America's Khrushchev moment

There is no more tired cliché than Mark Twain’s quote “history rarely repeats itself, but it often rhymes”. But sometimes, it’s hard not to use it: the similarities between what we’re witnessing today in Europe-US relations and the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s are pretty eerie.

As a reminder, the Sino-Soviet split occurred due to an ideological fracture in the Communist bloc whereby Mao accused the Soviets of being “revisionists” after Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization and his embrace of “peaceful coexistence” with the West.

Khrushchev’s shift had two drivers. The first was military: he broke with Stalin’s hawkish doctrine because nuclear weapons meant mutual annihilation. The second was economic: he wanted to redirect resources toward domestic development - his (somewhat deluded) promise to “catch up and overtake” the West economically.

All in all, Khrushchev’s “peaceful coexistence” was the Soviet Union’s resignation letter from the Cold War as total struggle. It was them saying they were no longer willing to bear the costs of a confrontation they used to define as civilization-defining.

China was, at the time, very much the Soviet Union’s junior partner, dependent on Soviet technical assistance, aligned with Moscow’s ideological framework, and committed to a confrontation with the West that it believed was the defining struggle of the era. Khrushchev’s pivot to “peaceful coexistence” wasn’t just a policy shift - it was a betrayal of everything China thought the partnership stood for.

Fast forward to today and it’s hard not to see the parallel.

“Peaceful coexistence” is quite literally what Trump is now saying he wants to achieve with Russia (and, to some extent, China): he’s repeated dozens of times that “getting along with Russia is a good thing” and that it was a mistake to spend “trillions and trillions of dollars” on confrontation. And just like Khrushchev, he’s telling the junior partners - Europeans: the struggle you organized everything around is no longer worth it to us.

Europeans are, somewhat understandably, in a state of shock and reeling. And they’re beginning to draw conclusions. Watch what Germany’s chancellor just said yesterday 👇

There’s no overstating just how extraordinary it is for a German chancellor, and all the more a CDU chancellor (traditionally the most pro-US party), to say that Pax Americana “no longer exists” and to now frame US-Europe relations as fundamentally adversarial. Crucially, Merz also made clear later in his speech that this isn’t about Trump personally. “This course is not temporary,” he said. “Trump did not appear overnight, and this policy will not disappear overnight either.” In other words: this is structural, the old America isn’t coming back.

I’m not claiming in the least that he or any EU leader today are Mao-like figures (if only!) but the emotional and strategic position is the same: junior partners who took the shared ideology seriously, who bore real costs for the common cause, are now discovering that the senior partner’s commitment was always conditional.

The parallels don’t stop here. If you read the U.S.’s latest National Security Strategy, it’s a radical departure from the post-WW2 consensus. It formally abandons global hegemony which it calls a “fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal”, announces a retreat to the homeland and the Western Hemisphere via a revived Monroe Doctrine, and reframes the contest with China as economic rather than military: “Win the Economic Future, Prevent Military Confrontation” is the title of the China section. It very much reads like Khrushchev’s playbook with American characteristics.

Key Washington insiders, like Richard Haass who presided the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations for 20 years, agree on the magnitude of the change. He just wrote on his Substack that his country is undergoing “the biggest redirection of U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II and the dawn of the Cold War 80 years ago”. Pretty dramatic!

Chas Freeman, pretty much ideologically opposed to Haass - he’s a former Assistant Secretary of Defense turned critic of the U.S. establishment who thinks Haass and his ilk caused this mess - arrived at the same broad conclusion in a speech he entitled “ceding the future to China” (bear in mind that Freeman is probably one the former senior U.S. officials most sympathetic and knowledgeable on China): “We Americans are now well along in our withdrawal from the world order we once championed and helped establish.”

The Russians essentially agree too, calling the new U.S. strategic direction “largely consistent with our vision,” and the Chinese as well, although in a characteristically more discreet way. Chen Yixin, the current head of China’s powerful Ministry of State Security (MSS, basically the CIA and the FBI all wrapped in one), recently wrote in Study Times - the official newspaper of the Central Party School of the Communist Party - that “the international power configuration is moving from unipolarity to multipolarity.” He describes “great power unipolar hegemony” (aka US hegemony) as “becoming increasingly unsustainable, with accelerating democratic anomalies, economic decline, and social fragmentation internally, and accelerating credit bankruptcy, hegemonic failure, and myth-shattering externally.” That last phrase is particularly striking: 神话破灭, the collapse of the myth - the end of the American mystique of invincibility.

Which all means that there is a remarkable consensus emerging from Washington to Moscow to Beijing to Berlin: American primacy is ending. The establishment and its critics, the rivals and the allies - all see it. When even Germany’s most Atlanticist chancellor declares Pax Americana dead, the diagnosis is no longer controversial.

The question now is therefore no more if American global hegemony is ending but why and what comes next?

To answer this question, I’ve spent the past week analyzing in depth the US’s new National Security Strategy line by line, going through the tedious work of comparing it with past strategies going back to 2010 (5 NSS documents in total). As you will see, not only is it indeed a radical shift from the past, it’s clear that Trump might in fact be America’s Khrushchev.