The Road to Beijing Runs Through a Defeated Moscow
A Strategic Critique of the "Reverse Kissinger" Proposal
By Luka Danelia
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The Ukraine-Russia negotiations led by the Trump administration have reopened a debate at the center of U.S. grand strategy: how should Washington handle the deepening partnership between Russia and China, the most serious alignment challenging American power today? Across European capitals, concerns over these negotiations stem from fears that Washington is displaying dangerous leniency toward Moscow at the expense of allied security. At the same time, European leaders view the 2025 National Security Strategy, which warns that "to focus on everything is to focus on nothing," as proof that the United States is stepping back from the continent. That reading misses crucial historical continuity. Shifting focus toward the Indo-Pacific, being selective about global commitments, and occasionally courting Russia are not new maneuvers unique to the Trump era. What is new is how openly this prioritization is declared as doctrine.
Even while pulling back from Europe, the United States remains focused on defending its global dominance against China, its primary rival. To preserve its power, Washington is concentrating attention towards the Indo-Pacific while neutralizing immediate threats elsewhere. What critics view as a dangerous weakness, such as Vice President JD Vance's calls to cut Ukraine funding or President Trump's push for a quick deal with Moscow, proponents frame as a necessity to avoid dual-front overextension. Ultimately, scaling back European commitments is designed to focus American strength where the challenge is greatest.
This retrenchment, and the vacuum it threatens to leave in Europe, has revived the idea of a "Reverse Kissinger" effect. In 1972, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger opened relations with Beijing to exploit the Sino-Soviet split and isolate Moscow. Behavior from the Trump administration today suggests that logic in reverse, arguing that Washington could draw Russia away from China through strategic leniency, thereby freeing the United States to focus entirely on its primary rival. However, leniency toward Moscow to break its alignment with Beijing rests on a fundamentally flawed understanding of how the Kremlin operates and ignores Russia's growing strategic vulnerability.
Washington cannot buy Russia out of its alignment with China. The Sino-Russian partnership is deeply asymmetric, steadily turning Russia into an economic dependent reliant on Chinese technology and markets, while Beijing encroaches on Russia's historic influence in Central Asia and the Far East. By keeping Moscow’s westward ambitions durably blocked, Washington could allow this imbalance to run its course, forcing the Kremlin to face its China problem alone. Anti-Westernism may anchor Putin’s regime, yet great powers ultimately prioritize survival over ideology, and an isolated Moscow will eventually have no choice but to approach the West on Washington’s terms.
Why the Reverse Kissinger Strategy Fails
The core assumption behind the Reverse Kissinger idea is that Russia’s alignment with China is a matter of convenience, reversible through the right deal. It is not. Anti-Westernism is not incidental to Putin’s Russia; it is the organizing principle behind the regime, reinforced through state media, historical narrative, and a conservative national identity built in opposition to the West. A government built this way cannot simply pivot toward the West, regardless of who sits in the Kremlin or what incentives Washington offers.
History backs this up plainly: Western engagement has been tried before, and it has consistently been followed by renewed Russian confrontation, not partnership. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration invested heavily in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, hoping to integrate it into Western security structures. Moscow read NATO’s later enlargement and Western intervention in the Balkans as a betrayal, and this grievance fed directly into Putin’s revanchism. The Obama administration’s 2009 Russian Reset repeated the pattern: an attempt to build cooperation with Moscow that ignored the 2008 war in Georgia and collapsed outright with the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Both episodes taught the Kremlin the same lesson: that Western outreach is a sign of weakness to be exploited, not an invitation worth honoring.
Some scholars, including John Mearsheimer, argue that Russia’s wars in Georgia and Ukraine were defensive reactions to NATO’s expansion rather than acts of imperial ambition. There is something to this: NATO enlargement did generate real anxiety in Moscow, and great powers often respond to perceived encirclement with hostility. But Russia’s own words undercut a purely defensive reading. At the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin called the Soviet collapse “a major geopolitical disaster” and framed the tens of millions of ethnic Russians left outside Russia’s borders as a wrong to be corrected. He later told President Bush that a large part of Ukraine’s territory was a historic gift from Russia and warned that Ukraine’s accession to NATO would mean the end of the Ukrainian state. These are not the words of a state reacting defensively to encirclement; they describe a state that views its neighbors’ sovereignty as negotiable.
It is worth examining where the Russian pretext, largely framed as a security fear, regarding NATO enlargement actually originates. No NATO member state, including those on Russia’s immediate periphery such as Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, or Poland, has attacked Russia or threatened its sovereignty. On the contrary, it is these frontline states that have faced systematic Russian provocations, including aerial incursions and hybrid warfare operations. States outside NATO’s protection, such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, have consistently faced Russian aggression as well. Taking Russia at its word, rather than searching for a hidden defensive rationale, is the more honest reading of the evidence.
The historical chronology bears this out. Volodymyr Zelensky was not elected on a hardline platform; he won largely on the premise that dialogue with Moscow was achievable, a reaction against the more confrontational Poroshenko years. Nor did Viktor Yanukovych provoke the 2014 annexation of Crimea: he had already extended Russia’s lease on the Sevastopol naval base to 2042 under the 2010 Kharkiv Pact, accepted Russian dominance over Ukraine’s energy sector, and formally shelved Ukraine’s NATO ambitions. Moscow still pressured him into abandoning an EU association agreement, and annexed Crimea anyway once he left office. Moldova offers the same lesson in miniature: its constitution mandates neutrality, and it harbors no NATO ambitions at all, yet it remains a persistent target of Russian destabilization. In every case, accommodating Russia does not buy safety; it only buys time until Moscow makes its next demand.
Russia’s demand for border buffer zones is an old imperial habit that existed decades before NATO was ever created. In the 1920s, Soviet Russia forced countries like Georgia, Iran, and the Baltic states to legally ban foreign militaries from their soil, only to violently invade and annex them shortly after the foreign troops left. When Moscow demands that NATO pull back its borders today, it is simply using the alliance as a modern excuse for an old strategy. The point is not merely historical curiosity: when Russia demanded in December 2021 that NATO withdraw to its 1997 borders, it was asking the West to recreate precisely this kind of exclusionary buffer zone. It is a script Russia was using long before NATO enlargement was ever a serious issue, which suggests NATO is an excuse to legitimize Putin’s longstanding ambition to restore Soviet-era borders.
Ukraine as the Test Case, and Why it Matters Beyond Europe
The Kremlin only respects strength, meaning Russian aggression expands exactly when the West hesitates. The invasions of Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, and the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022 all occurred following periods of Western retreat rather than any real growth in Russian power. Because Moscow feeds on Western passivity, it will only stop expanding once its path westward is completely blocked by force. By maintaining strict containment in Europe, the West actively accelerates Russia’s economic breakdown and forces it to face its vulnerability to China.
The war in Ukraine proves that the United States can successfully contain Russian expansion without sending American troops into combat. When the invasion began, the Kremlin expected to capture Kyiv in days, but years of Western investment in Ukraine’s defense have prevented a Russian victory. Sustaining this support is vital because completely abandoning Ukraine would destroy America’s global credibility, proving to allies worldwide that the U.S. security promises are worthless. In short, funding Ukraine's defense is a highly effective, low-cost way to degrade America's secondary rival.
Effective containment cannot stop at Ukraine; it must span the entire Russian periphery. Holding the line in Eastern Europe is insufficient if Moscow is permitted to secure exclusive hegemony on its southern flank in the Caucasus. Denying Russian dominance here does not require a formal military alliance. Instead, the West should support the sovereign hedging of states like Armenia, which is actively pivoting away from Moscow after Russia failed to honor its security commitments. By connecting the South Caucasus to a broader defensive line stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the West closes the geographic gaps that Russia exploits for expansion.
Washington's success in denying Russia a quick victory in Ukraine also serves as a powerful deterrent against China's ambitions toward Taiwan. While the legal and military details of Taiwan differ, Beijing is closely watching to see if the United States has the political stamina to defend a non-treaty partner against a nuclear-armed power. If the West retreats from Ukraine, China will view it as proof of American weakness and a possible green light for its own regional expansion. Therefore, Ukraine is the ultimate test of U.S. global resolve, and the results of that test will fundamentally shape Chinese calculations in the Pacific.
Russia and China: An Alignment That Cannot Last
The Kremlin and Beijing are aligned for now, united by a shared interest in weakening U.S. dominance. But their motives differ in ways that matter. For Russia, confrontation with the West is not a strategy of choice; it is close to existential, the primary source of the regime’s domestic legitimacy. Putin has extended this same logic to partnerships with Belarus, Venezuela, Iran, and Syria, suggesting his alignment strategy is less about shared interests than about needing shared adversaries. For China, by contrast, displacing American dominance is a long-term, patient project pursued through economic and institutional weight rather than open confrontation. Beijing does not need Western enemies to sustain its legitimacy the way Moscow does. Nor, tellingly, are the two powers willing to fight each other’s wars: neither has the joint command structures, shared contingency planning, or defense pledges that a genuine military alliance would require, and neither is prepared to absorb the political or military cost of the other’s conflict with the United States.
This asymmetry works against Russia over time. Demographically, China’s densely populated northeast sits beside a Russian Far East that has lost roughly a third of its population since 1991, a trend already reshaping the regional balance of power. Economically, Western sanctions have pushed Russia into growing dependence on Chinese markets, steadily turning Moscow from a peer partner into something closer to a junior supplier. Beijing’s growing footprint in Central Asia and even the Russian Arctic, a region Moscow once guarded jealously, reflects the same pattern: Russia is trading long-term influence for short-term support in its confrontation with the West.
The relationship is not, however, purely one-sided. China’s army has not fought a war since 1979, and it is turning to Russia’s battlefield experience in Ukraine for lessons in modern warfare, from sea drones to other newly tested technology. This military utility makes the asymmetry durable rather than destabilizing in the short run. Russia still has something concrete to offer Beijing, even as it steadily loses ground elsewhere in the relationship.
Because of this mutual utility, Washington should not expect Moscow to walk away from Beijing any time soon. Russia does not need to break with China for the strategy outlined here to work. The structural tension between a Russia that needs the alignment to survive and a China that maintains it opportunistically will do the isolating on its own. Washington’s task is simply to make sure that Russia’s westward ambitions stay durably blocked while this imbalance runs its course.
Conclusion
In essence, the West cannot build a durable partnership with Russia so long as the Kremlin relies on anti-Western confrontation for its domestic legitimacy and regime-survival. Russian aggression is a core requirement for this, not a temporary tactic. As the war in Ukraine proves, this aggression can be successfully contained without deploying American troops. The logic of active deterrence must span Russia's entire periphery, denying Moscow exclusive hegemony from Eastern Europe to the South Caucasus. Non-alignment offers neighboring states no protection, and Russian revisionism only shrinks when the West actively forces it to stop.
This strategy of strict containment leverages the unequal relationship between Moscow and Beijing to America's advantage. Washington does not need to offer concessions to break the Sino-Russian alignment. It only needs to keep Russia's westward ambitions durably blocked. Anti-Westernism is a domestic political tool, but sovereignty is an existential necessity. Confronting the West may secure the regime internally, but total submission to Beijing destroys the state externally. Just as the Soviet Union sought détente with Washington to avoid a two-front confrontation during the Cold War, a suffocated Russia will eventually recognize Beijing as the greatest existential threat to its statehood. An isolated Kremlin will have no choice but to turn West for a geopolitical counterweight. When that moment arrives, Washington will set the terms of engagement, treating Moscow not as a privileged partner, but as a weakened supplicant with nowhere else to turn.
Luka Danelia is a recent graduate in International Relations at Tbilisi State University. He completed two academic semesters abroad as an exchange student at the University of Tartu and the University of Porto. He is an incoming Don Lavoie Fellow (2026) at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University, and currently serves as a Regional Correspondent for the Caucasus at HEGEMON, the policy-oriented professional review of the Helsinki Geoeconomics Society, developed in partnership with Springer in Law & Geoeconomics. Mr. Danelia has also served as a Board Member and Head of the Research and Policy Department at the Youth Atlantic Treaty Association (YATA) of Georgia. He has contributed to and edited publications for several European youth think tanks and participated in student scientific conferences, including in the Research Exchange Program organized by the Program on Georgian Studies at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. He was also selected by an Associate Professor and Head of the International Relations Program at Tbilisi State University to serve as a Research Assistant and co-researcher.
