Trump’s reset with Russia shifts US’ focus back on China – Firstpost

In December 2024, a month before Donald Trump’s inauguration as the President of the United States for a second time, the incumbent Joe Biden administration approved a national security memorandum to serve as a roadmap for the incoming government. Although most details of this memo were shrouded in secrecy, it was shaped as a document to help Trump deal with the tightening relationship among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, which the Biden administration had identified as America’s biggest adversaries.

The memorandum called on the US to improve intelligence efforts, use sanctions, and prepare for simultaneous crises between itself and the enemies in order to deal with the imminent challenge. While it sought to outline the top national security priority for Trump 2.0 in advance by highlighting how Russia’s war on Ukraine had accelerated its cooperation with China, Iran, and North Korea. Little did the Biden administration realise that this memo would serve no purpose in a few weeks’ time because the Trump administration was coming in with a plan of its own.

Cut to March 2025, barely two months into Trump’s presidency, and the axis of adversaries that the Biden administration had sought to warn about is already staring at irrelevance. It all started as a phone call between the new US President Donald Trump and the Russian President Vladimir Putin in February this year, putting an end to the previous government’s efforts to isolate Russia.

Unlike Biden, who had publicly termed Putin as a ‘War Criminal’, Trump made a series of conciliatory gestures towards Russia by calling Ukraine’s NATO membership as ‘impractical’ and Russia’s return of occupied territory to Kyiv as ‘illusionary’. Suddenly a country that was facing the worst kind of shaming and isolation perpetrated by the collective West for the past three years was no more a pariah. Trump had not just broken away from the ranks, but he had also sidelined American allies in Europe to engage Russia directly and show that it really meant business.

One of the most important steps that Trump took was to convey to Ukraine that cessation of hostilities with Russia was the only logical way forward. Unlike the Biden administration, which had willingly backed Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s war against Russia, Trump decided to halt all military support to Ukraine. It was quite a sight to behold when US President Trump and Vice President JD Vance tried to drill some realism into Zelenskyy’s head, videos of which widely circulated on social media as well.

Although it also triggered a spate of responses from European leaders condemning Trump and vowing to stand with Ukraine, it seems that all those promises appeared hollow to Zelenskyy himself, who, hours after Trump’s resolve to stop military aid, posted a long note on X expressing his unconditional willingness to work under “President Trump’s strong leadership” for peace.

On one hand, Trump was rebuking the Ukrainian leader for continuing mindless hostilities in the war. On the other hand, he was reminding Russia of its shared effort with the United States during the Second World War, where both countries “lost tens of millions of people”.

For Putin, this was particularly pleasing as he himself has justified Russia’s great power status many times by alluding to the Soviet legacy of fighting the WWII. What Trump’s reference as well as his phone call did was to safely walk Russia away from its years of isolation by the West toward a broader agenda of cooperation covering multiple issues beyond just the immediate matter of resolving the war. It was anyone’s guess that Russia would soon reciprocate with an equal amount of warmth towards Trump’s United States when Putin offered to broker nuclear talks with Iran as well as some sort of understanding on Iranian proxies that have continued to target the interests of the US and its allies in the region.

All these developments have taken place in a matter of just a few weeks since Trump has returned to the White House. Russia has responded in a manner as if it was waiting for Trump to make an offer that respected the Kremlin’s sensitivities. Now some are of the view that Trump’s olive branch to Russia is coming at the cost of alienating European allies, who in turn may find comfort in China instead. Some are calling his outreach to Russia a bad move as well since it will embolden the country, an aggressor as per their perspective, to indulge in even more such activities. But if we observe Trump’s actions sans emotions, then we find that it is nothing but the return of good old balance of power politics.

Unlike Biden, whose alienation of Putin forced him to side with China and ended up creating a whole bloc of adversaries against the United States, Trump’s foreign policy is rooted in the logic that it is not Russia but China from which the US has a major threat. China is economically and militarily a predominant challenge to American power, where Russia’s war with Ukraine and its isolation by the collective West paved the way for China to approach Russia with a tighter embrace.

If China propped it up economically, then Russia also leaned on Iran and North Korea for defence supplies. Their mutual support club strengthened their collective resistance against the American influence. Due to Biden’s miscalculation, if the US had China as the principal challenger to its hegemony, then between 2022 and 2025, that challenger also got Russia, Iran, and North Korea’s collective strength on its side.

For all practical purposes, the US was left with backing a war that did not even threaten its security along with a host of incompetent allies. Not to mention that it was the Europeans who first provoked Russia into attacking Ukraine with their overtures in the form of NATO membership as well as European Union expansion but later expected the US to shoulder the lion’s share of burden.

It is common sense that in front of a mounting geopolitical challenge, it is better to isolate the challenger from its allies so that the threat can be managed without overwhelming oneself. Trump is doing exactly that. His foreign policy so far appears as an exercise to restore the balance of power in the international system. He has tactfully peeled Russia away from the ‘axis of upheaval’ and by withdrawing military aid from Ukraine has left little reason for the protracted war in Europe to continue. This has made sure that the geostrategic focus of the United States is once again back to the bigger and much more real challenge, which is China.

Not to miss that Trump’s resolve to impose debilitating tariffs against China has not weakened even one bit after assuming power. Just this week he has increased tariffs on Chinese goods to 20 per cent. One of the key steps that he has taken also includes restricting Chinese investment in strategically sensitive sectors. Trump 2.0’s foreign policy on China so far has disappointed those geopolitics watchers who were hoping that the second outing would see some conciliatory attitude towards China.

Interestingly, this is not lost on China itself because on a day when the country increased its annual military budget by more than 7 per cent, it also issued a statement saying China is “ready to fight any type of war” with the United States, be it a tariff war, trade war, or any other type of war. Now with the Ukraine war off the radar, the strategic focus of the US under Trump will be clear on the more pertinent challenge. European allies will obviously cry and crib, but at least the attention will be back on the Indo-Pacific.

One may say that Trump is doing a reverse of Nixon this time. In the 1970s, during the Cold War, US President Richard Nixon had secured a rapprochement with China to take on the Soviets. But this time, Trump is doing a rapprochement with Russia to take on China instead. In hindsight, the Soviet Union was a bigger challenge, needing China to be pulled away from an already credible threat. Today the same is true for China as a threat, thus needing Russia to be pulled away.

The implications of this Nixon-in-reverse strategy are going to be huge for India as well. The country had faced a lot of attacks from the collective West for not shaming Putin enough in the last three years. But now it is in the good books of Russia as well as being seen as a counter to China in the Indo-Pacific by the US. Trump had revived Quad in his first outing as the president. Though during Biden’s presidency the usual bonhomie between India and the US had taken a serious hit, now things are changing. The stage is all set for more such actions by the Trump administration, where Beijing may feel the heat, but India would find its concerns regarding the rise of China eased.

The author is a New Delhi-based commentator on geopolitics and foreign policy. She holds a PhD from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. She tweets @TrulyMonica. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.