The Trump administration entered office with two complementary goals concerning Russia. The first, the humanitarian goal of ending Russia’s war with Ukraine, does not seem close to being achieved. The administration proposed a ceasefire between the two countries as a first step toward terminating the conflict, but while Ukraine accepted the proposal, Russia did not. Meetings between representatives of the Trump administration and Russian officials have made no apparent progress.
The second goal, a geopolitical one that the achievement of the first is intended to make possible, is to flip Russia from its close connection to China to a friendlier relationship with the United States. This makes eminent good sense for America. The Trump administration’s initial approach to Russia, however, will not bring it about. To the contrary, the conciliatory attitude toward Moscow that it adopted upon taking office is precisely the opposite of what is needed.
Because China poses the principal challenge to the United States, weakening it by depriving it of its major ally, Russia, would serve American interests. Such a development has historical precedents. The reversal of alliances in Europe in 1756, sometimes called the Diplomatic Revolution of that year, saw the Austrian Habsburg Empire switch its allegiance from Great Britain to Britain’s chief adversary, France, changing the balance of power on the continent. More recently, the Nixon administration’s diplomatic rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China in 1972, conducted by President Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, had a similar impact on a global scale, moving China away from the camp of America’s then chief adversary, the Soviet Union, and toward the United States. A prospective shift of post-Soviet Russia from China to America has thus come to be known as a “reverse Nixon-Kissinger.”
The hope of persuading Russia to realign itself geopolitically is not groundless. The Russian people have traditionally identified more with Europe than with Asia. Russians and Chinese have never regarded each other as natural friends or partners. Indeed, mutual suspicion has marked their relations. In the half-century since 1972, moreover, the relationship between the two countries has changed dramatically: China has gained in wealth and strength while Russia has become relatively poorer and less powerful. China has become very much the senior partner and Russia the junior. If present trends continue, the gap between them will grow, to Russia’s increasing discomfort.
All this suggests that Russia has an interest in distancing itself from China and moving closer to Europe and the United States. Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin himself has no such interest. To the contrary, his personal goals require a continuing, indeed ever-closer, alignment with China as well as ongoing hostility to the United States and the West. Putin, with his tight control over Russia’s relations with the rest of the world, is the reason that the initial Trump strategy of conciliation as a way of flipping Russia cannot succeed.
Like other dictators of his kind, Putin wants, above all, to remain in power. This makes it possible for him to channel Russia’s wealth to himself and his circle of cronies. Close association with the West, with its emphasis on democratic politics, free markets, and the rule of law, would make both more difficult. In fact, Western values and practices pose a mortal threat to him and his core personal interests. Those interests also require that Russia remain at war. The Ukraine conflict has enabled him to concentrate power in his own hands and has given him a pretext to jail or drive out of the country anyone who might object to the political order he has established. An end to the war would be good for the Russian people, and of course for Ukrainians as well, but not for Mr. Putin; and for Russia to align with the West, the war would have to end.
The Russian leader not only needs the war to continue in order to secure his own power, he needs for the Russian people to believe that they are engaged in a life-and-death geopolitical conflict with NATO, the United States, and Europe. As the Russia expert Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute put it in his 2023 book Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War, “a perennial war with the America-led West became integral to the regime’s legitimacy.” Putin and his henchmen bombard those they rule with the message that the West is seeking to destroy Russia and that only Vladimir Putin can protect them. He portrays the Ukraine war as but one battle in a cosmic struggle in which Russia’s very existence is at stake.
For these reasons, the conciliatory approach to Russia that the Trump administration has initially attempted will neither end the fighting in Ukraine nor effect a twenty-first century diplomatic revolution. It is far more likely to follow the pattern of President Barack Obama’s policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Obama believed that offering the hand of friendship to the ruling mullahs would reduce their hostility to the United States. It did no such thing. The Iranian regime took advantage of the concessions the United States made in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed in 2015, to sustain and expand its campaigns of terror and subversion against America’s friends and allies in the Middle East. With its initial approach to Russia, the Trump administration risks following a similarly futile, indeed counterproductive, course.
In short, as long as Vladimir Putin holds supreme power in Moscow, Russia will be a friend of China and an adversary of the West. The necessary condition for the geopolitical realignment that would bring considerable advantages to the United States is the end of the Putin regime. How might that come about? The United States and its allies do not have the power to cause it to happen, and there is no guarantee that whatever government comes after Mr. Putin’s will abandon his foreign policy. Logic and history do, however, suggest an indirect way in which the West might help to push him out of power.
In Russian history, military failure has sometimes led to political change. Russia’s poor performance against Britain and France in the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 helped to create the conditions in which serfdom was abolished. The humiliation that the Russian Empire suffered in its war with Japan in 1905 compelled the tsar to create a Russian parliament. The battlefield defeats of the tsar’s armies in World War I triggered the collapse of his government and the subsequent Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. The inability to subdue Afghanistan in the 1980s contributed to the events that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The war in Ukraine could have similar consequences, providing that Vladimir Putin fails to emerge as the victor. The war has already put the country’s economy under severe strain and caused, by some estimates, more than 800,000 casualties among the Russians whom the Putin regime has conscripted into the army. At some point, the accumulated costs could prove greater than the Russian people, and even some of the people in Putin’s coterie, are willing to pay.
Russian failure, of course, requires Ukrainian success — in defending the territory it still controls and thereby retaining its independence. The United States has the means to increase the chances that the Ukrainians will be able to do so by continuing, and even increasing, its military support for Ukraine. Ukrainian success on the battlefield enhances the prospects for the geopolitical realignment that the Trump administration seeks; the administration ought therefore to be doing everything it can to train and equip the Ukrainian armed forces. It is they who hold the potential to flip Russia.
