Splitting Russia and China is a Fool's Errand
In 1972, when President Nixon visited China, he wasn’t just shaking hands with Mao Zedong, he was driving a wedge into the heart of the communist world. The trip marked a turning point in Cold War history, one that exploited the deep strategic rift between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Many in Washington today dream of pulling off something similar with Russia and China, splitting one from the other to isolate China. But this is a fantasy. The world has changed. And so has the nature of the China-Russia relationship.
A recent Foreign Affairs article cowritten by former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, prompted me to write this piece. It discusses how the idea of splitting China and Russia today is a distraction from navigating a changing world that is very different from the Cold War context. Its also important as a counter to the current administration’s strategy of thawing relations with Russia. The idea that we can drive a wedge between Russia and China is the underlying assumption behind this strategy.
To understand why the old playbook doesn’t work, we need to understand what made it possible in the first place.
A Real Split, Not a Strategic Illusion
By the time of Nixon’s visit to Beijing, China and the Soviet Union had been at each other’s throats for more than a decade. The split began in the late 1950s, as Mao grew disillusioned with what he saw as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s revisionism and softness toward the West. The Soviets, meanwhile, saw Mao as dangerously reckless, particularly after the disastrous Great Leap Forward and China’s push for its own nuclear weapons.
Adding to this, China had historic territorial disputes with the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire dating back 200 hundred years. The two communist powers had a border of over 2,700 miles that was heavily armed. On the surface, and in the minds of Western policymakers, China and the USSR were part of a unified, monolithic communist block. But, looking deeper, the two countries behaved more like rivals.
By 1969, the two countries were exchanging artillery fire along the Ussuri River dividing the northeastern Chinese region of Manchuria from the Russian Far East. Border skirmishes escalated into deadly firefights. Ideologically, they were locked in a bitter feud over who was the true leader of the international communist movement. Each saw the other as a heretic. And geopolitically, they were competing for influence in the Third World, each trying to win over newly independent nations in Africa and Asia.
That was the door Nixon and Kissinger walked through. It was a real fissure, not a manufactured one. U.S. diplomacy succeeded not because it was clever, but because it recognized and exploited a preexisting rift. Their “genius” was being able to see what was right in front of everyone’s nose.
Today’s Alignment: Less About Friendship, More About Fear
Fast forward to 2025. China and Russia are not ideological siblings, but they’re not rivals either. They don’t fight over the soul of Communism; China definitively owns that legacy. They’re not squabbling over borders. What they share is more important than affinity: they share a sense of threat. Both see the U.S.-led order, not just American military power, but liberal values, open societies, and global institutions, as a danger to their regimes.
They aren’t forming an alliance based on mutual trust. What binds them is mutual utility. China gets energy, raw materials, and a strategic partner willing to absorb the costs of confrontation with the West. Russia gets economic lifelines and diplomatic cover in the wake of its war in Ukraine. Both benefit from coordination at the U.N., in BRICS, and in global narratives challenging Western “hegemony.”
Russia and China also are not “rivals” in a strategic sense. The Russian Far East is lightly populated in comparison to the Chinese side of the border. They are not peer competitors: Russia is clearly a junior partner and relies on China as an economic lifeline to get around sanctions and stay plugged into the global economy. Their relationship is marked by deepening cooperation (some would argue Russian subservience).
More importantly, both see democratic values as subversive, not just geopolitically, but existentially. From Beijing’s perspective, movements like the 2019 Hong Kong protests aren’t just local unrest; they’re part of a global threat to regime stability. For Moscow, popular revolts in Ukraine and Georgia, aren’t just grassroots uprisings: they were Western-backed assaults on Russian influence.
That worldview shapes how they engage with the world and with each other.
The Myth of a “Reverse Kissinger”
Too much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment remains enamored with the idea of re-running the 1970s playbook. The logic is appealing: if we could split China and Russia then, surely we can do it again now. But this is wishful thinking dressed up as strategy.
Unlike during the Cold War, there are no ideological purity tests or territorial grievances driving them apart. If anything, their alignment is stronger because it’s less emotional. It’s pragmatic. It’s durable. And in many ways, it’s post-ideological. Both regimes see survival as the core objective, and cooperation as the best way to achieve it, and see common cause in weakening a U.S. led world order.
In that sense, trying to engineer a split is worse than ineffective. It distracts from the real work the U.S. needs to do.
A Strategy Grounded in Competitive Realism
Instead of chasing divisions that don’t exist, at least at the moment, the United States should be investing in its own strengths and preparing for long-term competition.
IF there is a scenario where a Russia-China split develops THEN it can be exploited. But that requires undermining the strategic logic of their alliance, which is that the U.S. can be weakened with a united front to their benefit.
First, get the basics right. This means creating a strategy to rebuild industrial capacity in the long-term, securing supply chains, and reducing dependence on authoritarian regimes for critical technologies. It also means making serious investments in energy security both for domestic resilience and to support allies under economic pressure.
Second, strengthen alliances. Not just NATO, but broader coalitions in the Indo-Pacific and the developing world. Countries like India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Brazil may not want to pick sides in a great power competition, but they don’t want to live in a world dominated by China and Russia either. The U.S. must offer a better alternative, not just militarily, but economically and diplomatically.
Third, take ideology seriously—but not simplistically. This isn’t about exporting democracy at gunpoint. It’s about understanding that values matter. Liberal democracies have inherent advantages—openness, innovation, legitimacy—but only if they function well. Protecting democratic institutions at home, and supporting them abroad, should be seen as strategic, not just moral. Its the one major rallying point the U.S. has.
Where the Debate Should Go Next
What’s missing from the conversation is an honest reckoning with structural change. We’re not in a unipolar or bipolar world anymore. Power is distributed differently, alliances are more fluid, and legitimacy is contested. U.S. strategy needs to evolve accordingly.
Instead of trying to return to the comforts of the Cold War, we need to adapt to the uncertainties of a more multipolar, more ideologically diverse world. That means thinking less about how to divide our adversaries, and more about how to outcompete them over time.
The good news is we’ve done it before. The United States didn’t “win” the Cold War because we split China and Russia. We won because our system proved stronger: economically, politically, and morally. The task now is to prove that again.