Many on the right have been advocating for a reverse “Nixon to China” policy in recent weeks. In this scenario, the U.S. would make concessions in Ukraine and thereby pull Russia out of China’s orbit, driving a wedge between Beijing and Moscow. Indeed, President Trump has on at least two occasions alluded to this.
This is a misguided idea, however, as it misunderstands both the past and the present.
Let us begin with the history of Nixon to China. The U.S. did not drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War; the Sino-Soviet split emerged organically, a fact even critics of the “reverse Nixon” plan miss.
“China had reason to fear Russia’s power,” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius recently wrote, “and to seek a counterweight from the U.S.” But this understates the Sino–Soviet tensions in the mid-Cold-War.
Three years after Joseph Stalin’s 1953 death, Nikita Khrushchev spoke before the Communist Party Congress, denouncing the Stalin era. Chinese leader Mao Zedong saw a betrayal of Marxism-Leninism and in turn aspired to rise to the leadership of global communism. The Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958 and met with harsh criticism from Khrushchev, was partly a Chinese effort to prove its model of communism to be superior to the Soviet Union’s. The ideological rupture became irreparable by the early 1960s, when China published “On Khrushchev’s Phony Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World.”
That ideological schism had practical implications. In 1960, the Soviet Union withdrew all of its advisers from China, including those tasked with assisting Beijing to develop its own nuclear weapons. It turned to cooperating with the Americans to maintain the nuclear duopoly. Mao was furious.
By the end of the 1960s, the Soviet Union was suggesting it might attack China’s nuclear sites itself. That suggestion came during a crisis along the Sino–Soviet border, where unresolved boundaries led to a minor military conflict in 1969.
In the 1920s, Soviet agents helped organize the Chinese Communist Party. Four decades later, the armies of the Soviet and Chinese communist parties would be shooting at each other across the disputed frontier. And the U.S. had nothing to do with creating this conflict. Henry Kissinger’s and Nixon’s trips to Beijing in 1971 and 1972, respectively, did not create a wedge between the two states but rather exploited a rift that had already existed.
The Soviet Union and China were two states divided by a common ideology during the Cold War. Scholar Aaron Friedberg observes that, today, China and Russia are united by “anti-ideology” — that is, their objection to the liberal order championed by the U.S.
Chinese and Russian policymakers have studied the Cold War as well as any American. They know that the Sino–Soviet split contributed to American triumph, and they are adamant about preventing the same outcome again.
Every piece of evidence suggests that, currently, there is no cleavage for the U.S. to exploit. China asked Russia to delay escalating the Ukraine War until the conclusion of the 2022 Beijing Olympics, and Vladimir Putin acquiesced. Weeks before the full-scale invasion, the two signed a diplomatic memorandum, stating, “Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation, strengthening of bilateral strategic cooperation is neither aimed against third countries nor affected by the changing international environment and circumstantial changes in third countries.” China has provided military, diplomatic and economic assistance to Russia throughout the war.
Like Washington and Beijing before, Moscow and Beijing now are bound by a common adversary: the U.S. and the international order it upholds. Historically, shared enemies make for strong allies.
Previous strategic and political disagreements have been resolved, too. Whereas the emergence of nuclear arms divided them, today they cooperate in space, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. Both sides are growing their nuclear arsenals, too — leaving the U.S. as the only power that is not expanding its stockpile.
A border dispute no longer exists, either. After taking power, Putin ensured that this issue would be resolved. The outcome was a 2008 agreement and the demarcation of the disputed territory. “Reverse Nixon” proponents insist Putin should fear Chinese designs on the Russian Far East, but the fact is, he doesn’t — and Xi Jinping is giving him no reason to.
Relations between Russia and China today do not remotely resemble those of the 1960s and 1970s. It would be a grave mistake for the U.S. to attempt a similar approach to that dictated by the facts of 1971. Such a policy is destined to fail.
Michael Mazza is senior director at Project 2049. Shay Khatiri is vice president of development and senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute.
