. It doesn’t have the resources (what exactly would the US offer Russia when it’s certainly not oil America wants to buy?) and time to play the very long game that would need, if it had to work at all—by which time both Putin and Trump would be long gone.

The obverse of this reality check is Trump’s real plans vis-à-vis China, if those exist. The trade deficit makes him see red; no pun intended. He evidently means business and the 20 per cent tariffs should in the long run return business and industry and jobs to the heartland burnt by decades of offshoring. But then words are louder than actions and it is uncertain how far Trump would go. It’s quite possible the short-term economic pain would pull him back as price rise compounded by supply-side constrictions begin to hurt.

More importantly, irrespective of how the trade-and-tariff war pans out, that doesn’t translate into any willingness on Trump’s part to militarily counter an attempt by Xi to, say, grab Taiwan. Ukraine is evidence. If Trump’s America is happy to let Russia run amok in what Moscow has always regarded as its sphere of influence, why would the US bother about China doing the same in the Far East? As a matter of fact, Trump has betrayed his broad agreement with China’s maritime worldview earlier.

Taiwan does have strategic value for America though and its semiconductor industry is precisely what a transactional foreign policy would treasure—and even Trump may not take kindly to threats against Japan and South Korea. But he has just left allies high and dry in Europe and has threatened to grab Greenland from a country that has been one of America’s staunchest allies within NATO.

The fact is, despite the Trump presidency turning journalists and pundits into workaholics with the relentless drama, nobody knows what exactly Trump will do, what he is thinking, and how much of his policy or policies he is improvising by the minute. That’s why it’s illogical to say just because he is apparently pushing for a trade war with Beijing, he would extend that war to military intervention to help a friend.

Reverse Kissinger is a catchy phrase. As of now, there’s nothing to say it’s anything more.

diplomacyDonald TrumpgeopoliticsUS Foreign policyUS-ChinaWeb Exclusive