A curious habit of any true-blue historian is considering who “lost” whom. Did we “lose” Eastern Europe to Stalin? Was China “lost” to Mao? Perhaps. President Donald Trump seems to think that “we” lost India and Russia to China. “Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to the deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!” Trump wrote in a social media post accompanying a photo of the three leaders together at President Xi Jinping’s SCO summit. Trump was keenly watching both those events, just as Xi wanted.
It seems unwise to judge this administration on a day-to-day basis, as no one actually knows who is in charge. Is the Pentagon in charge of us baiting Venezuela into a conflict? Is the administration in charge of its own forthcoming National Defense Strategy? Does the document even have any meaning, given the mercurial principals notionally overseeing it? At the time of writing, Trump appears to have moderated his tone regarding India, a sentiment instantly reciprocated by a canny Narendra Modi. Nevertheless, there has been forever a talk of a “reverse Kissinger,” this time splitting Russia from China rather than China from Russia. While that hasn’t happened, what has happened is a “reverse Kissinger” in the sense that we have ensured that three major powers of Eurasia are now aligned instead of divided. Nixon’s Metternich is probably turning in his grave at the undoing of his geopolitical masterstroke.
The photo in Trump’s post is incredible, an artifact of something never before achieved through either folly or farce, even at the height of the Cold War, and something that was actively avoided as core policy for the last 80 years: uniting Eurasia against the United States. For an administration that claims to be “not neoconservative,” this was a very “with us or against us” foreign policy, with results predictable by anyone with an over-room-temperature IQ.
The recently concluded National Conservatism summit in Washington, DC, ended on a triumphal note—it started in DC in 2019, and lo, it is at its zenith in 2025. After all, we are only trying to displace an entire population to turn its home into a riviera, trying to settle peace for errant clients and protectorates that are not interested in it, lecturing a continent on how to run its own affairs and domestic policies, and planning to bring the War on Terror home, this time against the cartels. Gone are the halcyon days of March, of burden-shifting and “commerce, not chaos.” Take that, neoconservatives!
But even amid many other moronic ideas, the notion that any attempted coercion that leads one-third of humanity—India, a pharma and manufacturing giant, Russia, the world’s largest nuclear power, and China, another manufacturing giant and America’s real Asian peer rival—into an alignment of necessity against what increasingly looks like a mindless Jacobin power will not affect the U.S. is genuinely strange to think. When the original American realists tried to divide Eurasia for over 80 years, the logic was simply Mackinderian: You cannot simply have a third of humanity actively hate you because they might entice another third towards them by simply being less arrogant than you. When that happens, more relevantly than a military threat, your trade power will go kaput. The sanction power and reserve currency that we are so confident about will be used against us. Hedging is important in international relations, something our new aspirational counterelites, the same ones who constantly harp on the glory days of prewar WASPdom, never somehow seem to grasp in their crusading spirit. This administration is not used to pushback, or worse, being ignored. India turned out not to be Armenia or South Sudan or Thailand or Europe or Japan. Tokyo and Brussels are both militarily dependent on Washington, DC. New Delhi isn’t.
The most interesting thing about uber-democratic online commentary on foreign policy from the populist right is not how dumb it sounds. It’s the almost superhuman combination of a lack of intelligence and curiosity and an extreme overconfidence, a weird, toxic mix of Obama and Bush ’43. Consider the administration’s current attack dog of choice, Peter Navarro, in all matters related to the Indian purchase of oil from Russia; he recently claimed that it is the Indian Brahmins who are apparently profiting as their countrymen suffer. You don’t have to be a colonial imperialist to see how factually ignorant that is. The fact is that Navarro simply wanted to impose the American racial white–black or the Marxist capital–labor dichotomy on an ancient and complex society. But Brahmins traditionally were the priests and scholars in ancient India, and, while casteism is officially banned in modern India, in modern times one can still see the Brahmin prevalence in intellectual professions of law, medicine, and the professoriate—but not business. Whatever the Brahmins are, they are not the “capitalist class” in India.
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The good thing, as in anything related to history, is that this state of affairs isn’t permanent. History is cyclical; this government won’t last forever. The “multiracial working class coalition” is already fraying at the seams, if for no other reason than the rampant social media abuse of parts of its constituents by other emboldened member groups of the coalition. India, Russia, China, and the U.S. are individual great powers, and sooner or later they’ll come to an equilibrium. But three-quarters of a century of American Asia policy now lies in tatters, partly due to the unhinged, incoherent policies of the administration and partly due to the Raw-Egg-Nationalization of grand strategy: foreign policy by social media clout. International relations is a domain of the elites because it needs prudence, propriety, realism, and restraint; that restraint is also behavioral. The fact that our previous elites were not good at foreign policy is no justification to make an uber-democratic statecraft that encourages the most functionally retarded elements to think they are wise and omniscient.
There is one core principle of realism, and it has everything to do with numbers: Don’t alienate too many people. All historical revolutionary powers—Jacobin France, Nazi Germany, or Bolshevik Russia—risked that. They were arrogant and crusading, and as a result, overstretched. No one likes a hectoring power, and a crusading foreign policy never won, even during the actual crusades. The relevant question is not moral, but numerical. Jacobins, Nazis, and Bolsheviks lost their biggest gambles because they alienated everyone, while the other side unified and made impartial use of its talents. The system manages to slap down the one who’s stupid or overbearing. It’s pretty Darwinian.
If Trump truly believes that “we” lost Russia and India, he might want to relay that message to his administration and aides who are responsible for that loss. There might still be time to correct the course.
