Vijay Prashad and John Ross discuss the momentous shift in the US’s geopolitical orientation that Trump is attempting to achieve – a reverse in direction of the shift led by Kissinger and Nixon in the 1970s.
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By Wang Wen
The following article by Wang Wen was originally published in Australia and then republished in 13 languages including Chinese, Arabic, English, Indonesian, Japanese, Malay, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. Wang Wen is Executive Dean of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, Executive Director of the China-US Humanities Exchange Research Center, and an influential writer on foreign affairs in China. It therefore represents an important analysis of the new Trump presidency from a Chinese perspective.
Donald Trump’s second term may not be all bad for all nations, including and especially China. For many Chinese internet users, Trump’s policies have unwittingly strengthened their country. This is why he has earned the popular nickname “Chuan Jianguo,” which means “Make China Great.”
Trump’s first term made at least three notable contributions to China’s rise.
First his presidency shattered the image of the US as a paragon of democracy for many Chinese, revealing political chaos and deep societal divisions. For decades some Chinese idealised the United States as a “beautiful country”: the literal translation of the Chinese name for the US. However, Trump’s actions provided what some describe as a “political lesson,” reshaping perceptions and fostering greater appreciation for China’s stability and governance.
Second, Trump helped accelerate China’s push toward technological independence. Over 20 years ago, the Chinese government began promoting innovation in science and technology, though many believed there were no borders in this field.
It wasn’t until events like the 2018 arrest of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou and the crackdown on Chinese tech firms that the country fully committed to innovation. By 2024, China had achieved significant strides in tech independence, including breakthroughs in semiconductor manufacturing. This shift was underscored by record-high chip exports in 2024, which surpassed $159 billion, doubling 2018 figures.
Third, Trump’s tariffs and trade restrictions pushed China to strengthen its ties with the non-Western world. Through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative, China deepened its relationships with Global South nations. Between 2018 and 2024, trade with these nations grew by over 40 percent, while China’s reliance on the US for trade fell from 17 to 11 percent.
Trump’s trade war with China has driven a rapid restructuring of global trade, leading more Chinese to recognise that the world is far larger than the United States.
Looking back, the combined experience of Trump’s first term and Biden’s policies to contain China over eight years has strengthened the country in the medium term.
From a long-term perspective, China has gained a strategic psychological advantage in dealing with Trump 2.0.
China’s media and think tanks have responded to the possibility of Trump’s return with relative calm compared to the growing anxiety in Europe and Canada. Beijing seems confident, having already weathered trade wars and technological blockades during Trump’s first term.
China won’t actively provoke Trump 2.0, but if aggressive US policies like trade wars or technology restrictions persist, China will respond with calculated countermeasures ‒ and ultimately, become even stronger.
On January 7, 2025, both China and the US experienced natural disasters. A 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck Dingri county in Tibet, while a major wildfire broke out in Los Angeles.
In Tibet, Chinese authorities swiftly transitioned from emergency response to recovery, relocating 50,000 residents within a day. Meanwhile, the wildfire in Los Angeles raged for over 10 days, worsened by political infighting and mismanagement. This stark contrast highlights the differences in governance and crisis management between the two nations.
China’s rapid response to the earthquake, efficiently moving from rescue to resettlement, stands in sharp contrast to the prolonged crisis in Los Angeles, where political leaders traded blame while the fire caused damage surpassing the 9/11 attacks. These contrasting responses underscore the weaknesses in US crisis management and governance.
While much of the non-Western world remains relatively at ease, Trump-style neo-fascism is provoking panic across the Atlantic, particularly in Europe and Canada. Questions now surface at the highest levels of international diplomacy: Will Denmark lose Greenland? Will NATO lose US military support? Will Canada become the 51st state? These once-crazy notions are now openly discussed.
For many in China, the global impact of Trump 2.0 is unlikely to surpass that of Trump 1.0.
In fact, in 2025, many in non-Western countries believe Trump 2.0 will focus mainly on domestic affairs while occasionally stirring up trouble among Western allies. Non-Western observers know full well that Trump 2.0 will not end the Russia-Ukraine conflict in one day. He will not resolve the Palestinian-Israeli dispute anytime soon. He will not prevent China’s long-term trade growth with 60 percent tariffs. He will not, and cannot, curb China’s continued rise.
Trump 2.0 will likely continue withdrawing from international agreements, including climate accords and the WTO. The result? The gradual disintegration of US global hegemony. If this trend continues, Trump 2.0 could push the US into regional power status, embracing isolationism.
Regardless of the scope of Trump’s impact ‒ whether through trade wars, technological conflicts, or treaty withdrawals ‒ China is well-prepared for the worst. As it has done in the past, China has the ability to turn challenges into opportunities.
By 2028 the Chinese will be more confident than ever in saying: “Thank you Trump.”
US President Donald Trump called Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and told him that his government is committed to a peace process in Ukraine. As part of the deal, Trump’s administration made it clear that sections of eastern Ukraine and the Crimea would remain in Russian hands. Speaking at the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Trump’s Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said that it was ‘unrealistic’ to assume that Ukraine would return to its pre-2014 borders, which means that Crimea would not be part of any negotiations with Russia. NATO membership for Ukraine, he said, was not going to be possible as far as the United States was concerned. The United States, Hegseth told NATO, was not ‘primarily focused’ on European security, but on putting its own national interests first and foremost. The best that the European leaders at NATO could do was to demand that Ukraine have a seat at the talks, but there was very little said against the US pressure that Russia be given concessions to come to the table. Ukraine and Europe can have their say, Hegseth said, but Trump would set the agenda. ‘What he decides to allow and not allow is at the purview of the leader of the free world, of President Trump’, Hegseth said with characteristic midwestern swagger. The cowboys, he said with his body language, are back in charge.
While Hegseth was in Brussels, Trump was in Washington, DC with his close ally Elon Musk. Both are on a rampage to cut government spending. Over the past five decades, the US government has already shrunk, particularly when it comes to social welfare provision. What remains are areas that have been jealously guarded by the large corporations, such as the arms industry. It had always seemed as if this industry was inviolate and that cuts in military spending in the United States would be impossible to sustain. But the arms industry can rest easy (except Lockheed Martin, which might lose its subsidy for the F-35 fighter jet); Musk and his team are not going to cut military contracts but go after the military and civilian employees. During his confirmation hearing, Hegseth told the Senators that during World War II the United States had seven four-star generals and now it has forty-four of them. ‘There is an inverse relationship between the size of staffs and victory on the battlefield. We do not need more bureaucracy at the top. We need more war fighters empowered at the bottom’. He said that the ‘fat can be cut, so [the US military] can go toward lethality’.
There is a fundamental misreading of these moves by the Trump administration. They are sometimes seen as the idiosyncratic flailing of a far-right president who is committed to putting ‘America First’ and so is unwilling to pursue expensive wars that are not in its interest. But this is a short-sighted and erroneous assessment of Trump’s phone call with Putin on Ukraine and approach to the US military. Rather than see this as an isolationist manoeuvre, it is important to understand that Trump is attempting to pursue a Reverse Kissinger Strategy, namely, to befriend Russia to isolate China.
Trump understands that Russia is not an existential threat to the United States. The US government does not fear Russian energy sales to Europe, since these primary commodity sales do not pretend to undermine the overall US control of the global economy. However, China’s rapid development of technology and science as well as of the new productive forces genuinely poses a threat to US domination of the key sectors of the global economy. It is the US perceived ‘threat’ from China that motivates Trump’s approach to alliances and enemies.
Kissinger’s strategy: Befriend China to Isolate Russia.
Henry Kissinger (1923-2023) was one of the most influential US foreign policy bureaucrats. During the presidency of Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1974, Kissinger essentially ran the foreign policy of the United States. Both Nixon and Kissinger closely followed the dispute between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). When Nixon became president, the USSR-PRC border dispute around Zhenbao Island almost escalated with a potential Soviet nuclear strike against Beijing. Kissinger had recognised that this dispute was of great value to the United States since it prevented the two large Eurasian countries from building an essential union against the Atlantic alliance encapsulated by NATO. If Russia and China had come together, Kissinger wrote, then they would be able to undermine the foundation of Western power in the world. To prevent that alliance was essential and to use the Sino-Soviet dispute to build a deep wedge between the two countries was the essence of Kissinger’s policy. Rapprochement with China also allowed the US to attempt to close the logistical supply line for the Vietnamese national liberation forces in their war against US aggression.
It was for that reason that Kissinger began secret talks through Pakistan with the Chinese government in 1970, made a secret trip to Beijing in 1971, and thereby opened the door for Nixon to visit China the following year. In his secret verbal report to the White House staff after his visit to China, Kissinger made the following important comment: ‘The Chinese were extremely serious people. They don’t wish us well. We have no illusions on that score. But in terms of our overall situation, with Soviet pressure and with the situation in Southeast Asia, it is in our interest to bring the Chinese in’. Nixon’s epochal visit to China was entirely driven by US interests to divide Russia and China so that the US could establish its power around the Asian continent.
Long after the USSR collapsed, Kissinger continued to make the case that the United States should befriend China, isolate Russia, and subordinate Europe to continue its long-term dominion. That is the underlying argument in Kissinger’s 600-page epic, On China (2011).
Trump’s Reversal: Befriend Russia to Isolate China.
With the fall of the USSR, the United States establishment developed a strategy to befriend both Russia and China, but more Russia. It was thought amongst the foreign policy elite that Russia’s subordination to the United States – under Boris Yeltsin’s presidency from 1991 to 1999 – was total and that the Russians would become a minor player on the Eurasian continent. Russia’s entry into the G7 in 1998 was the pinnacle of that subservience. The return of Christianity in public in Russia as well as the promotion of Russia’s Europe-facing culture suggested that Russia had embraced its Western heritage and moved away from either sovereignty or from Asia, and therefore China. In 1993, US President Bill Clinton phoned Yeltsin and said, ‘I want you to know that we’re in this with you for the long haul’.
A far-right wing section of the US establishment identified two elements in the late 2000s. First, that Chinese technological development of their productive forces seriously threatened the intellectual property domination by US firms. Second, that Russia’s new nationalism had been premised both on sovereignty (identified by the emergence of Putin’s patriotic parties) and on white supremacy and Russian Orthodoxy (such as anchored by the theories of Alexandr Dugin). There is an entire bloc in the US far right that sees in Russian patriotic nationalism its own ideology, and it sees in Chinese Communism its adversary.
Even in his first term, Trump sought to befriend Russia to isolate China and subordinate Europe. This reversal of Kissinger’s strategy is not progressive, but similarly reactionary and dangerous. The unifying goal is to ensure the supremacy of the United States with the same strategy of division with the actors reversed. Trump was then accused of being a beneficiary of Russian interference.
What the United States is now doing is to attempt to break the relation established between China and Russia since 2007, when Putin made his official break from the United States at the Munich Security Conference. Good cooperation between China and Russia has moved swiftly and the two countries have a security agreement underneath the transfer of goods and services in roubles and renminbi. Breaking up this relation will not be easy but it is now the strategy Trump has decided to attempt to carry out.
It is worth remembering Kissinger’s assessment of the Chinese leadership in 1971: ‘Their interest is 100 percent political…..Remember, these are men of ideological purity. Chou En-lai joined the Communist Party in France in 1920, long before there was a Chinese Communist Party. This generation didn’t fight for 50 years and go on the Long March for trade’. This view captures not only Zhou En-lai and Mao Zedong, but also Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. They too have been steeled in a struggle against the United States over the course of the past decade. It is unlikely that a few baubles will attract Putin to adopt Trump’s reverse Kissinger strategy.
The New Cold War is rapidly heating up, with severe consequences for people around the world. Our series, Briefings, provides the key facts on these matters of global concern.
From the beginning of the Ukraine war in 2022, countries in the Global South – which contains the overwhelming majority of the world’s population – have opposed US policy towards that conflict. A recent survey found that only two Global South countries have actually implemented US sanctions against Russia over the war, and India increased its oil imports from Russia tenfold during the war’s first year. Global South leaders, such as South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, stated that the US policy of expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Eastern Europe lay behind the war.
But, until recently, support for the war seemed firm in the US and among its European allies. This is now changing significantly. Media speculation has focused on Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that he could end the war within 24 hours, but much more substantial is evidence of a sharp change in popular attitudes to the war. This provides the basis for hopes to permanently end the war.
The Necessity to Restore Economic Links Across Europe
The first pressure changing the situation is economic. On 1 January 2025, for example, a five-year gas transit agreement between Russia and Ukraine expired, ceasing Russian gas exports to Europe via Ukraine entirely and ensuring that the Ukrainian government will shut the pipelines across its territory. The US’s gradual success in achieving its decades-long objective of cutting the direct export of Russian gas to Europe has reduced the living standard of Europe’s population due to soaring energy prices and has simultaneously dealt a huge blow to Europe’s economy. Price shocks from the war spread out to affect many developing economies as well.
US liquid gas exports, on which Europe is now reliant, are on average 30–40% more expensive than Russian gas. Moreover, this Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is mostly sourced via the devastating fracking method and transported to Europe in an equally ecologically unfriendly way, on huge LNG carrier tankers.
The tremendous economic damage done to Europe has now created increasing opposition to the war, not least among the working class and households at large. More and more people have come to understand that they pay twice for the war in Ukraine: their taxes underwrite the enormous war and militarisation efforts, and at the same time they bear the brunt of the concomitant rising energy prices and imposed austerity measures.
In Germany, the leadership of Christian Democratic, Conservative, Social Democratic, and other ‘centrist’ parties implemented such US-enforced policies, thereby deeply damaging their own economies and societies. This sort of complicity has defined the approach in most European countries until recently and has continued despite the immense unpopularity it created for their own parties. The overwhelming majority of governing parties in Europe are now deeply unpopular, and there has been a sharp rise of xenophobic and overtly neofascist/fascist forces. In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, there is a sharp rise of support for parties opposing the war. Lately, an increasing number of politicians have openly stated that it is vital for Europe’s economy to break with this disastrous US policy and resume direct supply of gas from Russia, as well as to reinstate normal trade and investment relations with the Global South and BRICS countries, particularly China. Former Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine summarised this sentiment by saying there should simply be a phone call to Russia to restore the gas supply.
NATO Cannot Win the War in Ukraine
The second factor changing public opinion is that the US and NATO are suffering setbacks in the Ukraine war.
NATO’s expansion into Ukraine is, of course, not the only example of US-supported aggression in the present world situation. Notably, in Gaza, Israel and the US are able to carry out unbridled military massacres, atrocities, and genocidal policies against the Palestinian people and other countries in the region. In Europe, however, the US and its allies are confronting Russia, which has the most powerful army on the continent and nuclear forces essentially equal to those of the US. The latter appears incapable of winning this proxy war; only direct intervention by NATO military forces, risking global nuclear war, would turn this around.
The dragging on of the Ukraine war, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of victims –including thousands of children – and widespread devastation, has led to a sharp change in public opinion. In Ukraine, polls now show that 52% of the population supports the position that ‘Ukraine should seek to negotiate an ending to the war as soon as possible’. Only 38% support the view that ‘Ukraine should continue fighting until it wins the war’.
In Romania’s first-round presidential elections in November, after Diana Șoșoacă, a candidate opposed to the war, was banned from the election, Călin Georgescu, who also opposes the war, came in first place. Romanian authorities, with US support, responded by cancelling the election.
In December 2024, a YouGov survey of Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Denmark showed a sharp increase in support for a negotiated settlement. In four of these countries – Germany, France, Spain, and Italy – the position to ‘encourage a negotiated end to fighting, even if Russia still has control of some parts of Ukraine’ had more support than the view to ‘support Ukraine until Russia withdraws, even if this means the war lasts longer’.
In the US, only 23% of the population thought ‘supporting Ukraine’ should be a US foreign policy priority.
The Situation in Ukraine
Re-establishing normal, mutually beneficial economic ties across Europe is necessary for the region’s economy but is only a first step in bringing an end to the disastrous Ukraine war that US imperialism has imposed on Europe.
NATO’s expansion effort is interrelated with the situation within Ukraine, which has a very large Russian-speaking minority (around 30% of the population) that is a majority in the East and Southeast of the state. Experiences in countries such as Canada and Belgium confirm that bilingual states can only be held together by strict guarantees of linguistic and other rights of the different communities and avoiding policies which are totally unacceptable to either.
Nonetheless, from the 2014 Maidan coup onwards, the Kyiv government, supported by the US, has set out to suppress the rights of the Russian-speaking minority. As the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, which cannot at all be accused of being pro-Russian, stated, ‘the current Law on National Minorities is far from providing adequate guarantees for the protection of minorities… many other provisions which restrict the use of minority languages have already been in force since 16 July 2019’.
Both the attempt to oppress the Russian-speaking population and the question of NATO membership for Ukraine are two issues that must be resolved in order to bring a permanent end to the war.
The Conditions for an End to the War in Ukraine
Europe should undertake honest, serious efforts to bring the Ukraine war to an end. Building on public opinion that is longing for peace and progress and on a peace movement with a strong working-class component, European social and political forces must promote the following steps to end the war in Ukraine:
It will take a significant period for Europe, and the world, to recover from the disastrous effects of US policy in the region. Permanently halting the war in Ukraine is an indispensable first step.