by Thaddeus G. McCotter
To checkmate China, the U.S. must revive Nixon’s grand strategy—this time triangulating with India and even a wayward Russia to avoid being the odd superpower out.
Recognizing a split in the fractious relationship between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its junior partner in the communist bloc, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in 1972, President Richard Nixon visited the PRC with the goal of luring it into America’s strategic orbit. Nixon succeeded, for better and for worse. Ultimately, for this and numerous other reasons, by the end of the 20th century, the Soviet Union had gone into the dustbin of history, but by the beginning of the 21st century, the PRC had become the successor to the Soviets as America’s greatest strategic threat and rival model of governance.
Exacerbating matters, the failure of the two Bush administrations and the Clinton administration to properly address the domestic and foreign policy challenges confronting a Russia newly freed from the communist yoke has restored and, in fact, strengthened the partnership between the PRC and the Russian Federation, leaving the United States as the odd nation out.
What is to be done?
First, under successive, bipartisan administrations, the United States had been nurturing a relationship with another emerging player on the international stage, one expected to eventually surpass the PRC in population and economic prospects and prowess, and one, like America, that is a former British colony turned democracy: India.
While its relations with America continue to blossom, India’s past and present relations with the other two major international actors are a mixed bag. Despite initially warm relations, India and the PRC have a decidedly cold relationship, intermittently pocked with recriminations and military confrontations. Alternately, in part due to the earlier disputes between the former U.S.S.R. and Mao’s PRC, India has warm relations with Russia. To date, despite the invasion of Ukraine, U.S. policymakers have sagely not allowed India’s longstanding ties to Russia to impair our bilateral relations. There has been a mature recognition that in the developing relationship between the U.S. and India, both nations are not looking for a spouse, but a lover, free of the concrete dictates and duties of a “permanent” alliance.
This instructs the next step: determining which of the two strategic competitors the U.S. should seek to bring into a realistic, if not a complete, alignment of interests—or at least, into a benevolent neutrality?
The relationship in the 20th century between the USSR and the PRC has been turned on its head in the 21st century Russian Federation. Five decades ago, the USSR was the senior partner of the PRC; there was a border crisis between the two nations that risked war between the two communist allies; and it was the PRC in need of U.S. and Western economic engagement.
Today, the Russian Federation is the junior partner to the PRC; the border crisis is between Russia and Ukraine and, hence, the West; and it is Russia in need of U.S. and Western economic aid and sanctions relief. It cannot be overemphasized that President Trump considers economic power to be “hard power,” which perfectly suits this situation. For instance, consider how much economic benefit could accrue to a more pacific Russia from the U.S. and the West decoupling its supply chain from the PRC.
Moreover, given India’s new relations with the U.S. and its continuing relations with Russia, the latter has a friendly interlocutor to facilitate a rapprochement between Washington and Moscow. In sum, Russia has these and many more practical reasons for aligning itself with the U.S. and the West than does the PRC.
Importantly, too, as the past is precedent, we have seen how the PRC has reciprocated with the U.S. and the West for its economic and diplomatic outreach: belligerency and unrestricted warfare across the board to destroy America and the international rules-based order it helped found and defend. If anything, however, the PRC’s acceptance of Western investment, especially providing the first link in the global supply chain, renders it susceptible to Western economic leverage, which is why the PRC vehemently opposes any linkage of issues, especially regarding its predatory trade practices.
Obviously, the elephant in the room is Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. It has been a boon to the PRC’s alliance with Russia, as it has necessarily deepened Russian dependence upon it for military, diplomatic, and economic ties. It has also played into the hands of those in the U.S. political and policymaking elites who, for economic reasons, have allowed them to grandstand in their hatred of Russia while ignoring the unrestricted warfare the PRC is presently waging upon America; moreover, it has formed a welcomed distraction for their strategic mistakes in helping to precipitate the current Ukraine crisis. It is into this Ukraine maelstrom of competing international and domestic pressures President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio must navigate to help facilitate both an immediate ceasefire and a just and enduring peace between the victim, Ukraine, and the clear aggressor, Russia—and to do so bearing in mind the momentous stakes involved in the overarching grand strategy of triangulating communist China.
Should the India-Russia-U.S. alliance come to pass, as mentioned previously, it should not be formed as a traditional alliance, whereby one superpower anchors an allied bloc in opposition to another superpower with a similar complement of allies. What is needed is not merely a reprise of the Cold War, which is not possible in the first place.
Nor would it be a “multi-polar” world with tentpole powers lording over a specific region of the world. The very idea of pretending a “pole” can be created by diplomatic fiat in an arbitrary area of the globe is inane. A nation is either powerful in a naturally evolved region or it is not.
No, what would hopefully emerge is an alliance of already powerful nations voluntarily working where there is a common convergence of interests; and, even in such instances where two of the three pursue common interests at the potential expense of the other, the consequences will be mitigated—or the joint action cancelled—for the sake of the third party and, most importantly, for the preservation and perpetuation of the alliance. Such an alliance would profoundly vitiate the prospects of military engagements on behalf of the alliance, as no nation would be bound to defend the other in a particular scenario, à la NATO. And, in fact, even the PRC may become a member should it cease its provocative, martial aggressions, unrestricted warfare, and mercantilist trade policies.
To use an admittedly inelegant sports analogy, a new alliance between the U.S., India, and Russia would not be a 1970s Wilt Chamberlain-style NBA basketball team dominated by a center surrounded with subordinate passers and shooters. It would be more akin to a 2020s Steph Curry-style collection of coequal shooters and passers firing up threes or dishing out assists to others to do so as circumstances dictate.
As one who has long warned of a revanchist Russia, it is not easy to recognize and address the reality that President Nixon faced: which of our adversaries can we, and should, ally with so we are not the odd one out?
Long after he had left office, in 1992, elder statesman Richard Nixon explained the stakes for the U.S. and the free world in the future of post-communist Russia. It bears quoting:
Russia at the present time is at a crossroads. It is often said that the Cold War is over and that the West has won it. That’s only half true, because what has happened is that the Communists have been defeated, but the ideas of freedom now are on trial. If they don’t work, there will be a reversion to not communism, which has failed, but to what I call a new despotism, which would pose a mortal danger to the rest of the world because it would have been infected with the virus of Russian imperialism, which of course has been a characteristic of Russian foreign policy for centuries. We begin with that.
Therefore, the West—the United States—and all those who want peace and freedom in the world have a great stake in freedom succeeding in Russia. If it succeeds, it will be an example for others to follow. It will be for China, an example to follow. For the other communist states, the few that remain.
If it fails [in Russia], it means that the hardliners in China will get a new life. They will say, ‘It failed there. There’s no reason for us to turn to democracy.’ That’s part of what is at stake here. The other point that we have to have in mind is that it’s vitally important that it succeed because it means that Russia, which for seventy years has been exporting or trying to export the ideas of Communism to the world, will now be exporting the ideas of freedom, the ideas of democracy—the goods of freedom. It means that Russia, for example, will be able to export goods [and] that’ll be a huge export market for the United States and other countries.
So, I would simply sum it up to say… we have here a potential ally joining with the United States and other free countries…
Sadly, Mr. Nixon’s hopes for a truly free, democratic Russia did not come to pass. But the stakes remain for the U.S. and the free world, even if the prospects for freedom in the former Soviet Union remain elusive. Thus, as in the first Cold War, we are faced with allying with the lesser of two evils. Yet, such is the nature of statecraft in defense of America and the free world.
On my part, like Mr. Nixon, I am fervently anti-communist, for it is anathema to human dignity, and I am also a realist. Presently, Russia is a revanchist authoritarian regime. But there is currently only one genocidal communist country openly and admittedly engaged in unrestricted warfare against the United States and the free world—it is the People’s Republic of China.
Let America’s strategic triangulation of the PRC continue with all due alacrity until it reaches its just conclusion.
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An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003–2012. He served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee and as a member of the Financial Services, Joint Economic, Budget, Small Business, and International Relations Committees. Not a lobbyist, he is also a contributor to Chronicles, a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars, and a co-host of “John Batchelor: Eye on the World” on CBS radio, among sundry media appearances.
Thaddeus G. McCotter
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/09/on-the-strategic-triangulation-of-communist-china/
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