Iluzija „obrnutog Kisindžera“
The Illusion of the „Reverse Kissinger”

Summary/Abstract: The renewal of great power competition has intensified discussions about possible strategies for the United States towards the other two powers in the international system, Russia and China. One line of thought, whose popularity is growing with the return of Donald Trump to the White House, is the “reverse Kissinger” approach. Drawing on the analogy with the diplomacy of President Richard Nixon and his most influential foreign policy advisor, Henry Kissinger, in the early 1970s, when the renewal of US-China relations weakened the Soviet Union, it involves improving the United States’ relations with Russia in order to separate Moscow and Beijing, in order to limit the growing power of China. The main research problem of the paper is to review the possibilities of applying this strategy in the current strategic context. The theoretical framework used for this is the balance of threat. The central hypothesis of the paper is that the “reverse Kissinger” faces fundamental challenges caused by a different perception of the threat compared to the period of its original application. Unlike the 1970s, when Beijing identified Moscow as the main threat, today both powers see Washington’s policy as a central challenge, which is what made their strategic partnership possible. In addition, the tensions caused by the war in Ukraine and Russia’s growing economic dependence on China pose another serious obstacle to the implementation of this strategy. In such circumstances, the “reverse Kissinger” is an illusion based on faulty analogical reasoning.

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