"Reversing Kissinger The former secretary of state’s 1972 opening to China badly weakened the U.S."

The self-proclaimed "expert" class has led the world into some very dark and dangerous places in many, many fields of endeavor.

From Tablet magazine, March 5, 2025:

Reversing Kissinger
The former secretary of state’s 1972 opening to China badly weakened the U.S. By dispensing with that conceit, Trump shows he intends for America to win the great-power competition. 

The undiplomatic words that Donald Trump had for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week left some Washington, D.C., observers wondering how the Europeans saw the situation. After all, they wondered, if that’s how Trump treats a war-torn country fighting for its independence against Russian despot Vladimir Putin, what do Paris, London, and Rome, etc. think about U.S. security commitments?

Other foreign policy analysts recognize that Trump has many audiences outside the United States, including those in Moscow and Beijing. Many of these Trump watchers conjectured that the spectacle at the White House was meant to illustrate that Trump was willing to tilt against Ukraine in order to accommodate Putin. And the reason for that, they say, is to drive a wedge between Russia and China, what Trump sees as America’s No. 1 threat.

The Washington foreign policy establishment is calling what it presumes to be Trump’s Russia policy “reverse Kissinger.” That is, Trump is using the same tactic employed by Richard Nixon’s chief foreign policy aide Henry Kissinger when he encouraged his boss to open relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and thereby “play the China card” against the more powerful Soviet Union. And in February 1972, Nixon went to Beijing, forging the opening with China. Trump, some are arguing, is doing the same, except going the other way.

Indeed, Kissinger himself had prophesied the coming of the “reverse Kissinger,” for as he told Nixon only days before their fateful 1972 trip, a future American president “if he’s as wise as you, will wind up leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese.”

Kissinger reportedly suggested the idea to Trump in 2017 and the president told me for my forthcoming book on China that lots of people agreed it was a bad idea to let Russia and China get close. There were many in the administration who wanted to see if there was a way to work with Moscow to hobble Beijing, but there was no way to get around Russiagate.

"Kissinger’s idea of an international order based on cooperation and comity was an early advertisement 

for what we now call globalism—the very order that the ‘America First’ president opposes and seeks to undo."

The surveillance and propaganda operation managed by Barack Obama’s spy chiefs who alleged that the Trump circle had illicit ties to Russia consumed most of Trump’s first term, and made it impossible for him to engage with Putin on most meaningful issues. Thus, Russiagate was more than a Beltway scandal featuring U.S. spy services that tried to topple the government; it’s a still-unfolding national security disaster of the first order that limited the president’s ability to secure American peace and advance our prosperity.

Insofar as it kept Trump from testing the waters to see if he might split Russia from China, Russiagate was effectively a pro-CCP information operation benefiting a U.S. ruling class—including media, Big Tech, and corporate elites alongside the security services—whose wealth, power, and prestige are fruits of the opening with China. Many of those now disdainful of Trump’s initiative are deeply invested in his failure since weakening China weakens them. Naturally they’re going to say that Trump can’t pull it off—because, for among other reasons, Trump isn’t as smart as America’s most famous statesman. However, a more critical look at the opening shows that Kissinger and his boss bungled it badly.

Trump’s critics are right that there’s nothing now analogous to the fault line underlying the 1972 opening—there’s no obvious breathing space between Moscow and Beijing like the Sino-Soviet split that drove the two communist juggernauts apart starting with the 1953 death of Josef Stalin. But Kissinger fans give him far too much credit for seizing that opportunity, when the plain fact is that he misplayed the gift that fell into his lap....

....MUCH MORE

The damage done by the "Russiagate" perpetrators and their cheerleaders on both legacy and social media is far greater than anything any terrorists have attempted, and could yet fracture the United States.