Triangulation strategy / Tertius gaudens - >>> Trump wants US to ‘partner’ with Russia to weaken China: Divide-and-conquer strategy
The US government’s talks with Russia are more about China than Ukraine. Donald Trump admitted he wants to “un-unite” Russia and China, in a reverse of the divide-and-conquer strategy used by Nixon and Kissinger in the 1970s.
Geopolitical Economy
by Ben Norton
2025-02-24
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/02/24/trump-divide-russia-china-us-strategy/
The Donald Trump administration is holding talks between the United States and Russia, and he says he wants to end the war in Ukraine.
Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has even proposed that the US could “partner with the Russians, geopolitically”.
What is happening here? The simple answer is that this is all about China.
Trump is trying to divide Russia from China, in an attempt to isolate Beijing.
The United States sees China as the number one threat to its global dominance. This has been stated clearly by top officials in both the Trump administration and the previous Joe Biden administration.
Rubio dubbed China “the single greatest challenge this nation has ever faced”. Trump’s CIA Director John Ratcliffe asserted that “China was far and away our top national security threat”.
Trump’s plan to split Russia and China
Trump made this strategy clear in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the right-wing talk show host, on October 31, 2024.
Trump said it was a “shame” and it was “stupid” that the US had pushed China and Russia together.
“I’m going to have to un-unite them, and I think I can do that, too. I have to un-unite them”, Trump stated.
The following is a partial transcript of his remarks (emphasis added):
We are a nation in decline. We are a nation in very serious decline. And look at what these stupid people have done. They’ve allowed Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and others to get together in a group. This is impossible to think.
When I was a young guy, I loved, I always loved the whole thing, the concept of the history, and all of the things that can happen. The one thing — and I had a professor at the Wharton School of Finance, but we had history classes also.
He said the one thing you never want to happen is you never want Russia and China uniting. We united them, because of the oil. We united them. Biden united them. It’s a shame, the stupidity of what they have done.
I’m going to have to un-unite them, and I think I can do that, too. I have to un-unite them.
But early on I’ve read, and you’ve learned, you never want Russia and China — and they’re natural enemies, because Russia has massive land, and China needs it.
They’re a natural enemy. And we’ve allowed them become, to get together. It’s such a dangerous thing.
Another thing that we’re doing is we’re losing the dollar as the standard, because of these people that are so — if we lose the dollar as the standard, that’s like losing a war. And it’ll never happen with me. There’s no way that will happen with me.
Trump threatens BRICS
What is noteworthy is how Trump immediately linked the close partnership between China and Russia to the issue of de-dollarization, the international drive to create alternatives to the US dollar as the global reserve currency.
China is Russia’s largest trading partner, and the two countries have almost entirely removed the US dollar from their bilateral trade. Instead, they now use their domestic currencies, the renminbi and ruble, in more than 90% of settlements.
Fears of de-dollarization have led Trump to threaten 100% tariffs on BRICS countries and other nations that drop the dollar in international trade and foreign exchange reserves.
“I hate when countries go off the dollar. I would not allow countries to go off the dollar”, Trump declared during his presidential campaign in 2024.
Since returning as US president, Trump has given himself credit for supposedly killing BRICS. “BRICS is dead”, he claimed in a press conference at the White House on February 13.
In reality, BRICS has continued expanding, admitting in early 2025 new countries with large populations, like Indonesia and Nigeria. The Global South-led organization now represents roughly 55% of the world population and 42% of global GDP (PPP).
Nevertheless, Trump has continued to threaten them. “If they want to play games with the dollar, they’re going to be hit with a 100% tariff”, he warned.
Trump’s reverse Nixon/Kissinger strategy
Trump’s attempt to divide Russia and China, to try to save US imperial dominance, is far from secret. It has been debated openly in the Western media, with Foreign Affairs magazine cautioning that “Beijing and Moscow’s partnership will be hard to break”.
The Wall Street Journal stated clearly that “Washington’s embrace of Putin aims to drive wedge between Moscow and Beijing”.
The Western press has dubbed this strategy a “reverse Nixon”, referring to former US President Richard Nixon.
Nixon and Trump have many similarities. Both were hard-line right-wing Republicans who used “populist” rhetoric. Both also sought to exploit divisions between Russia and China — albeit in opposite directions.
Although he was a virulent anti-communist, Nixon took a historic trip to Beijing in 1972 in order to normalize relations with the People’s Republic of China.
Washington saw the Sino-Soviet split, which happened in the 1960s, as an opportunity to advance its imperial power by exacerbating the tensions between China and the USSR.
This ended up being an important factor in the decline of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and its eventual overthrow in 1991.
Trump’s strategy has also been referred to as a “reverse Kissinger”, because Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was the architect of the tactic, known as “triangular diplomacy”.
Kissinger took a secret trip to Beijing in 1971, in an attempt to further divide China and the USSR.
Decades later, Kissinger thought the United States should return to this “triangulation” strategy to weaken China.
In fact, Kissinger had advised Trump during his first administration that he should try to improve relations with Russia to isolate China, the Daily Beast reported in 2018.
Ironically, it was the Russiagate conspiracy theory pushed by the Democratic Party that prevented Trump from pursuing this Kissingerian strategy during his term term. Democrats’ baseless, nonsensical claims that Trump was a “puppet of Putin” distracted from his more insidious new cold war strategy, aimed at kneecapping China.
In his second term, however, Trump has fully embraced this strategy.
Marco Rubio wants USA “to partner with the Russians, geopolitically”
In both his first and second term, Trump has surrounded himself with neoconservatives and war hawks.
In his first administration, Trump’s foreign policy was overseen by neocons John Bolton, as national security advisor; and Mike Pompeo, first as CIA director and later as secretary of state.
In his second administration, Trump’s foreign policy is overseen by neocons Marco Rubio, as secretary of state; Mike Waltz, as national security advisor; and Pete Hegseth, a self-declared “crusader” serving as defense secretary.
Trump’s neoconservative foreign policy team: Marco Rubio (left), Mike Waltz (middle), Pete Hegseth (right)
All of these these figures are extreme China hawks who have pushed for aggressive policies against Beijing.
They also agree with Trump’s strategy to try to woo Moscow.
This is why, when Trump sent Rubio to Saudi Arabia in February to participate in talks with his Russian counterparts, he proposed that the United States could “partner with the Russians, geopolitically”.
The US secretary of state said:
[We are] beginning to engage in identifying the extraordinary opportunities that exist, should this conflict come to an acceptable end, the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians, geopolitically, on issues of common interest, and frankly economically, on issues that hopefully will be good for the world, and will also improve our relations in the long term between these two important countries.
In fact, in a Senate hearing in 2024, Rubio argued that the US should help bring an end to the war in Ukraine, not because hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives, but rather because it was helping China, he complained.
“The Chinese see great benefit in Ukraine”, Rubio said, “because they view it as, the more time and money we spend there, the less time, and money, and focus we have on them”.
Rubio’s argument was essentially that the US empire should end the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine so it could instead focus on preparing for war against China.
Western far right wants to ally with Russia against China
Although Rubio’s proposal to “partner” with Russia surprised some observers, this strategy has been proposed for years by members of the far-right “MAGA” movement in the Republican Party.
Many MAGA Republicans are influenced by racist white nationalist ideas and see China not only as a threat to US imperial dominance, but also as an Asiatic, atheist, communist threat to capitalism and white, “Judeo-Christian Western civilization”.
On the other hand, many conservatives in the US and Europe see Russia as a potential ally, given that it is capitalist, white, and predominately Christian.
Far-right politicians in Europe have argued the same. France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen called the China-Russia partnership “the largest danger of the 21st century for us”.
She insisted that the West shares “common civilizational and strategic interests” with Russia and should break to break its close relations with socialist China.
Le Pen stated:
Imagine … if we let the first producer of raw materials in the world — which is Russia — [create an alliance] with the first factory of the world — which is China — to let them perhaps constitute the first military power of the world. I believe that it’s potentially a great danger.
It will be necessary diplomatically, when the war [in Ukraine] is over, when a peace treaty has been signed, to try to avoid this tie-up which risks being the largest danger of the 21st century for us.
Fox News and other conservative US media outlets have pushed this same message for a decade.
This is one of the favorite refrains of Tucker Carlson, the far-right talk show host and close Trump ally who previously hosted a program on Fox News, which was the most popular politics TV show in the United States.
Carlson repeatedly argued that “the biggest threat to this country is not Vladimir Putin. That’s ludicrous. The biggest threat, obviously, is China”.
In multiple programs, Carlson asserted, “Russia is not America’s main enemy. Obviously, no sane person thinks it is. Our main enemy, of course, is China, and the United States ought to be in a relationship with Russia, aligned against China, to the extent that we can”.
Carlson complained that a China-Russia partnership would end “American global hegemony”.
Although he portrays himself as a “populist”, Carlson previously applied to join the CIA. His goal is to preserve US imperial dominance.
On his Fox News program, Carlson stated:
If Russia ever joined forces with China, American global hegemony, its power, would end instantly. You’d have the world’s largest land mass and largest natural gas reserves, allied with the world’s largest population and world’s largest economy.
So a Russia-China axis would be not just more powerful than the United States, but much more powerful. It would have the scale to control a lot of the world’s economy, and trade routes, and raw materials. It could project military force that, posturing aside, we actually don’t have the power to stop.
If Russia and China ever got together, it would be a brand new world, and the United States would be greatly diminished. Most Americans agree that would be bad.
In fact, when he still hosted his show on Fox, Carlson regularly invited on Rubio to fearmonger about China.
The following is a partial transcript of a segment featuring the then Florida senator, who now serves as secretary of state:
MARCO RUBIO: They are also undermining our technological base through something called Made in China 2025, where they intend not just to supplant America, but all countries on Earth, and the West, in automobiles, and passenger aircraft, and quantum computing, and artificial intelligence.
They’ve laid out the entire industries, and they’re slowly but surely carrying out this plan.
TUCKER CARLSON: So this is a threat, obviously, not simply to our economy, but to our predominance around the world, to our power, and to our values.
Rubio calls China the “single greatest challenge” ever faced by the US empire
Rubio has for years pushed for an extremely aggressive US policy against China.
In a Senate hearing in 2024, Rubio complained that China is trying to change the “rules of the world” that “were written by America and our allies”:
The Chinese, they believe we’re in inevitable decline, and that their rise is inevitable as well. Like I said, they don’t like the rules of the world as they believe were written by America and our allies, and so they increasingly are taking it upon themselves at every opportunity to challenge them.
In a separate Senate hearing in 2022, Rubio warned that China could replace the United States as the most powerful country on Earth:
We often talk about China’s plans and intentions behind closed doors. But the fact of the matter is that their ultimate goal, and what they’re trying to do, is really not that big a secret.
They seek to displace the United States and to become the world’s most dominant economic, industrial, technical, and military, and geopolitical power. That’s their goal.
In the 2022 hearing, Rubio referred to China as “the single greatest challenge this nation has ever faced”, and he claimed that the People’s Republic is much more of a threat than the Soviet Union ever was:
The intelligence community, I think at this point, leaders on both sides of the aisle, have been pretty clear that this is the single greatest challenge this nation has ever faced.
We have never faced a near-peer adversary that poses such a comprehensive challenge, that way that China does today.
The Soviet Union was a military and a geopolitical rival; they were never an industrial, and technical, or commercial rival. China is all of that and more.
CIA says China is “the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century”
Nevertheless, it is not just neoconservative Republicans like Marco Rubio who see China as the main threat to US global dominance.
This view has become bipartisan in Washington.
In 2021, the CIA launched a “China Mission Center”, which is the only mission center at the notorious coup-plotting US spy agency that is specifically focused on one country.
That year, the CIA announced on its official website that it considered China to be the top “threat” to the United States.
CIA Director William Burns “explained that the new mission center will bring a whole-of-Agency response and unify the exceptional work CIA is already doing against this key rival”, wrote the infamous US spy agency, which has meddled in the internal affairs of countless countries and assassinated foreign heads of state.
Burns fearmongered about “the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”.
Trump’s pick for CIA director, John Ratcliffe, praised Burns’ work at the agency and made similar comments in his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2025.
Ratcliffe stated (emphasis added):
Much more has to be done. Because our adversaries, and one in particular that I will discuss now, understand that the nation who wins the race of emerging technologies of today will dominate the world of tomorrow.
Which brings me to the need for the CIA to continue, and increase in intensity, the focus on the threats posed by China and its ruling Chinese Communist Party.
As DNI [director of national intelligence], I dramatically increased the intelligence community’s resources devoted to China.
I openly warned the American people that, from my unique vantage point as an official who saw more intelligence than anyone else, I assess that China was far and away our top national security threat.
President Trump has been an incredible leader on this issue, and it is encouraging that a bipartisan consensus has emerged in recent years.
The recent creation of the CIA’s China Mission Center is an example of the good work that must continue.
US State Department warns China is top “threat” to US global imperial dominance
In both the Biden and Trump administration, the State Department made similar warnings, fearing that China could challenge US imperial dominance.
In a speech in May 2022, Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned:
Even as President Putin’s war continues, we will remain focused on the most serious long-term challenge to the international order – and that’s posed by the People’s Republic of China.
China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.
The message was essentially identical during Trump’s first term.
Trump’s CIA director turned secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, delivered a similar speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California in July 2020.
Using very aggressive, cold war-style rhetoric, Pompeo essentially called for overthrowing the Chinese government and the Communist Party of China. He stated:
We, the freedom-loving nations of the world, must induce China to change, just as President Nixon wanted. We must induce China to change in more creative and assertive ways, because Beijing’s actions threaten our people and our prosperity.
We must start by changing how our people and our partners perceive the Chinese Communist Party. We have to tell the truth. We can’t treat this incarnation of China as a normal country, just like any other.
And if we don’t act now, ultimately the CCP will erode our freedoms and subvert the rules-based order that our societies have worked so hard to build. If we bend the knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party, whose actions are the primary challenge today in the free world.
General Secretary Xi is not destined to tyrannize inside and outside of China forever, unless we allow it.
Many of these hawkish views are shared by NATO.
NATO’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg praised the first Trump administration for its extreme anti-China policies.
“You shifted your policy on China in 2017 under President Trump, and since then, NATO has gone a long way in helping European allies fully appreciate the challenges posed by China and respond to it”, Stoltenberg said at the right-wing US think tank the Heritage Foundation in Washington in 2024.
Trump admin invokes China to try to justify US colonialist policies
All of this explains why Donald Trump has turned China into his favorite bogeyman, constantly invoking the country to try to justify his colonialist policies.
During his inauguration speech in January 2025, Trump declared that the United States is going to take over the Panama Canal, in a blatant act of colonialism.
“China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China; we gave it to Panama. And we’re taking it back”, Trump claimed.
It is not true that China is operating the Panama Canal. This is utterly false.
Nonetheless, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has used the same rhetoric.
In January, Rubio spoke with the conservative talk show host Megyn Kelly, in his first official interview as US secretary of state.
In this hour-long discussion, Rubio mentioned the words “China” or “Chinese” 65 times.
“China wants to be the most powerful country in the world and they want to do so at our expense, and that’s not in our national interest, and we’re going to address it”, he lamented.
When asked why the Trump administration wants to control the Panama Canal, Rubio echoed Trump, falsely arguing that China is controlling it.
The way that Trump and Marco Rubio see the world is that the US empire has a sphere of influence, and they want to reassert US imperial control over the Western Hemisphere, and especially Latin America.
That is why they are threatening Greenland, Panama, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, and more. This is also why Trump allies are constantly invoking the colonialist Monroe Doctrine.
US Vice President JD Vance targets China
When it comes to Europe, the Trump administration’s view is basically that Ukraine is not in the US imperial sphere of influence, and that Europe has to deal with Russia on its own terms.
This was the message that US Vice President JD Vance conveyed in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025.
Vance pressured Europe to reduce its relations with China. He portrayed Beijing as a so-called “authoritarian master that seeks to infiltrate, dig in and seize your information infrastructure”.
Instead of using resources in Europe, the Trump administration wants to focus the attention of the US empire on China.
Like Trump, Vance exploits “populist” rhetoric, but both seek to expand US imperial power, and are willing to promote aggressive interventionist policies.
To understand Vance’s worldview, CNN interviewed Alexander Gray, who served as chief of staff of the National Security Council in Trump’s first term.
Gray is a neoconservative Republican who continues to defend Trump. He supports Trump’s attempts to colonize Greenland and the Panama Canal.
CNN reported (emphasis added):
Gray said that Vance’s foreign policy worldview stems from his military service in Iraq and what he sees as the failures of American entanglements abroad. But he also noted that Vance supports an aggressive approach toward China and does not just want the US to retreat from the world stage altogether.
“That worldview is about making hard choices with limited resources and devoting our resources to what is an existential threat with China,” Gray said. “He’s not for abdicating US global leadership; he’s not for stepping back from the US being a muscular power on the world stage.”
Brzezinski warned of an “anti-hegemonic coalition” of China, Russia, and Iran
Washington’s fears of an alliance between China and Russia go back decades.
The influential US imperial strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, a fervent anti-communist cold warrior who served as national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, published a book in 1997 called The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.
In this work, Brzezinski discussed tactics that the US empire could use to try to maintain its global unipolar dominance. He also warned of potential challenges to US hegemony.
“The most dangerous scenario” for the US empire, Brzezinski wrote, “would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances”.
The relevant passage from Brzezinski’s book follows (emphasis added):
Finally, some possible contingencies involving future political alignments should also be briefly noted, subject to fuller discussion in pertinent chapters. In the past, international affairs were largely dominated by contests among individual states for regional domination. Henceforth, the United States may have to determine how to cope with regional coalitions that seek to push America out of Eurasia, thereby threatening America’s status as a global power. However, whether any such coalitions do or do not arise to challenge American primacy will in fact depend to a very large degree on how effectively the United States responds to the major dilemmas identified here.
Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an “antihegemonic” coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances. It would be reminiscent in scale and scope of the challenge once posed by the Sino-Soviet bloc, though this time China would likely be the leader and Russia the follower. Averting this contingency, however remote it may be, will require a display of U.S. geostrategic skill on the western, eastern, and southern perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously.
This is exactly what has happened in the past few decades. The aggressive policies of the US empire, including wars, sanctions, and regime-change operations, have pushed Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran together.
China, Russia, and Iran are members of BRICS, the Global South-led organization that continues to grow every year.
BRICS now represents roughly 55% of the world population and 42% of global GDP, measured at purchasing power parity.
This is why Trump has repeatedly threatened to destroy BRICS, and vowed to impose 100% tariffs on members of the group.
It is not just BRICS, however. China, Russia, and Iran are also members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which seeks to maintain security and stability in Eurasia.
China: 10 times Russia’s population, 5.5 times its economy, 17 times its manufacturing output
China has not fought in a war since 1979 and has a strict non-interventionist foreign policy. Nonetheless, US imperial strategists fear Beijing, because it is significantly more powerful than Russia, and even than the former Soviet Union was at its peak.
To start, China has 1.4 billion people, which is roughly 10 times the size of Russia’s population, of around 140 million.
China also has the world’s largest economy. When you measure China’s GDP at purchasing power parity, it overtook the United States in 2016, according to IMF data.
As of the end of 2024, China represents a bit over 19% of the world economy, compared to just under 15% for the United States.
Russia is a major economy, but it is only about 3.5% of world GDP. That means that China’s economy is roughly 5.5 times larger than Russia’s.
Russia’s economy is similar in size to the economies of Indonesia or Brazil, which are very important countries with large populations. But China is at a whole different level.
GDP PPP share world IMF Russia China US 2025
Russia has enormous reserves of natural resources, and is one of the world’s top producers of oil, natural gas, critical minerals, grains, and fertilizer. It is also a major military power, with advanced weapons technologies.
When it comes to manufacturing output, however, there is no comparison. China is by far the world’s leading manufacturing power.
China represented 31% of global manufacturing value added in 2022, according to UN data.
The US made up 16%, compared to just 1.8% for Russia.
Russia’s manufacturing output was a bit lower than Mexico’s, and slightly larger than that of Italy and France.
When it comes to technology, China is the world leader.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a hawkish anti-China think tank that is backed by Australia’s military and funded by the Australian government, US State Department, UK Foreign Office, and European Parliament, has frequently fearmongered about China’s rapid technological progress.
In a 2024 report, ASPI lamented that “China has strengthened its global research lead”, and is ahead of the rest of the world in 57 of 64 critical technologies, representing 89% of the total.
China made an enormous leap forward from 20 years before, when it led in only three technologies.
The ASPI report complained that scholars in China now publish more articles in research journals than those of any other country, and engineers and scientists in China apply for more patents than any other nation by far.
China is the only country with large technological firms that can challenge US Big Tech monopolies in Silicon Valley.
This is why the US government has sought to sabotage and ban Chinese technology companies, such as Huawei, TikTok (owned by Chinese firm ByteDance), and DeepSeek, the transformative AI company.
Most fundamentally of all, US officials see China as a threat because it poses a systemic challenge to US-led capitalism.
China has a socialist system, led by a communist party, and it has made enormous progress in recent decades, lifting approximately 800 million people out of poverty. This represented nearly three-quarters of global extreme poverty reduction, according to the World Bank.
China’s GDP (PPP) increased by 75 times from 1984 to 2024, based on IMF data. In the same time period, US GDP rose by seven times.
Meanwhile, it is clear to the world that China continues to grow at a steady rate, whereas the United States faces serious decline, with extreme inequality, severe homelessness, soaring poverty, widespread addiction, mounting debts, and increasing economic and political instability.
This is why Trump complained, “We are a nation in very serious decline”.
Trump hopes that by trying to divide Russia and China, he can weaken Beijing, reverse US decline, and save the US empire.
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