Alexander Gabuev
“The one thing you never want to happen is you never want Russia and China uniting. I’m going to have to un-unite them, and I think I can do that,” Donald Trump boasted in an interview with the political commentator Tucker Carlson in October. On the campaign trail, the president-elect said repeatedly that he would stop the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours” and that he would be much tougher on China than President Joe Biden has been.
Trump has never articulated exactly what his plan to “un-unite” these two countries is, and based on his record, he might simply devise one on the fly. But early indications suggest that the coming administration might seek to damage the Chinese-Russian partnership by reducing tensions (and even improving ties) with Moscow in order to put pressure on Beijing—something like the reverse of what Secretary of State Henry Kissinger orchestrated more than 50 years ago, when the United States pursued détente with China to exploit the Sino-Soviet split.
This school of thought seems to be popular with many people in the Trump universe, including those who have been nominated to his national security team. Michael Waltz, for example, a member of Congress whom Trump has tapped to serve as his national security adviser, advocated in The Economist for the United States to help wind down the war in Ukraine as soon as possible and then divert resources to “countering the greater threat from the Chinese Communist Party.”
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