Adam Zivo: Trump wird Russland nicht gegen China wenden

Submission statement: The Trump administration’s diplomatic and foreign policy decisions have fuelled speculation that the White House is trying to foster a Russo-American alliance against Beijing. This has been referred to as pulling a „Reverse Kissinger,“ in reference to Kissinger and Nixon’s unexpected anti-Soviet alliance with Maoist China in 1972. This article explains why the historical parallels to Kissinger are unfounded (Mao and the Soviets hated each other, unlike Xi and Putin today), and why, given the depth of contemporary Sino-Russian cooperation, attempts to entice Russia away from China will almost certainly fail.

*[NOTE: I am also the author of this article. For context, the National Post is one of Canada’s largest newspapers, and I am one of their political columnists and resident Ukraine experts. My name is in the post title because Canadian newspapers generally require that opinion pieces include author names in their headlines, and I’m obligated to use the exact headline as the submission title.]*

Putin has managed to turn the US against Europe.

This sounds to me more like a rationalization of the Trump Administrations concessions to Russia than it sounds like a real policy tbh. In any case the key difference is that Kissinger’s approach to China was based on two facts: One, American failure in the Vietnam War meant US threat against China was receding, and two, most crucially, China and the USSR had already gone into conflict with each other without American involvement a few years prior. Kissinger didn’t have to fabricate a conflict, he took advantage of one that already existed. Russia and China has no reason to create a conflict between each other just because America wants one to exist.