Sur-realism: The Sheer Folly of the ‘Reverse Nixon Manoeuvre’ – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

I regret to inform the reader that the realists are at it again, and this time, they seem to have outdone themselves. No, this isn’t about annexing Canada, or invading Greenland, or trading Taiwan for mining rights in Antarctica — not quite yet, at any rate. We are, however, being advised to launch a massive peace campaign aimed at “disengaging,” “detaching,” or “peeling” Russia away from China, which represents just about as outlandish a geopolitical gambit as any of the above. (RELATED: A Letter to a Young Realist)

The idea of effectuating a Sino–Russian split has been around for a while now, but it has been given new life by the strategist and historian Edward Luttwak, who has made this scheme something of a cause célèbre. In a March 4, 2025, think-piece in UnHerd, Luttwak proposed that a “reverse Nixon manoeuvre” could achieve the goal of prising Russia from China’s clutches. “Instead of courting China to oppose the USSR, as Kissinger and Nixon did in 1972,” Luttwak suggests, “Trump wants to detach Moscow from Beijing.” The time is apparently ripe to drive a wedge between the Kremlin and Beijing. Russia’s power relative to China is declining precipitously, its vast Siberian territories are vulnerable to Chinese incursions, and China nurses a niggling historical grievance over the fact that Russian Vladivostok used to be the Chinese settlement of Yongmingcheng, the “City of Eternal Light” during the Yuan dynasty. Dangle a sufficiently juicy carrot in front of Putin’s eyes, the theory goes, and Russia will turn away from China and throw itself into a passionate embrace with its new American partner.

This notion of a Reverse Nixon Manoeuvre should strike you as quite ambitious, if not utterly preposterous. Now, it does come at a time when we are adopting a fairly novel approach to the use of carrot and stick in foreign policy, with the stick being employed against, for example, our Ukrainian allies, at times almost literally — see our recent deprivation of military aid and intelligence sharing, described by envoy Keith Kellogg as being “sort of like hitting a mule with a two-by-four across the nose.” If we are then employing the carrot vis-à-vis the Kremlin, in the form of sanctions relief or other measures, surely it must be for some grand strategic purpose, like bringing about a Sino–Russian split. But what if that grand strategy is just absolutely bonkers? (RELATED: Ukraine: A Defiant People)

As Luttwak and other like-minded realists know very well, the historical and geopolitical circumstances of the Sino–Soviet split, so deftly exploited by the Nixon administration, were rather specific and have basically no relation to the present day. There were mounting doctrinal differences between the two leading communist states, the Cultural Revolution had disrupted diplomatic relations between Beijing and Moscow (the Soviet embassy was placed under siege by Red Guards at one point), the Great Leap Forward had failed miserably, Mao was seething at the Soviet Union’s growing ties with India at the very moment a Sino–Indian border dispute was raging, and small-scale warfare between the USSR and China had actually broken out along the Sino-Soviet border, with clashes taking place in Xinjiang and Manchuria. Compare all of that mayhem to what we are witnessing today, when the Russian Federation and China have never been closer, diplomatically or economically. Splitting a rock is a great deal easier when a natural seam presents itself. Splitting a seamless rock with no real tools at hand will soon prove a futile misadventure.

Since the beginning of the Russo–Ukrainian War, economic ties between China and Russia have been steadily strengthening, as the former’s gravitational pull grows and the latter’s pariah status necessitates further reliance on its top import and export partner. Russia desperately needs Chinese dual-use technology for its heavily-sanctioned military industrial complex, but non-military joint action is even more widespread and includes energy cooperation, Belt and Road transportation routes, alternative global navigation satellite systems, and terrestrial communication cables. It cannot be denied that the Russian and Chinese economies are, for better or worse, perfectly complementary. China has an insatiable need for energy and mineral resources, which Russia has in spades — a match made in geopolitical heaven, or somewhere lower down, depending on one’s views. Luttwak tells us that, from a demographic perspective, the “Chinese increasingly outnumber Russians along that immensely long and scarcely patrolled border,” something which should “alarm Moscow,” but it hardly follows that Russia, almost totally dependent on its closest trading partner and ally, would make an accounting of its parlous, but immensely profitable, geopolitical position and then seek succor from the United States of all countries.

We’re always talking about “cards” these days — who has them, who doesn’t have them — so it is worth considering precisely what cards the United States has to bring about this putative Reverse Nixon Manoeuvre, which would prise Putin from Beijing, as Luttwak and other realists advocate. We can provide a modicum of sanctions relief, but that alone isn’t enough to bring about such a vast rapprochement, recalibration, and realignment. Since Russia is essentially an outdoor insane asylum and gas station, maybe we could purchase some of their oil and natural gas, not that we lack for that in our own hemisphere. And it does seem far more straightforward for Russia to direct its fossil fuel exports to nearby China, given that Russia’s Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corporation have signed a 30-year gas sales and purchase agreement, and the China-Russia eastern route gas pipeline is set to reach its designated transportation capacity this very year, and more pipelines are on the way. For Russia, its geographical proximity to China is not primarily a source of alarm but of massive and consistent revenue. How the United States is meant to interpose itself between these two increasingly intertwined trading partners is anyone’s guess, although realists are supposed to take those sorts of things into consideration, I should have thought.

And since we’re all obsessed with rare earth minerals these days, perhaps we could purchase some of Russia’s reserves of 15 different rare earth minerals, thought to amount to some 28.7 million tons, even as we plan to extract the mineral wealth of Ukraine under the proposed (at the time of writing) Ukraine mineral “deal.” One does wonder what we are supposed to do with those minerals once we acquire them. Pile them up in a warehouse and swim around in them like Scrooge McDuck? China has a near-monopoly on global rare earth element refining capacity, something which has up until now suited the rest of the world, content as we have been to let China deal with the (literal) fallout from all the radioactive sludge produced during that process, which fills up tailing ponds with toxic waste, poisons rivers, groundwater, and soil, and creates the notorious “cancer villages” that pockmark the Chinese countryside. I appreciate that the current administration has issued an executive order on rare earth minerals, proposing to “build metals refining facilities on Pentagon bases,” and best of luck with that, really, but in the meantime it is a fairly safe bet that China will remain the primary destination for Russia’s rare earth mineral wealth for decades to come.

How about military or diplomatic, as opposed to economic, cooperation? Ignore, for a moment, Russia’s well-earned pariah status and its genocidal campaigns of conquest and destruction carried out against its neighbors. Realists, who positively revel in their own amorality, are naturally above such “moralizing garbage,” and if you are concerned about Russian revanchism, you probably have some kind of “dual loyalty” or are fueled by an “ethnic rivalry,” or so we’ve been told. Notwithstanding all of that, some conviction seems to have arisen that Putin’s regime represents a potential American partner for securing international peace and stability. Again, unfortunately for Russia’s ardent, besotted, occasionally even slavering realist suitors, I am afraid the Kremlin is spoken for. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have affirmed that the “Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation,” and that includes the military arena.

China and Russia have for years now been holding regular bilateral military exercises, including naval simulations and even live-fire drills in the Baltic. As I write this, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian warships have just finished drilling together in the Gulf of Oman, and those same three countries are now issuing joint demands for an end to Washington’s “illegal, unilateral sanctions” against Iran. If we did find ourselves in bizarro world and actually managed to pull off the old Reverse Nixon Manoeuvre, are we supposed to be the ones conducting naval drills with Russian and Iranian naval vessels in the Indian Ocean? And cooperating with Moscow to end (our own) sanctions against poor, mistreated Iran? However unlikely Russo–American security cooperation may seem, making any headway in the diplomatic sphere is equally unlikely, with the Kremlin and the Zhongnanhai carefully coordinating their policies through BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and seeking to implement a New Development Bank and Contingent Reserve Arrangement to bypass American- and Western-dominated financial institutions.

At the end of the day, Russia is critically dependent on its Chinese ally, and there is nothing the realists, no matter how realistic they think their eccentric theories are, can do about it. It isn’t 1972; times have changed, and any pseudo-Nixonian disengagement trick along the lines being discussed is destined to fail. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will tell you this himself. “Americans know,” he recently said, “that we would not betray our commitments, legal commitments, but also political commitments which we develop with the Chinese.” Maybe not every American knows, if there are people still advancing this as a possibility, but the fact remains that there will be no Reverse Nixon Manoeuvre. It’s pure fantasy, borne ironically enough from the depths of the realists’ overwrought collective imagination, with little or no bearing on reality, and I would like to think that there are those in the White House and Foggy Bottom who recognize this folly for what it is.

Vladislav Inozemtsev, the co-founder of the Center for Analysis and Strategies in Europe and a brave critic of the Putin regime, has persuasively argued that “Russia today poses a greater threat to the world order than China,” and that its “pivot to the east” is making it “increasingly aggressive and decisive.” His suggestion is that

a more realistic approach, aligned with current realities, calls not for “detaching” Russia from China and reintegrating it into the collective West — of which it was a part for centuries — but rather for “isolating” Russia with China’s help and global efforts to compel it to peace. In other words, it suggests recreating a bipolar world, with Washington and Beijing as its future centers, capable of maintaining order by influencing their satellites and junior partners.

I am not so convinced of China’s good faith, as it grows increasingly assertive in the South China Sea and starts unveiling its new special purpose barges, quite clearly tailor-made for an amphibious assault against a certain nearby self-ruled democratic island state. I would suggest that it is possible to restrain Russian, and even Chinese, international ambitions by doubling down on our partnerships with our great many traditional allies in the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific, countries which are fundamentally ideologically and economically aligned with us and still represent roughly half of global GDP — the so-called “Golden Billion” that the neo-Eurasianist Kremlin, with its deep-seated horror of the “Atlanticist New World Order,” is always ranting and raving about.

That seems like a workable approach, but we are clearly trying something very different, engaged as we are in a volatile ongoing experiment in import substitution industrialization/autarchy/Juche that has given us a tariff profile similar to economic powerhouses like Senegal, Tanzania, or Fiji, while we seek out trade wars with our closest allies, and systematically antagonize even pro-American stalwarts like Poland and Japan. And then, at this of all historical junctures, we start talking about disengaging Russia from China with a charm offensive. The Underpants Gnomes are evidently trying their hand at foreign policy — Phase One: Russian Reset, Phase Two: ?, Phase Three: Profit. Blowing kisses in the direction of the Kremlin and peacocking for the most sinister geopolitical actors in the world is not going to get us anywhere. The Russians have even told us that, explicitly. And yet there are those who stubbornly cling to this delusion, imagining themselves to be moving tokens around a Risk board, their frankly bizarre geopolitical gambits sure to take over the map.

There is something absurd, poignant almost, about realists who lose their grip on reality. A clear-sighted view of the geopolitical lay of the land is their entire raison d’être, after all. A realist’s impotent wish-casting is like a self-styled hyper-rationalist throwing a temper tantrum or an animal rights activist kicking a puppy. It’s the kind of thing that just shouldn’t happen, yet here we are. Might I suggest that any purported foreign policy realist seriously advocating a Reverse Nixon Manoeuvre with respect to the Kremlin ought to come up with a new name for his theoretical school. “Un-realism” or “sur-realism” might work, or “fantasism,” or “delusionism,” or another neologism along those lines. In any event, this ignominious episode in the history of realism will prove, mercifully quickly, to be a valuable object lesson in pure folly, and although it is said that “the shortest follies are the best,” I would have preferred if it had not arisen in the first place, particularly among otherwise serious people. The very notion of a pro-Kremlin Reverse Nixon Manoeuvre is far-fetched to the point of absurdity, and grotesquely immoral to boot (not that realists would ever concern themselves with such things), and I genuinely look forward to never having to hear about it again, once these so-called realists have finally snapped out of it and come back down to earth.

READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:

The Perils of Oppositional Politics

A Letter to a Young Realist

Ukraine: A Defiant People