Nixon–Mao, Trump–Putin, and Triangular Diplomacy – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

In the early 1970s, China was supplying significant military, financial, and logistical assistance to North Vietnam in its war against the United States. China was helping North Vietnamese troops kill American soldiers. Domestically, China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s chaotic, bloody purge that killed more than two million people in revolutionary episodes of “unfathomable brutality.” Yet, President Richard Nixon was determined to improve relations with China while simultaneously pursuing détente with the Soviet Union in what scholars have called “triangular diplomacy.” President Donald Trump is doing a “reverse Nixon manoeuvre,” writes the renowned strategic thinker Edward Luttwak, in his geopolitical embrace of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Luttwak has been a consultant to the Pentagon and the Israeli Army, and is the author of Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union, and The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy. He understands global politics more than most contemporary commentators and does not suffer fools gladly. Trump’s “refusal to subordinate everything to Ukraine’s needs and ambitions,” Luttwak writes, means that “it is China and not Russia that is the White House’s main concern these days.” (RELATED: Is US Support for Ukraine Over?)
That was evident in Trump’s first term, Luttwak explains, when he strengthened technology export controls against China — a policy that even the Biden administration continued. Josh Rogin has written about the rise of the China hawks in the last two years of Trump’s first term, and it was Defense official Elbridge Colby who largely authored the 2018 National Defense Strategy that shifted the nation’s national security focus from peripheral wars to great power rivalries. Trump has nominated Colby to serve as under secretary of defense for policy in his second administration. Co…