A ‘Reverse Kissinger’ would be a fool’s errand for Trump

OPINION:

You probably know what a reverse mortgage is because you’ve seen Tom Selleck selling them on television commercials, and you may recall what a reverse half-nelson is from high school gym class.

But do you know what a “Reverse Kissinger” is?

I ask because there’s reason to believe that some of President Trump’s advisers are telling him that a Reverse Kissinger should be his approach to Russian ruler Vladimir Putin.

I’m telling you that would be a fool’s errand. Stick with me for a few paragraphs, and I think you’ll agree.

In the early 1970s, President Nixon, guided by Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser and secretary of state, opened diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Their goal was to drive a wedge between that young and economically weak communist regime and the older and more powerful Soviet Union, thereby giving the U.S. an advantage in the Cold War.

A Reverse Kissinger implies that Mr. Trump would attempt to do the opposite: Draw Moscow away from Beijing and closer to Washington.

But the Nixonian/Kissingerian detente with Mao Zedong, then chairman of the Communist Party of China, was possible thanks to the preexisting Sino-Soviet split, a souring of relations between the two Marxist/Leninist states based on ideological and strategic differences. Today, there’s no Sino-Russian split to exploit.

On the contrary, just days before Mr. Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, he concluded a “no-limits” strategic partnership with Xi Jinping, who is the president of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

Next, ask yourself what Mr. Trump needs to offer Mr. Putin to induce him to move closer to Washington and from Beijing.

We know what Mr. Putin wants: the restoration of the Russian/Soviet empire. Toward that end, he seeks to subsume Ukraine, turning it into a colony like Chechnya or a vassal state like Belarus.

It’s possible he would accept what he would disingenuously spin as a compromise: his occupation of a wide swath encompassing eastern and southern Ukraine, which he would call Novorossiya (New Russia). That would leave Ukraine landlocked and vulnerable. It also would give Russia a border with Moldova. More on that in a moment.

For Mr. Trump to facilitate such a conquest of a pro-American democracy by the military forces of a dictator would be not peacemaking but appeasement. It would stain his legacy hugely and indelibly.

Of course, Mr. Xi is already assisting Mr. Putin by buying Russian oil, the only standing pillar of the Russian economy, and providing technological support for Russia’s military and defense-industrial base.

Also worth noting: During a press conference last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alleged that more than 150 Chinese nationals have been fighting in Ukraine on behalf of Russia. A day earlier, Ukrainian forces announced that they had captured two of those Chinese fighters in the Luhansk region.

Mr. Xi may not have deployed these soldiers, but there’s no indication that their participation in Russia’s brutal and illegal war troubles him.

Meanwhile, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has sent thousands of his troops to help Mr. Putin kill Ukrainians. It’s unlikely that Mr. Kim would have made that decision without at least tacit approval from Mr. Xi.

A question that Mr. Xi is doubtless pondering: If Moscow can destroy a sovereign nation — a U.N. member, a nation whose independence and territorial integrity was guaranteed in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, a document signed by Russia, the U.S. and Britain — how plausible is it that the U.S. will sacrifice treasure and/or blood to prevent Beijing from conquering Taiwan, an island that Nixon in 1972 called, incorrectly and unfortunately, I’d argue, “a part of China?”

Finally, if you think conquering Ukraine would sate rather than whet Mr. Putin’s geopolitical appetite, think again.

Moldova would be low-hanging fruit. Next in line might be NATO members such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all of which have significant Russian minorities, the result of Soviet settler colonialism.

If the U.S. failed to defend those states, NATO would collapse.

The demise of other American alliances would follow. Many nations would respond to the unreliability of American security guarantees by cutting deals with Beijing.

History would record that, under Mr. Trump, the U.S. relinquished its role as leader of the free world and ceded global predominance to the most powerful communist regime that has ever arisen. Some historians would put it this way: Mr. Trump lost Cold War 2.0.

At that point, Mr. Putin, even if he had moved closer to Mr. Trump in exchange for approbation of his imperialist aggression, would surely return to the anti-American bloc led by Mr. Xi.

Today, that bloc includes Mr. Kim and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamist regime in Tehran.

Cozying up to this axis of aggressors are the member states of multilateral organizations such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which include Russia, China and Iran but exclude the U.S.

One more factor making a Reverse Kissinger a rickety bridge too far: Aleksander Dugin, a Russian political philosopher who is often called “Putin’s brain,” regards Russia, ruled by Mongols for 240 years, as more Asian than European.

He argues that Russia’s mission, in tandem with other anti-Western powers, is to diminish the global preeminence — “greatness” would be a synonym — of the United States.

What can Mr. Trump offer to compete with that vision? A Reverse Kissinger is unlikely to be achieved by offering the hard man in the Kremlin the prospect of beach resorts on the Black Sea.

• Clifford D. May is the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Policy” podcast.