Trump's ‘reverse Nixon' charade insults our intelligence

Telegraph

11-03-2025

George Walden, a British diplomat and one of a tiny handful of Westerners in China at the time, said he was spat at and denounced as a Russian 'revisionist swine' by gangs of fanatical Maoist youth on the streets of Beijing.
He recounts in his book China: A Wolf In The World? how he also learnt from visiting impromptu bomb shelters in the hutongs that Mao Zedong was preparing for war with the USSR.
We now know that Chinese forces had ambushed and killed 60 Soviet troops on the border at the Ussuri River. The Russians brought in reinforcements armed with tactical nuclear weapons. Moscow then put out feelers to the Nixon administration: would the US object if the USSR knocked out China by launching a first strike against its nuclear weapons installations in Xinjiang? Nixon warned them off.
It became clear to both Nixon and his guru Henry Kissinger that a) they could play off China and the Soviet Union against each other in a triangular strategy of detente; and b) that better links to Beijing could help the US extract itself from the quagmire of the Vietnam War.
The Daily Telegraph had its own cameo moment in the secret talks. Its stringer in Pakistan, MFH Beg, spotted Kissinger at Islamabad Airport being smuggled on to a Pakistani Boeing 707 with Chinese navigators and headed for Beijing. He put through a breathless call to the editor, who spiked the scoop of the year, thinking Beg must be drunk.
There are Russians who fear vassal dependency on China. 'The East is not our friend,' once grumbled Sergei Sobyanin, then Moscow mayor, but he nevertheless renamed Europe Square as Eurasia Square last year, and loyally toes the line on China.
A whole generation now in key posts has internalised the Primakov doctrine, which deems American hegemony to be the permanent and overarching threat to Russia. Only by teaming up with China can the two together force a restructuring of the global order and defend themselves against liberal contagion.
Putin had some trouble persuading the collegium of the FSB security services two weeks ago that Trump's overtures are a basis for anything durable.
'We understand that not everyone is happy with the resumption of Russian-American contacts. Western elites are still determined to stoke instability and will try to disrupt the dialogue. We see this. We need to take this into account,' he said.
The Russians know that Trump won the US election narrowly and that his hold on Congress is fleeting. 'It is highly unlikely that Russia has any desire to separate itself from China,' said Angela Stent, a fellow at the Center for the United States and Europe.
'There is a fundamental mistrust of the US among the current and probably future Russian leadership. They're not going to squander this relationship with China built up over the past couple of decades.'
If Trump's reverse Nixon play were authentic and were to succeed to any degree, it would inevitably throw China and Europe into each other's arms, creating a de facto pact between two of the world's three big economic blocs (with the UK back in the EU).
The US would swap its rich European equal for a poor Russian 'petrol station masquerading as a country', to borrow from the late senator John McCain.
There is an even more horrible possibility that Trump will go in a different direction. While he has hit China with tariffs, he has eschewed a serious fight with Beijing so far. One can imagine another of his theatrical deals that effectively cedes the Far East to China.
He seems to see the world as a 19th-century concert of great powers – in his head, America, Russia and China – each with an imperial 'droit de regard' over its own sphere. Europe has no place in this. It is for him the despised weakling and cultural degenerate.
One fears that it is not so much reverse Nixon as a reborn Metternich system of iron-fist reactionary powers colluding to hold back liberal ideas, this time on a global scale.
Nixon and Kissinger must be turning in their graves.