It was Henry Kissinger’s coup in the early 1970s to thaw up Chinese-American relations to pivot against Russia, and 45 years later over the better part of the Trump presidency, he has been advocating to reverse engineer that pivot, ie put Russian-American relations on a new footing to pivot against the rapidly rising Middle Kingdom. As a special envoy, Kissinger even at his advanced age has been travelling to Beijing as well as Moscow forming a strategy to further America’s standing in the world.
It feels like Donald Trump got the message and its rationale, and whatever else his reasons were to try to warm up to the Kremlin, he has implicitly heeded Kissinger’s advice. The problem is that the Deep State would not grant him a free hand to implement such a shift in Washington’s geopolitical direction. On the contrary, Trump may instinctively not have given up on a break-through with Putin, but for now, he is playing ball at home and supporting military initiatives such as Space Force and ever more new sanctions.
At the same time, Trump is continuing his war on two fronts and escalating the trade conflict with China. While there is a geo-strategic logic to such move, the Deep State as much as Trump need to understand that there are inherently more risks taking on China on a solely bilateral basis and absent any simultaneous US-involvement with the other superpower in that triangle formation. Worse, within a month of the Helsinki summit, Russian-American relations are in free-fall once again.
On the very contrary, as Washington has slapped sanctions after sanctions on Moscow, and as it finally transpires that there will be no improvements to be had as long as Trump is president, Moscow and Beijing are literally being forced into each others’ hands to tango and further deepen their unexpected cooperation. It is still a new experience for both parties, and the jury is obviously still out on where this will be heading. Mainstream opinion’s money is on mere geopolitical signalling for the time being.
However, there is an increasingly growing sentiment that the Russian-Chinese rapprochement isn’t a fluke. Now that Trump repeatedly had to slam the door on Putin, the embrace of Beijing and Moscow has become as much about an antipathy towards an American-dominated global order as their rapidly growing common interests. The concept of a common enemy does help in such circumstances. Continuous attempts by Washington to spoil the party and drive wedges between the two have been in vain.
The evidence speaks for itself. From today, the powerful Politburo member and senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi will be on a 3-day visit to Moscow and lead the Chinese delegation into the next round of what is called consultations on strategic security and stability. As has been reported in the South China Morning Post, Yang will be received by Vladimir Putin himself, something that is usually not announced this early and is clearly a testament of the importance the Kremlin puts on these consultations with Beijing.
As an important component of this week’s talks, it is widely speculated that the issue of Arctic sea routes will be raised. This alone gives us a sense how advanced the cooperation efforts have grown. It could marry Moscow’s strategy along its Arctic coast with the ambitions Beijing has with regards to its BRI and might well become a game changer how the Chinese ecosystem can expand and combine land and sea connections to Europe and the rest of the world.
Whatever mainstream thinks, my take is it’s fair to say that this train has left the station. It has certainly not reached maximum speed yet, but it will be running on all cylinders very soon. You can’t put this in any different terms… what America is producing here is nothing but a geopolitical blunder and a danger to the global security structure that has served the world well for decades and, let’s not forget, to itself and its standing as the sole superpower. Kissinger must have tears in his eyes.
