Poor U.S. Relations with China and Russia Is a Bad Idea

Although Donald Trump, as president, made Richard Nixon look like a Boy Scout, Nixon’s corruption overshadowed his foreign policy, which was sophisticated and effective. It was from the realist school.

Realism assumes that countries with different ideologies and internal political systems have the same goal internationally—to accumulate power and influence. This assumption allowed Nixon to open U.S. relations with the isolated communist China to use as a lever to achieve détente and nuclear arms control with the Soviet Union. In other words, Nixon accepted that the United States could be ideologically opposed to communism but could achieve peaceful relations with the feuding communist powers by reducing the U.S. threat to them, thus driving a further wedge between them.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent security agreement with North Korea may not have pleased Chinese leader Xi Jinping, but both of those leaders have pledged a friendship “without limits,” which is directed against the United States.

Nixon must be rolling in his grave. How did the United States stumble into having poor relations with the two other great powers simultaneously? And, how can the next U.S. administration, whether led by Joe Biden or Trump, extricate itself from this dangerous position?

During Nixon’s presidency and after, the United States took the realist approach of achieving a better power balance by favoring the weaker China against the stronger Soviet Union, which was a larger threat to the United States.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. establishing formal diplomatic relations with China in 1979, the United States began intelligence sharing, military exchanges, and exports of weapons and military-applicable dual-use technology to China. However, with the Chinese military suppression of democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall that year, ending the Cold War and leading to the evaporation of the more severe Soviet threat, the United States had the luxury to end strategic cooperation with China.

In addition, rapid Chinese GDP growth, resulting from the government’s decontrol of the Chinese economy, led the United States to be concerned about China’s geopolitical rise, especially its global investment and more assertive policy toward neighboring countries in East Asia (resembling U.S. behavior in the Western Hemisphere using the Monroe Doctrine).

In Europe, instead of converting NATO into a talk shop and admitting Russia, Bill Clinton expanded the alliance into Eastern Europe, and subsequent presidents enlarged it right up to Russia’s borders. President George W. Bush even pushed for the admission of Georgia and Ukraine, a strategic country for Russia right on its border. Although Russia’s military incursions into eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014 and its brutal full-blown invasion in 2022 are unacceptable, the United States has never accepted any responsibility for contributing to their antecedent conditions.

U.S. policy did so by excluding a post-Cold War Russia from NATO and then expanding the hostile alliance up to the borders of a country that has been invaded many times by the West—the last time by the Nazis, which led to between 25 million and 30 million deaths and the total destruction of western Russia. Such initial alliance expansion, which rubbed Russia’s nose in its Cold War defeat, may have even contributed to the rise of the autocratic Vladimir Putin at the turn of the millennium.

The Chinese believe, with some validity, that the United States is trying to encircle and contain China’s legitimate rise as a great power by enhancing existing security alliances and creating new ones (for example, AUKUS between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States and JAROKUS, the trilateral security pact between Japan, South Korea, and the United States). Also, the United States has beefed up its military presence in East Asia.

If one puts oneself in Russia’s and China’s shoes, which U.S. policymakers and the public rarely do, one would see that the United States has a significant military presence in Europe and East Asia near these nations, whereas these countries have little to no military presence in the Western Hemisphere.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its continuing brutal war there, it is improbable that the United States and Russia currently would undertake a rapprochement. However, after the 2024 election and a new administration is inaugurated in the United States, U.S. policymakers could ease tensions with China to allow that country to naturally rise as a great power—similar to Britain’s peaceful ending of a century of hostility toward the United States as it rose at the turn of the 20th century.

This U.S.–China thaw would try to drive a diplomatic wedge between China and Russia, making the ghost of Richard Nixon proud. Yet, come January 2025, unfortunately, the current anti-Chinese campaign hyperbole by the Biden and Trump campaigns will make this enlightened policy shift unlikely.