Ukraine’s worst nightmare has come true. European leaders have been shocked by US President Donald Trump’s decision to exclude Europe from the ongoing ceasefire talks and his blatant deal-making offers to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Instead of throwing US support behind Kyiv and offering it security guarantees, Trump has demanded the $350bn he claims the US has spent on the three year war in Ukraine, which some have labelled as reparations.

But others say that this dramatic volte-face is actually a clever change in US foreign policy. Trump is attempting a “reverse Nixon”. By cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is obviously very interested in doing deals with the US, he is attempting to “peel Russia off” from its “no limits” relationship with China.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said as much in an interview on February 27. He mapped out a strategy for managing Russia’s close relationship with China, saying Washington wants to “dilute ties” without sowing division between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever be successful completely at peeling them off of a relationship with the Chinese,” Rubio said, referring to Russia. “I also don’t think having China and Russia at each other’s neck is good for global stability because they’re both nuclear powers.”

President Richard Nixon travelled to China some 53 years ago to make friends with Chairman Mao, undermining the Kremlin’s global influence, and pulled Beijing closer to Washington, in a move that shifted the international balance of power for decades. The trip included a historic meeting with Mao and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, leading to the Shanghai Communiqué, which laid the groundwork for diplomatic ties between the two nations. Mao and Nixon considered the Soviet Union a common adversary long before they shook hands.

Throughout the Cold War, communist China and the Soviet Union should have been natural allies in their ideological conflict with the capitalist west – and they weren’t. Indeed, they remained rivals throughout this period.

Will it work this time round? Analysts are sceptical. It is possible to drive a wedge between Russia and China even today. China has thrown its backing behind Moscow, but it has abstained in all UN votes to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has adhered to sanctions on selling equipment to finish Russia’s Arctic LNG-2 project and its banks cut ties with their Russian clients when the US threatened them with secondary sanctions. Most importantly, Beijing has supplied Russia with dual-use equipment and technology, but it has pointedly shied away from supplying military equipment. Beijing continues to put its own interests ahead of those of Russia and always will, analysts say. While the relationship between Xi and Putin has moved beyond its initial billing as a “marriage of convenience,” both Moscow and Beijing remain wary of each other as bne IntelliNews explored in a recent look at residual Sino-Russian rivalries in the Arctic.

“There’s something to the idea that President Trump is attempting a geopolitical pivot. His outreach to Russia has gone far beyond seeking an end to fighting in Ukraine and towards a broader rehabilitation of US-Russia relations,” William Jackson, the chief emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, and Mark Williams, chief Asia economist, said in a note on February 27.

“He floated the idea of Russia rejoining the G7, repeated Russian talking points around the war in Ukraine and talked of the “incredible opportunities” for companies if the war ends (including possible joint US-Russia energy exploration in the arctic). Meanwhile, Keith Kellogg, the Special Envoy for Russia and Ukraine, has talked of seeking to “break” Russia’s alliance with China, Iran and North Korea,” the analysts added.

The multipolar world view is ideologically agnostic and based on commercial ties that fits perfectly with Trump’s transactional approach to international relations. Putin, who is seen as more of a tactician than a strategist, holds very similar views. But that is going to clash sharply with the EU’s value-based ideology where Brussels' support for Ukraine is born out of principle more than practical considerations. Following French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s visits to Washington this week, it appears there is very little common ground between Brussels and Washington.

Putin will welcome US deals as they will reduce tensions with the West and should come with sanctions relief. But better relations with Washington will also serve as a useful counterbalance to Russia’s diminutive role in its relations with Beijing and fit with Putin’s multipolar view of the world. By the same token, Beijing will not object to Russia moving closer to the US, as Xi shares the same multipolar world view as Putin.

From this perspective, the “reverse Nixon” analysis is out of kilter with the geopolitical changes that have occurred since the 70s. In those days, Great Power politics dominated the international stage. You were either with us (the capitalists) or against us (the communists). Today everyone is a capitalist. The ideological war is over.

The multipolar world that both Xi and Putin want to build is one where all countries can build their own alliances in a spirit of mutual cooperation, but no one country has the right to dictate to another or interfere in its domestic policies – the main complaint China and Russia have of the US-led “unipolar” system, where America is continuously sanctioning or even bombing countries that it feels have broken the norms that it has defined.

Even Secretary of State Marco Rubio admits that the world has changed and is now multipolar. Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the IMF, said the same in January. Putin has been moaning about the unipolar world order for years, but it seems that his decision to invade Ukraine has already rewarded him with the destruction of the unipolar world order.

Nixon’s goal was to weaken the relations between Beijing and Moscow in a bipolar world and bring the Soviet Union closer to the “us” pole. What Putin wants is simply to establish as many relations as he can in what has also been described as a fractured world, which will be better or worse, but managed in a concert of multifaceted bilateral partnership. Putin has often said that his preferred institution to coordinate these relations is the UN.

In this sense, Putin’s deals with Trump will not weaken the Sino-Russian relationship; it will just even it out. One of the new dynamics in the Sino-Russian relationship is the economic glue of trade. Russia has become one of China’s most important export markets. China’s exports to Russia rose by more than 70% (in US dollar terms) between 2021 and 2024, whereas China’s total goods exports rose by just 8% over the same period, reports Capital Economics.

“Russia has absorbed more of China’s post-pandemic export boom than any country other than the United States,” Capital Economics said. The SWIFT sanctions that were imposed days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have also helped promote Beijing’s project of making the yuan a reserve currency and have encouraged the de-dollarisation of global trade.

Beijing will welcome the Russo-US relationship as it brings Trump to a common table. But it remains to be seen how far the White House is prepared to go in its burgeoning relations with Moscow; will Trump stop at exploiting a few oil and gas fields or setting up a few lithium mines, or will he go further and drop all sanctions and re-establish deep commercial ties between Russia and the US?

For Putin, the biggest risk in a successful attempt to peel Russia off from China is Trump’s inability to guarantee a continuation of this policy by future US administrations. Trump’s ascent to the presidency itself demonstrates the unpredictability of US foreign policy over the long-term.

“There are strong reasons to think that any attempt to bring Russia into the US’s alliance and to put distance between Russia and China won’t go far,” says Capital Economics. “A push by the Trump administration to normalise relations with Russia without requiring Moscow to break from Beijing would have a greater chance of succeeding. In our fracturing work, we classify 88 countries and territories as being in the China bloc. Russia is one of only eight that the US government formally deems an adversary.”