Reversing Kissinger

The undiplomatic words that Donald Trump had for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week left some Washington, D.C., observers wondering how the Europeans saw the situation. After all, they wondered, if that’s how Trump treats a war-torn country fighting for its independence against Russian despot Vladimir Putin, what do Paris, London, and Rome, etc. think about U.S. security commitments?

Other foreign policy analysts recognize that Trump has many audiences outside the United States, including those in Moscow and Beijing. Many of these Trump watchers conjectured that the spectacle at the White House was meant to illustrate that Trump was willing to tilt against Ukraine in order to accommodate Putin. And the reason for that, they say, is to drive a wedge between Russia and China, what Trump sees as America’s No. 1 threat.

The Washington foreign policy establishment is calling what it presumes to be Trump’s Russia policy “reverse Kissinger.” That is, Trump is using the same tactic employed by Richard Nixon’s chief foreign policy aide Henry Kissinger when he encouraged his boss to open relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and thereby “play the China card” against the more powerful Soviet Union. And in February 1972, Nixon went to Beijing, forging the opening with China. Trump, some are arguing, is doing the same, except going the other way.

Indeed, Kissinger himself had prophesied the coming of the “reverse Kissinger,” for as he told Nixon only days before their fateful 1972 trip, a future American president “if he’s as wise as you, will wind up leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese.”

Kissinger reportedly suggested the idea to Trump in 2017 and the president told me for my forthcoming book on China that lots of people agreed it was a bad idea to let Russia and China get close. There were many in the administration who wanted to see if there was a way to work with Moscow to hobble Beijing, but there was no way to get around Russiagate.

The surveillance and propaganda operation managed by Barack Obama’s spy chiefs who alleged that the Trump circle had illicit ties to Russia consumed most of Trump’s first term, and made it impossible for him to engage with Putin on most meaningful issues. Thus, Russiagate was more than a Beltway scandal featuring U.S. spy services that tried to topple the government; it’s a still-unfolding national security disaster of the first order that limited the president’s ability to secure American peace and advance our prosperity.

Insofar as it kept Trump from testing the waters to see if he might split Russia from China, Russiagate was effectively a pro-CCP information operation benefiting a U.S. ruling class—including media, Big Tech, and corporate elites alongside the security services—whose wealth, power, and prestige are fruits of the opening with China. Many of those now disdainful of Trump’s initiative are deeply invested in his failure since weakening China weakens them. Naturally they’re going to say that Trump can’t pull it off—because, for among other reasons, Trump isn’t as smart as America’s most famous statesman. However, a more critical look at the opening shows that Kissinger and his boss bungled it badly.

Trump’s critics are right that there’s nothing now analogous to the fault line underlying the 1972 opening—there’s no obvious breathing space between Moscow and Beijing like the Sino-Soviet split that drove the two communist juggernauts apart starting with the 1953 death of Josef Stalin. But Kissinger fans give him far too much credit for seizing that opportunity, when the plain fact is that he misplayed the gift that fell into his lap.

Early in Nixon’s term, Soviet diplomats asked their American counterparts how Washington would react to a Soviet nuclear attack on China—in fact, would the U.S. care to join them? The White House was horrified and leaked Moscow’s plans to deter the attack. Mao later told Kissinger he thought it was strange the Americans saw no advantage in letting their two communist rivals tear each other to pieces. Clearly that’s how Mao would have played it, because that’s how the PRC saw the opening: They were playing the American card against the Russians.

When the Chinese came running to the Americans for help, Washington by definition held the stronger position. But it was the White House that played the supplicant. For instance, during his secret July 1971 trip to Beijing to prepare for Nixon’s visit, Kissinger gifted Beijing with precious intelligence on Soviet troop movements in exchange for … agreeing to host the leader of the free world in the run-down capital of a dirt-poor third-world hellhole peopled by, at the time, nearly 900 million peasants. It would only get worse for the U.S. side, despite the great photo ops Nixon earned with his historic trip.

As the late Angelo Codevilla explained in a 2015 essay, “The Courage of His Contradictions,” Kissinger’s chief concern throughout his career as a diplomat, and then high-level consultant, was to promote an international order—in Kissinger’s view, a harmonized convergence of competing world powers designed to foster stability. His model was the Concert of Europe, the early-19th-century arrangement between various powers that kept the peace on the continent after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo. But Kissinger misrepresented the nature of Europe’s concert system—the purpose was not to build an international order where every state agreed to pursue their interests in moderation; rather it was to ratify, as Codevilla wrote, “what the governments that defeated Napoleon had secured militarily.” No one wanted to fight again, at that particular moment, so they made peace, which lasted only briefly.

Accordingly, Kissinger wasn’t leveraging China against the USSR, he was trying to draw Beijing into an international order along the lines of his quasi-mystical conception of the concert system. And crucially, Kissinger’s idea of an international order based on cooperation and comity was an early advertisement for what we now call globalism. Kissinger is its intellectual father, the theorist and apologist for the very order that the “America First” president opposes and seeks to undo. Accordingly, it’s more accurate to think of Trump’s overall strategy not as Reverse Kissinger but rather as reversing Kissinger.

The typical understanding of the opening is that the move was a geopolitical masterstroke, but the U.S.-China relationship later went sour as the PRC began to cheat and failed to meet its obligations in international fora, like the World Trade Organization. Yes, obviously Beijing can’t be trusted—it’s a totalitarian police state that’s been governed by a communist party since 1949. Why Kissinger and Nixon sought friendship with a regime then engaged in another of its serial purges that cost millions of lives, the Cultural Revolution, is more evidence the opening was a mistake from the outset. For Americans then, the blame must rest entirely with the side elected to represent our interests—the U.S. political class, starting with Nixon and Kissinger.

With the end of WWII, the U.S. was primus inter pares in the Atlantic and Pacific because it won the war. But by trying to induce deadly rivals to join it in a multilateral system, the United States was offering to neuter itself. And that’s exactly what happened when Nixon met Mao.

For instance, the president hoped to get Mao’s help withdrawing from Vietnam and was prepared to be flexible on Taiwan in the exchange. The Chinese countered by informing the Americans that they’d continue to help killing their children and constituents in Southeast Asia if they didn’t withdraw immediately, and then they pocketed Nixon’s virtual abandonment of Taiwan. The opening was structured to weaken the U.S. position in favor of China, and everything pursuant to it followed that logic.

With his reputation as the Marco Polo of globalism firmly established through his public sector work, Kissinger’s job in the private sector was to help get U.S. companies into the enormous Chinese market with nearly a billion potential consumers. According to Kissinger—and the dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of Kissinger clones that came after—it was to be the heyday of U.S.-China trade. Except the Americans knew that dating back 200 years there had never really been a Chinese market for U.S. goods, except for opium. In fact, what the big U.S. corporate bosses really wanted was to replace American workers with China’s huge pool of cheap labor by offshoring manufacturing. And thus began the purposeful impoverishment of the U.S. middle class, what Trump calls American carnage.

This is what Trump is trying to undo with his protectionist policies, like his now 20% tariff on Chinese goods. Making America great again requires protecting American workers and our industrial base—our national security and national character depend on it. Thus, his strategic goal is to reverse the devastation of the heartland that began with Kissinger. And it seems he believes that trying to pull Putin away from Xi Jinping is a useful tactic in that larger effort. Who knows if he’ll succeed, but the fact is that unlike Kissinger, Trump isn’t playing for a tie. He intends to win.