Trump isn’t wrong to want North Korea’s nuclear program to end. He’s not wrong to want North Korea to end. It is, after all, the closest thing to hell on earth. Ending its nuclear program would be a blessing, and freeing its 25 million people would be the greatest advance of human freedom since the end of the Cold War. But if the Trump administration is to have any chance of moving in that direction, it must begin thinking not only about what China can do for America but what America can do for China.

The Chinese aren’t suckers. They won’t strangle an ally just because Trump promises not to start a trade war that would hurt America as much as them. The most tempting carrot Trump could dangle would be a promise that, if Korea reunifies, America won’t move its troops into what is currently the North. The Chinese might not believe those promises. After all, the Russians think America promised not to move U.S. troops into East Germany after that country reunified. But the Trump administration could at least begin a conversation about how to alleviate Chinese fears of reunification. It could support warmer relations between Seoul and Beijing. As part of a deal, it could even withdraw the THAAD anti-ballistic missile system it began deploying in South Korea this spring, a system the Chinese fear is aimed at much at them as against Pyongyang.

The problem is that this type of thinking runs directly contrary to the mentality Republicans inherited from the Cold War. As Trump’s foreign policy has become more conventionally conservative, he seems to have embraced the conventional conservative myth about Ronald Reagan: that Reagan brought down the Soviet empire through ideological pressure and unyielding hostility. Like the George W. Bush administration, which thought it could curb Iran’s nuclear program by branding Tehran a member of the “axis of evil” (a riff on “evil empire”), threatening “preemptive” war, and refusing to negotiate until Tehran stopped enriching uranium, the Trump administration is now ruling out direct negotiations with Pyongyang and openly threatening a military strike. Last week Mike Pence, who loves comparing Trump to Reagan, stared fiercely across the DMZ while remembering a youthful visit to the Berlin Wall.

This is horrendous policymaking based on historical ignorance. Yes, Reagan built up America’s military, aided anti-communist regimes and rebels, and morally condemned the U.S.S.R. But by 1984, Reagan’s genuine terror of nuclear war (sparked in part by movies about the subject), and his concern that his warmonger reputation might imperil his reelection, had led him to shift his rhetoric. That January, 15 months before Mikhail Gorbachev took over the Soviet Union, Reagan said in a speech that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. “should always remember that we do have common interests and the foremost among them is to avoid war and reduce the level of arms.” When Vice President Bush travelled to Moscow for the funeral of Gorbachev’s predecessor, Konstantin Chernenko, the White House instructed him to tell the new leader that “We should seek to rid the world of the threat or use of force.” When Reagan met Gorbachev in 1985, he told him, “I bet the hardliners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands.” By 1987, Reagan had signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the first agreement of the Cold War to actually destroy nuclear weapons. This was two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Charles Krauthammer was still calling Gorbachev “Khrushchev with a tailor.”