Throughout the 1980s, and into the early 1990s, the New York real estate developer Donald Trump exchanged fan letters with disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon. In 1982, not quite eight years after Nixon’s resignation, Trump described him as “one of this country’s great men.”
Why was Trump such a fan? It might have had something to do with Nixon’s vengeful approach to politics, or their mutual closeness to McCarthyite prosecutor Roy Cohn. But the famously deal-seeking Trump was also an admirer of Nixon’s most famous diplomatic coup: the 1972 visit to China.
Throughout the 1980s, and into the early 1990s, the New York real estate developer Donald Trump exchanged fan letters with disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon. In 1982, not quite eight years after Nixon’s resignation, Trump described him as “one of this country’s great men.”
Why was Trump such a fan? It might have had something to do with Nixon’s vengeful approach to politics, or their mutual closeness to McCarthyite prosecutor Roy Cohn. But the famously deal-seeking Trump was also an admirer of Nixon’s most famous diplomatic coup: the 1972 visit to China.
Today, the ghost of Nixon is haunting American foreign policy as well, thanks to the administration’s declared intention to strike a grand bargain with Russian President Vladimir Putin that would reorder global politics by sidelining the Europeans and leaving Kyiv in the cold.
Keith Kellogg, Trump’s Ukraine war envoy, revealed the underlying logic for such a move during a presentation at the Munich Security Conference. The Trump administration, he said, will try to “break” Putin’s alliances with China, Iran, and North Korea—apparently by offering Russia a deal better than anything it can get from them.
It’s an approach that strikingly mirrors Nixon’s masterstroke in 1972, when the president who had made his reputation as a diehard anti-communist stunned the world by becoming the first U.S. leader to travel to the People’s Republic of China. By meeting Mao Zedong, Nixon created a new diplomatic relationship that put the Soviet Union on the back foot—giving the United States leverage it used to push Moscow into negotiating a new strategic arms treaty. Now Trump is apparently contemplating a “reverse Nixon”—a dramatic rapprochement with Moscow that would leave Beijing out in the cold.
This doesn’t come as a complete surprise. Trump and his followers have often expressed their eagerness to engineer an end to the war, usually in terms that allow little input from the Ukrainians themselves. At the same time, MAGA loyalists—including Vice President J.D. Vance—have suggested that leaving Ukraine and the Europeans to fend for themselves would free up Washington to focus on countering China.
The anti-China camp inside Trumpism has not been doing well recently. Trump himself has recently made conciliatory sounds about Beijing, even touting his “very good relationship” with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and much U.S. government work targeting China has been frozen by Elon Musk’s government efficiency cuts, to Chinese nationalists’ delight.
Yet undermining China has been one of the consistent themes of MAGA foreign policy ever since Trump rode down that golden escalator in 2015. Cozying up to Putin, in Trump’s mind, might be just the way to box in the Chinese.
This logic is deeply flawed. Nixon’s visit took place at a time when Beijing and Moscow were already enemies, three years after a deadly exchange of fire over a disputed island on the Ussuri river had brought the two close to all-out war. Today, in contrast, Russia and China are closer allies than ever.
Russia is deeply dependent on China in just about every way that matters. China is the biggest customer for Russia’s coal and crude oil—a market that Putin would be ill-advised to jettison at a time when his economy is struggling. Western sanctions and the spiraling war costs have hit the Russian economy hard, driving up inflation, which in turn is fueling predictions of a devastating wave of corporate bankruptcies).The two countries share an often-contested border where they resolved long-standing disputes through a complex series of negotiations in the 1980s and 1990s; neither has any desire to relitigate the issue, or to have to use troops and money to refortify their frontiers.
Beijing has been giving the Russians vital military and technological support; by one estimate, China supplies roughly 90 percent of the computer chips currently used in Russian industry. Moscow and Beijing have developed overlapping interests in a variety of diplomatic and political realms, motivated by their deeply held desire to oppose the U.S. wherever they can. Russian and Chinese propagandists promote each other’s disinformation narratives across the world.
They agitate against the West using joint fora such as the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. They have been holding joint military exercises (with a notable emphasis on the Indo-Pacific region) and sharing military technologies. Along the way, China has also been tacitly and not-so-tacitly abetting the war in Ukraine. There’s a reason why Xi declared in 2022 that their countries’ partnership had “no limits.” If the U.S. were to persuade Putin to abandon this relationship, the price would have to be exceedingly high.
And why in the world should the United States pay it? Despite MAGA talk of American decline, the U.S. economy is thriving, and its military remains strong. Russia, by contrast, is shockingly weak. Over the past three years, Putin’s empire has struggled to subdue a foe that has less than a third of its population and merely a fraction of its natural resources.
The economy is in deep trouble. The ruble has lost more than half its value over the past decade; ordinary citizens are struggling to cope with runaway inflation. His central bank recently had to hike interest rates to an eye-watering 21 percent, prompting some experts to warn of a coming wave of corporate bankruptcies.
For most Russians, their country—sapped by corruption and backwardness—is little better than one of Trump’s proverbial “shitholes.” Sanctions have cut off Russians from foreign travel to many countries , international money transfers, and global credit cards. Russia’s GDP, despite its population of 144 million, is smaller than that of Texas or California; if Putin is the leader of a superpower, then so is President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, whose economy is now slightly larger than Russia’s.
Trump’s half-assed proposal to pressure the Kremlin by imposing tariffs vividly reveals his funhouse-mirror view of Moscow’s global significance. It’s been a long time since Russia has exported anything in significant quantities to the United States, so the effect of trade barriers would be virtually nil.
Meanwhile, U.S. allies from the United Kingdom to South Korea are unified in their desire to thwart Putin’s Ukrainian ambitions, since they know perfectly well that a Russian victory represents a massive threat to their own security. (The aggregate EU economy, by the way, is 10 times the size of Russia’s.) This constellation of forces makes this the perfect moment to pressure Russia into concessions at the negotiating table. Yet instead Trump is contemplating giving Putin a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Putin has made his own strategic priorities eminently clear. He wants to keep the territory he has illegally occupied in Ukraine; he wants to control the government in Kyiv; and he wants to keep Ukraine neutral (making its security de facto subject to Russian dictates). Putin recently refused to take part in direct talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he called “illegitimate.” (It’s worth noting that Zelensky was elected president in a competitive election, while Putin has retained power through a series of sham votes engineered by his own minions.) And, above all else, he wants to negotiate one-on-one with his American counterpart, serving his desperate need for status. The Biden administration stuck with admirable consistency to the slogan of “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” The current American president’s version so far sounds more like “Trump to Kyiv: Drop Dead.”
For the West to agree to such terms would be both scandalous and stupid. Rewarding the most blatant act of territorial aggression in Europe since World War II would strike a huge blow to the postwar rules-based order that has kept much of the world at peace for decades. It would establish a disastrous precedent—one that would signal to Beijing, above all, that there is no price to be paid for the armed conquest of weaker neighbors, such as Taiwan.
Until now, despite many shortcomings, the Europeans have done a surprisingly competent job of helping Kyiv militarily and financially. But a Trump-Putin deal, forged over the heads of the Europeans, would almost certainly mean the death of NATO—a massive gift to China, Iran, and other anti-Western tyrannies. There is reason to fear that Putin will make some sort of shallow concessions designed to give Trump a publicizable win.
Russian sources have said that they are aware of Trump’s desire for an achievement he can depict as a victory over China, and they are almost certain to provide him with one. Whatever that may be, there is little reason to think that Putin will see a need to scuttle his alliance with Xi. He simply needs it too much, regardless of what the Americans will give.
No one should be holding the fate of a European democracy hostage over the alleged benefits of a treaty with Putin’s wobbling empire. The Russian dictator has painted himself into a corner. Trump would be a fool to help him out of it.