The United States pursued this goal while holding together its traditional alliance structure, including even the relationship with Taiwan. That U.S.-Taiwan relationship was downgraded in protocol—the U.S. Embassy was renamed “the American Institute in Taiwan”—but China accepted American protection of Taiwan as the price for American help against the Soviet Union. Indeed, Taiwan’s most flourishing days began after the Nixon breakthrough with Beijing.

Compare and contrast with Trump’s gambit, if gambit is what it is. Trump has consistently committed himself first, without receiving any reciprocal consideration from Russia. Trump jolted the Chinese with a phone call from the president of Taiwan. He violated the rule that a president-elect keeps quiet about foreign policy to tweet two provocative comments about the Chinese seizure of an American naval drone. Meanwhile, Trump also appears to have committed himself to a series of unilateral concessions to Russia: on Syria, on Crimea, and even on Putin’s human rights record. (“We kill people too, Joe.”) Trump has appointed a national security adviser once paid by a Russian television network and a secretary of state who accepted a Russian medal.

Along the way, Trump has done damage to NATO, by calling into question the certainty of the treaty’s security guarantees, and endorsed British exit from the European Union, an important milestone on Putin’s project of dividing the European Union into smaller, weaker parts, each dependent on Russian energy. The U.S.-German relationship, already cool in the Obama years, has chilled to its most frigid since the end of the Cold War.

Meanwhile the Russia-China relationship remains as cordial as it was back when Chinese President Xi Jinping pronounced the two nations “friends forever” back in the summer of 2016.

Does all this look like Trump is playing some brilliant gambit? Doesn’t it look rather more like that he is the one being played?

Imagine for a moment how all this looks from Vladimir Putin’s side of the table. Russia has a GDP about the same size as Italy’s. It is weaker than any of its political competitors: the U.S., China, or a united Europe. Putin's best strategy is to divide each of those potential competitors from the others—and then to subdivide them against themselves. That strategy has been hugely advanced by the election of Donald Trump. China and the United States have already been set at loggerheads. NATO has been turned against itself, the credibility of its security guarantees already visibly dented. Russia’s prestige is rising: Pro-Russian governments have been elected in the border countries of Estonia and Moldova, a pro-Russian coup was only last month thwarted in the Adriatic country of Montenegro, and pro-Russian anti-EU parties are rising across not only central but also Western Europe.