The spurning of Volodymyr Zelensky by Trump and Vance in the Oval Office last week was painful to watch. A courageous wartime leader, fighting against a dictatorial, nuclear-armed aggressor, found himself being ridiculed and shouted down by his supposed allies. Even for Donald Trump, a man with a preternatural ability to offend, this was grotesque. But was it all part of a grand plan?
There have been many explanations for the blowup, from Zelensky’s refusal to play the role of supplicant, to Trump’s outrage that Zelensky wore military-style fatigues in front of the television cameras, to the evergreen conspiracy theory that Trump is being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin. But some seasoned foreign-policy watchers believed that it was proof that the “Reverse-Nixon” was in full effect.
Although it sounds like a particularly unwholesome sexual position, the term describes a diplomatic gambit advocated by China hawks. If Nixon’s 1972 trip to China put the Soviet Union—a longtime Chinese ally—on the back foot, then a Reverse-Nixon is an attempt to thaw relations with Moscow in order to isolate Beijing.
Admittedly, for one to believe that Trump could be engaged in such realpolitik one has to believe that he was acting strategically and toward a long-term goal rather than instinctively and for his own immediate benefit—his usual modus operandi. This is a big ask. But there are numerous clues pointing in the former direction.
There’s no doubt that the dressing-down of Zelensky was a love letter to Russia, proof that the United States’ newfound devotion to its longtime enemy was genuine. What could thrill the Kremlin more than the public humiliation of this stubbornly defiant leader?
“The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office,” Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president, posted on X. Not to be outdone, Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, chimed in with this on Telegram: “How Trump and Vance exercised restraint and didn’t punch this scumbag is a miracle of restraint.”
When Trump paused military aid to Ukraine, on Monday, one could almost see the hearts in the Kremlin’s eyes as its spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, declared, “The new [U.S.] administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely coincides with our vision.”
This shared vision, in which Ukraine is shunned and Russia embraced, can be found spelled out in Trump’s de facto agenda, Project 2025, which has proved to be a more accurate guide to his second term than most people dared imagine. In a section titled “Pivoting Abroad,” China is described as a “tyrannical country” whose designs are “serious and dangerous” and whose “aggressive behavior can only be curbed through external pressure.”
The Russian threat is not mentioned until a few pages later, after the dangers posed to the United States by Venezuela and just before those of North Korea. Support for Ukraine is dismissed as not being in “the national security interest of America at all.” In the whole of Project 2025, Russia is mentioned 108 times. China is mentioned 483 times.
Trump’s interest in the Reverse-Nixon dates back to 2016, when it was reportedly proposed to him by none other than Henry Kissinger, the architect of Nixon’s original trip to China. In a series of private meetings during the presidential transition, Kissinger is said to have suggested that Trump should work with Russia to contain a rising China. (Unusually, Trump seems to have genuine respect for Kissinger, not so much for his role influencing foreign policy for more than half a century but because they attended many of the same parties. As Trump said of Kissinger in 2017, “We have been really in, I guess you’d say, the New York scene a little bit.”)
If it’s too hard to believe that Trump could keep such a plan in his wildly vacillating mind for nearly 10 years—or if you think that he comes by his love for Putin honestly, as a would-be authoritarian himself—then look to J. D. Vance, who seems to have seized the reins of foreign policy from Secretary of State (and notable Russia hawk) Marco Rubio.
Last July, Vance declared, “I’m much more interested in some of the problems in East Asia right now than I am in Europe.” His infamous speech to European leaders last month, in which he praised the Continent’s Kremlin-backed far-right parties and chided its liberal ones, is all of a piece with the Reverse-Nixon. Indeed, Keith Kellogg, Trump’s Ukraine war envoy, openly admitted, during a presentation at the Munich Security Conference in February, that the United States wanted to “break” Putin’s alliance with China.
The Reverse-Nixon thesis was further strengthened by this week’s congressional hearing on the nomination of Elbridge “Bridge” Colby as undersecretary of defense for policy, a role that is generally seen as the Pentagon’s “grand strategist.” A 45-year-old policy professional, and the grandson of C.I.A. director William Colby, he is the author of the influential 2021 book The Strategy of Denial, which argues that America’s defense strategy must change in light of China’s growing power. Vance is a big fan: “Bridge has consistently been correct about the big foreign policy debates of the last 20 years,” he wrote on X. Vance even appeared at the hearing to introduce Colby—whom he called his “friend”—a rare step for a sitting vice president to take.
In an interview with the New Statesman last year, Colby articulated what might be the Trump Doctrine: “Asia’s more important than Europe, China is more formidable than Russia, and the other European states are much stronger relative to Russia than the Asian ones are relative to China. Today, it’s clear as a bell that we should be focusing on Asia.”
Everything Colby advocated in that interview—Europe should defend itself, China must be confronted “with a strong shield of disincentive”—is now official policy. The war in Ukraine has, in a flash, gone from being an epochal battle for democratic values and a rules-based international order to being a sacrificial pawn in the Great Game between the U.S. and China.
There’s only one problem: many analysts think the Reverse-Nixon is impossible. Since Western nations imposed sanctions on Russia in 2014, following its invasion of Crimea, China and Russia have found common cause attacking Western-style democracies, aiding in each other’s disinformation campaigns, backing each other diplomatically at the United Nations, taking part in joint military maneuvers, and openly fighting against American hegemony. That relationship was only deepened with Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when China became a huge buyer of Russian oil and gas and almost single-handedly helped fund the Russian war effort.
What’s more, Xi and Putin are personally very close, having met more than 40 times. In 2022, Xi declared that their countries’ partnership had “no limits.” Last summer, Putin described Russia and China as “brothers forever,” and on February 24 of this year, Xi called Putin and declared the two countries “true friends who have been through thick and thin together,” while declaring that relations between the two countries would not be “affected by any third party”—a clear reference to the U.S. Trump may have written a love letter to Putin, but Xi is already at third base.
The original Nixon’s visit to China succeeded in part because it took place at a low ebb in China’s relations with the Soviet Union. Today, China and Russia appear to be much closer. “It’s just a complete misreading of history,” says Seth Jones, president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington. “The conditions that were present [during Nixon’s presidency] just don’t exist right now.” Similarly, a report by the Council on Foreign Relations published in December of last year announced, “Hopes of driving wedges between the two are equally unrealistic.... Their real differences with each other pale in comparison with those they have with the United States.”
Nevertheless, proponents of the Reverse-Nixon say that the relationship between Russia and China is asymmetrical, and Russia is champing at the bit to assert itself more. They hope that the United States’ wooing of Russia is enough to sow some small doubt in China’s mind. After all, how comfortable could you really feel in a long-term relationship with Vladimir Putin, especially if he no longer needed you quite as much as he used to? But a more likely result, said the former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev last month, is that “the Americans will be strung along with talk about a potential reassessment of Moscow’s relationship with Beijing.”
And this is where the danger lies. The Reverse-Nixon may end up rewarding the most blatant act of territorial aggression in Europe since World War II, while leaving the United States with nothing to show for it. Indeed, the worst-case scenario is that the United States, having repulsed its closest European allies and discarded its traditional values in a vain attempt to split Russia from China, becomes indistinguishable from its worst enemies.
George Pendle is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL. His book Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons became a television series for CBS All Access. He is also the author of Death: A Life and Happy Failure, among other books
