Trumps Russia reset sagely predicted 50 years ago

When Donald Trump announced during his first presidential campaign that the United States “should get along with Russia,” many dismissed it as naive, provocative or even dangerous. Washington’s foreign-policy establishment reacted with bewilderment. Then as now, Russia was widely regarded as a geopolitical adversary rather than a potential partner.

Yet Trump consistently repeated the point throughout his presidency. The US and Russia, he insisted, should cooperate where possible; China, not Russia, was America’s principal rival; and the era ahead would be defined less by ideology than by shifting global alignments.

These statements were not the improvisations of an outsider ignorant of geopolitical realities. Nor were they random departures from traditional US strategy. They were, in fact, remarkably close to a prediction made nearly half a century earlier by the American futurist Larry Taub (1936-2018).

In his macrohistorical model, first developed in 1976, Taub argued that the US and Russia would eventually move toward a strategic partnership, a northern “polar bloc” he called Polario.

This bloc would emerge not out of ideological affinity, but from deeper currents: geography, the rise of East Asia, resource access and the shared “frontier psychology” of two giant continental powers.

Today, as the Arctic melts, supply chains shift and China rises with unprecedented speed, Taub’s Polario framework offers a striking lens through which to interpret Trump’s Russia instincts and the broader realignment of the 21st century.

Geography is destiny

Taub’s futurism was unique. He was not interested in short-term forecasting or institutional politics. His model examined long-term arcs in which civilizational mindsets and cultural archetypes shape the new world order.

The United States and Russia, he argued, share a fundamental characteristic: Each is a frontier culture. The Russians had their Cossack frontier; Americans had the cowboy frontier. Each developed an ethos of expansion, improvisation and rugged individualism.

This does not make the countries politically similar, but it does place them in a distinct civilizational category: restless, exploratory and resource-oriented nations characterized by vast territories.

In Taub’s view, a partnership between these two “northern giants” would become attractive once global conditions shifted. Natural resources, shipping routes and strategic chokepoints would pull the US and Russia together just as surely as Cold War ideology had driven them apart.

Taub identified various similarities between the US and Russia, which was still the USSR when he first developed his models. He cited Alexis de Tocqueville, who had already made the same point in“Democracy in America”(1835). Tocqueville wrote:

There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans…. Their starting point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

Tocqueville pointed out the notable similarities:

• Both nations had grown in relative obscurity and suddenly emerged as major powers.
• Both were expanding across vast, resource-rich territories (the US westward, Russia eastward).
• Both faced open frontiers with room for rapid population and territorial growth, unlike the constrained European nations.

Taub noted additional similarities between the US and the then-USSR. In“The Spiritual Imperative”(initially self-published, in 1980), he wrote:

Both countries are superpowers with superpower mentalities…. Both are multicultural – they have multiethnic populations – but are dominated culturally, economically and politically by a main group (WASPs in the US and Canada, Russians in Russia).

Both the United States and Russia’s recent incarnation, the USSR, were born in revolutions against European empires, based on humanitarian political ideals rather than, as most countries in Europe, on the fact that a certain ethnic group or groups existed on their territories.

Both Russia and the US expanded by taking over the lands of indigenous peoples at about the same time (the 19th century). Both have “union,” or federated, political structures, mainly European cultural roots.…

Both countries have the largest weapons arsenals, capable, perhaps, of destroying the world, and years of experience in space exploration… Both had the Cowboy/Cossack mystique, and the related tendency to see all political/religious issues in simplistic, black-and-white terms.

Nixon redux

Against this backdrop, Trump’s foreign-policy instincts take on a different meaning. Throughout his campaign and presidency, Trump insisted that China, not Russia, posed the primary long-term challenge to American primacy.

In fact, Trump resurrected a geopolitical strategy formulated by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. Nixon’s China policy rested on a simple formula: keep China and Russia apart. His opening to China was designed precisely to prevent the formation of an integrated Eurasian bloc centered on Russia and China.

By the time Putin replaced Yeltsin, this strategic imperative was forgotten. America’s policymakers believed that Russia was too weakened, corrupt and marginalized to be of any meaningful use as a swing power.

Instead, the US took a victory lap as the sole remaining superpower. It decided, with Europe, to expand NATO eastward, the most consequential decision of the post-World War II era.

Resurgent nationalism

Another element of Taub’s macro-historical thinking that resonates strongly today is the resurgence of nationalism. After several decades of hyper-globalization, marked by deregulated capital flows, offshoring and the weakening of state capacity, societies across the political spectrum are reasserting cultural identity, domestic control and economic sovereignty.

From Trump’s “America First” to Modi’s “Make in India,” from Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman revivalism to Xi Jinping’s call for “national rejuvenation,” nationalism has become the dominant political grammar of the early 21st century.

This shift is not confined to authoritarian systems; it is equally visible in democratic societies, where voters increasingly demand that borders function, industries remain national and governments prioritize internal stability over abstract global commitments that benefit capital and multinationals without loyalty to the state.

Taub’s model treats this resurgence not as a regression or moral failure, but as a structural correction. Hyper-globalization promised efficiency, growth and interdependence, but it also produced hollowed-out industrial bases, regional inequality, cultural dislocation and political alienation. In such conditions, appeals to global responsibility lose legitimacy.

A nation that cannot maintain social cohesion, economic resilience or a sense of shared purpose at home cannot credibly exercise influence abroad. Foreign policy, in Taub’s view, is always downstream from domestic strength. When the internal foundations weaken, states instinctively retrench, consolidate and redefine priorities.

Trump’s rhetoric, whatever one thinks of its execution or tone, reflected this deeper global realignment. His emphasis on borders, manufacturing, energy independence and transactional diplomacy echoed similar instincts elsewhere, even among leaders who publicly opposed him.

In this sense, contemporary nationalism is not an aberration but the political surface expression of a broader civilizational shift – from expansion to consolidation, from global abstraction to territorial reality and from unipolarity to multipolarity.

Taub anticipated this moment as part of a long historical rhythm: Periods of outward integration are inevitably followed by phases of inward reconstruction. The current nationalist wave is best understood not as a rejection of the world, but as a need first to put one’s own house in order.

In this sense, nationalism is not an anomaly but rather the political expression of a more profound civilizational realignment.

What about BRICS?

Some critics argue that the rise of BRICS runs counter to Taub’s prediction of a US-Russia polar bloc. However, BRICS is a coalition of convenience rather than a coherent geopolitical alliance. Its purpose is not to form a unified bloc, but to dilute Western dominance in finance, governance and “global” institutions, all of which are based in Europe or the US.

Nothing in the BRICS framework prevents Russia from aligning with the US if conditions push in that direction. In Taub’s model, BRICS is a tactical formation in an era of flux, not the basis for a new world order.

Taub has often been criticized for making what appeared to be far-fetched geopolitical forecasts.

He replied by noting that people are usually focused on daily headlines and ignore the arc of history. Alliances can shift in a few years. He pointed at Germany and France. The two countries co-founded the EU in 1957, just 12 years after the end of World War II.

The enduring value of Taub’s macro-history lies not in its detailed prediction of geopolitical developments, but in the fact that major geopolitical reconfigurations follow civilizational patterns.

Whether Polario becomes a reality is impossible to predict. However, the underlying drivers Taub identified – geography, resources and China’s growing industrial and technological power, which will not peak for another two or three decades – can strengthen the gravitational pull between the two northern giants.

Trump sensed this shift intuitively. Taub articulated it decades earlier.

Jan Krikke is the editor of the new book “A Futurist for the 21st Century: The Macrohistory of Lawrence Taub (1936-2018).”