Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Shanghai in 2014. (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)
Behind President Donald Trump’s shake-up of the global military and economic order is a big but deeply flawed idea: He appears convinced that a newly powerful United States can pull Russia away from China — and become the power broker between Moscow and Beijing.
The economic revitalization part of Trump’s vision got a sharp rebuke this week, though, from global financial markets. Investors fear that his new “Liberation Day” tariffs will reduce U.S. access to global markets without any quick benefit for domestic manufacturing. If things go badly, it will be all pain and no gain for American consumers.
But beyond Thursday’s Wall Street wipeout, the bigger danger might lie in Trump’s policies toward Russia and China. He believes that making Moscow a partner in a Ukraine peace deal will create three spheres of influence — with the United States playing balancer between Russian and Chinese power.
This hope of a “Reverse Kissinger,” as the strategy is often described, might be illusory. Many analysts predict that Russia and China will continue their “no limits” partnership, regardless of Trump’s blandishments. Meanwhile, the U.S. might severely damage its alliances in Europe and Asia as nations there doubt America’s willingness to deter Russian and Chinese power.
“There is no relationship the United States has understood less, historically, than the one between China and Russia,” argues Kurt M. Campbell, a former deputy secretary of state and now chairman of the Asia Group. He sees the bond between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping as intensely personal, nurtured over scores of meetings and a thousand hours of discussion. If Trump thinks he can control that dynamic, he is mistaken, Campbell argues.
Plus, Putin and Xi see Trump coming. “When Chinese and Russian leaders meet, one of the foremost topics on the agenda is anticipating how the U.S. will seek to split them,” explains Campbell. Both see the United States as a declining power, and Trump as an erratic and unreliable player in the new “great game.”
The idea of dividing Russia and China was a central rationale for Henry Kissinger’s opening to Beijing in the early 1970s. But at the time, China had reason to fear Russia’s power and to seek a counterweight from the U.S. American diplomats have tried to rekindle this anxiety — arguing to China that its economic interests lie with the West, and to Russia that it will be swallowed by China’s rising power — with little success.
Countries on the periphery of Russia and China play their own trilateral games, hoping to create leverage. A classic example is Belarus, a captive neighbor of Russia whose ruler, Alexander Lukashenko, nonetheless boasts of his “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” with China. The China card is “safe cover” from Moscow, explains Natalia Kaliada, a Belarus-born dissident who founded Belarus Free Theater. But in a crunch, China would never lean toward Minsk rather than Moscow.
From Trump’s earliest days in business, he has been both a disrupter and a dealmaker. In his public comments, he appears desperate to draw Putin into a Ukraine peace agreement. Already, he has rescued Putin from pariah status, squeezed and scolded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and endorsed some of Russia’s main demands. But the more concessions Trump offers, the more Putin wants — to the point that even Trump said this week that he was “very angry” and “pissed off.”
Even as Trump woos Putin, he also “wants to make a big deal with China,” argues Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official now with the Brookings Institution. He sees Xi as a kindred spirit. “I can sum up Trump’s China policy in one sentence: ‘Xi Jinping is my friend,’” a Trump China adviser told me during the president’s first term. That still appears true. Though Trump has many hawkish China advisers, he still seems to prefer trilateral cooperation over confrontation with the “big men” in Russia and China.
Here’s where the United States’ long-standing allies in Europe and Asia get nervous. If Trump is seeking a three-way division of influence among Russia, China and the U.S., these smaller countries risk ending up out in the cold. America’s promise of nuclear “extended deterrence” could become unreliable — forcing allies to build their own nuclear weapons or seek new alliances.
Trump already appears to have abandoned leadership of the old global economic order. Japan and South Korea, two of the United States’ most important trading partners, have gotten the message. They met for trade talks last weekend with China, and Beijing says the three countries will coordinate their response to new U.S. tariffs.
Everything everywhere all at once. That’s a useful shorthand description of Trump’s global economic and security policy makeover. The president is so impatient for change that he might not see the biggest event that’s taking place on the global stage: Russia and China are playing the Trump card.