On February 28, Volodymyr Zelensky fell into an ambush. A Russian commando? No, the oval office of the White House. At the time chosen, journalist Brian Glenn, companion of the elected official of the far right Marjorie Taylor Green, launches the offensive: “Why do you never wear a costume?”. The tone is set.
With his bad English and his misunderstanding of American policy, the Ukrainian president is trapped. The attacks follow one another: JD Vance, and then Donald Trump. A few days earlier, the American president had treated his counterpart as “Dictator without elections” with “4% of favorable opinions”recovery word by word from the Kremlin’s Novlangue.
What strikes is the extraordinary coherence of communication. Thus, no one in the entourage of Trump can admit that Russia has invaded Ukraine. If this Orwellian reversal of discourse (the aggressor, Russia, becomes the friend, and the attacked, Ukraine, the enemy) evokes methods of uncompromising regimes, others are tempted to see a blow of diplomatic genius, a “plates tectonics” geopolitical which is reminiscent of the reversal of sino-American alliances of 1972.
So, fifty years later, would we be witnessing a “Nixon upside down”, with Trump in the role of Richard Nixon, and Vance in that of Henry Kissinger? In the entourage of Trump, everyone knows that he counts on the judgment of the Ukrainian conflict to obtain the Nobel Peace Prize. And, who knows, having his statue on Mount Rushmore? At a time when we write these lines, we know nothing about the addition of a fifth head on the southern Dakota mountain. But Nixon ended up obtaining his opera.
“Nixon in China”
It is undoubtedly one of the greatest diplomatic shots in the XXe century. In February 1972, President Nixon undertook a trip to Beijing, thus ending twenty-five years of tense relations between the People’s Republic of China and the United States. This trip, which follows months of preparation and several secret trips of Henry Kissinger, leads to the official normalization of relations between the two countries seven years later.
Upon his return to the base Andrews Air Force, next to Washington, the American president is welcomed as a hero. Journalists even evoke a “King’s welcome”. The scope of the event is such that John Adams later makes an opera, Nixon in China.
At the time, Nixon faced a litany of challenges: riots in American city centers in 1967 and 1968, leap of crime, unemployment, inflation, monetary crisis and collapse of the Bretton Woods system following the suspension of the gold convertibility of the dollar. On the outdoor level, it is hardly better: the Vietnam War drains the American economy, and the Cold War, by its induced defense costs, limits the possibilities of economic recovery.
At the same time, border incidents in 1969 brought a conclusion to the slow agony of the Sino-Soviet alliance, sealed in 1950 between Joseph Staline and Mao Zedong. The Nixon administration seizes the opportunity and starts one of the strongest alliance reversals in modern history. The result is a remarkable success.
A year later, the Soviets and the Americans sign the first nuclear non-proliferation treaty (SALT-1), the Vietnam War ends soon after, and the United States and the United States engaged in what becomes the most important commercial cooperation in the world between two countries. We know that Trump and Nixon had a sustained correspondence in the 1980s, and that the 47e President admired the “Beijing”. Would the apprentice seek to go beyond the master?
Trump, the new Nixon?
Under the pretext of putting an end to the war in Ukraine, Donald Trump would thus be, according to some commentators, on the verge of making a diplomatic blow of a similar magnitude. However, nothing is comparable… In 2025, Russia was the minor partner of the Sino-Russian alliance (it was the opposite in 1972). With a population reduced by half compared to the USSR and a tiny economy against China, some claim that Russia would have everything to gain a wave of American, energy, mining, real estate and other investments.
For the United States, it would be a “martingale”: the Russian-American rapprochement would mean the end of the Sino-Russian alliance, a new oil lever to compensate for the unpredictability of the Middle East, access to rare land and strategic metals (challenge of a battle with China for the control of the technologies of the future), the control of the Arctic, the future big game of the 1920s.
The whole would therefore allow Americans to reduce defense spending, isolate China, the only competitor in the United States for world supremacy, and to kill the initiatives of the BRICS. Would Trump be an unknown genius of diplomacy?
The strategy behind the rapprochement to Russia
If, as Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk suggests, we “Let’s stay calm and continue”behind this avalanche of declarations, threats and insults, we see an extremely coherent strategy looming and which can be read in several stages. Let’s take it one by one.
Step one (before the election of Trump): to exploit the weariness of the Western populations and make the end of the conflict the ultimate objective, in a sort of “whatever it costs”.
Step two (January-February): Explain that an initial rapprochement between Moscow and Washington is a prerequisite necessary for any conflict resolution.
The goal is to bend Zelensky, to break his European supports and above all to degrade his image as a warrior chief, accidental heroes.
Step three (two weeks ago): continue to undermine the morale of Europeans and remind them that they are negligible quantity in any form of negotiation, through threats (customs rights, article 5 of NATO, return of American troops), other threats (Greenland, etc.) and insults (vance on the British army).
Step four (last week): continue the demolition work of Volodymyr Zelensky. The goal is to make him bend, to break his European supports and above all to degrade his image as a warrior chief, of accidental heroes who stood against the invader. The goal is therefore not to make Putin sympathetic, but to make Zelensky so antipathetic that Putin becomes an acceptable negotiation partner for American and European hearings (to a lesser extent).
Step five (to come): demonstrate that Europe is an obstacle in peace negotiations, by denigrating it in all possible ways. The objective is obviously not to ally to Russia to wage war in Europe, but rather to “dumbfound” Europe in order to obtain its tacit acquiescence, leading to a withdrawal from US Troops from the East NATO, commercial concessions, and an increase in arms expenditure with the United States.
Step six: forcing the hand of Europe and Ukraine, to sign the peace plan, to reinvite Russia to the G7.
Zelensky, “Heritage Foundation” and ideological convergence
What are the real reasons for such a reversal of alliances? First, the relationship with Volodymyr Zelensky. Donald Trump has only two operating mechanisms with others. Either he appreciates flattery, servility or even attentions (British Prime Minister Keir Starmer arrives with a signed letter from the king who invites him to a state visit, Emmanuel Macron invites him to the reopening of Notre-Dame); Or else he respects and admires the strong or powerful man (Vladimir Putin at the head of an arsenal of 6,000 nuclear heads, Elon Musk the richest man in the world, and even Barack Obama, elected twice in the White House).
Not only does Zelensky fall into any of these two categories, but he is small, he directs a country which “loses war”, and Trump holds him responsible for his first trial in dismissal (the famous “Perfect Phone Call”). Unless a miracle, Trump will never deal with Zelensky.
Then, the “Heritage Foundation”. This is the reflection group behind the vision of the Trump administration. If reading the “Project 2025” (922 pages) teaches us little about Greenland, on the other hand, it is clear about the geopolitical vision which has underpinned the most right administration for more than 100 years. The real goal is China.
The country is portrayed there as a political, economic, military and nuclear adversary. However, unless you breaks, the United States cannot ensure the security of Europe, that of the Near East and that of the Pacific. It is therefore necessary to revitalize the economy, reindustrialize it (customs duties), cut into the expenses of the federal government and reconstruct the nuclear arsenal. If the attitude towards Russia remains vaguely defined, a rapprochement with Moscow aimed at isolating China is part of the logic of the right Trumpian.
A so-called rapprochement with Russia would be a blank check to make Europe the number one target of Russian clandestine operations.
Finally, the ideological convergence between Putinian Russia and the American right. The big mistake in Europe is to believe the American right Europhile. As the repeated attacks of Vance indicate, for many Maga, Europe is drifting, socio-cultural (immigration, dechristianization, breaking to freedom of expression), economic (impoverishment, taxation) and geopolitical (collapse of defense expenses).
Admittedly, even the most incompetent of the Trump administration do not see Putin’s Russia as a cantor of democratic principles. But they marry the same conservative values (antiwoke, religion, faith in the use of force, patriotism). They share the conquering faith of great civilizations, without which, according to them, one dies and dark in oblivion.
A dangerous illusion
The United States-Russia rapprochement is a dangerous illusion. First, Moscow does not have the means to free himself from the grip of China. The latter is the main importer of Russian oil and coal, without which Russia can no longer finance its war machine. Beijing would also be responsible for the majority of exports of electronic components which are used for Russian armaments. And then there are Chinese banks, loans, joint military exercises, etc.
The economic potential promoted by Trump makes no sense. It would be a bis repertita of the 1990s when the United States has invested tens of billions of dollars to transform the Russian economy into a market economy, with the results that we know.
A so-called rapprochement with Russia would be a blank check to make Europe the number one target of the Russian clandestine operations, with a purpose shared between the Trump and Putin administration: the end of the European Union and the return of areas of influence-Western Europe for the United States, Eastern Europe for Russia.
Europe is paying thirty years of illusions, because we do not “Sortes not in history”on the contrary: we adapt to it, otherwise we sink. We can blame Trump, Putin, or climate change, but reality is that our countries are offended, indignant, paralyze themselves, while our societies have sacrificed their defense in the name of illusory peace in order to finance a utopian social model.
Hopefully this geopolitical electroshoc will lead Europe to finally see reality in the face: if it wants to preserve its social democratic and liberal model, it must urgently proceed to the drastic increase in military budgets, which are accompanied by the reconstruction of a defense industry, significant investments in intelligence and cyberfense, anti-aircraft defenses and nuclear.
