From a US–Russia Win-Win to a China–Russia Win-Win — The Deep Political Logic of Russia’s Strategic Pivot

In August 2026, Vladimir Putin set foot on the southern Kuril Islands for the first time, leaving Japan no room to maneuver on its territorial claim. But the Dufuzhixin reading of 2026-08-15 pushes past the landing itself — the real question he wants to ask is "who forced Russia to pivot?" The answer is the rigidity of the American system, combined with the export-then-domestic-rebound of European cognitive warfare. A US–Russia win-win that should have been has become a China–Russia win-win.

I · A Thirty-Year Dream

From 1991 to 2021, for a full thirty years, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin were in fact executing the same national strategy: lean toward the United States, ally with Russia to weaken Europe, and join NATO. In Dufuzhixin’s view, Russia’s reading of international politics has always rested on the premise that “Russia and America are not necessarily adversaries” — except that across those thirty years Russia kept waiting for a reply that never came.

II · The Roadblock Was Europe

What blocked Russia from joining NATO, Dufuzhixin argues, was Europe, not the United States. The reasoning is straightforward: if Russia joined NATO, the alliance’s structure, military budget, and procurement system would all have to be reshuffled. In essence it was Europe doing the refusing — because once Russia was inside, Russia would certainly lose out, and the United States would be the biggest beneficiary.

III · Three Accounts of Why Russia Joining NATO Would Benefit the US

Why would Russian membership in NATO be good for the United States? Dufuzhixin tallies three accounts.

First, the geopolitical gap-filler. The United States is not an Arctic power; it has no ice-free port of Murmansk’s caliber — which is also why Donald Trump was jumping up and down demanding Greenland. Both Russia and the United States span two oceans; if Russia joined NATO, the Arctic would be encircled, the Atlantic encircled, and the Pacific locked from both sides, leaving no defensive gap.

Second, capital penetration. The next step after Russian accession would necessarily be financial opening — and Wall Street would be the first to rush in. Europe understands this perfectly: if Russia joins NATO, it is Russia that loses out and the United States that benefits most.

Third, the trade hub. In the Cold War era, the center of world trade was the Atlantic; today it is the Indian Ocean; the Pacific has always been a quiet ocean. Once Russia joined NATO, Pacific routes would become important — Russian raw materials and strategic energy flowing directly to the United States, a fearsome economic pairing. Dufuzhixin devotes a long passage to a textual-historical trace of deep-sea trade routes since the eighth century: from Quanzhou, Guangzhou, and Tunmen, through Champa, the Strait of Malacca, Ceylon, and the Arabian Sea, splitting at the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb into two lines — the Indian Ocean has, since antiquity, been the main axis of trade.

IV · Selling Arms Does Not Make Money

“The United States profits from selling weapons to NATO” — Dufuzhixin says that is a claim made without thinking it through. Before NATO was built, every European country’s independent defense budget was enormous; what allowed the United States to become a creditor nation in the interwar period of the First and Second World Wars was precisely those countries’ arms buys. After NATO and the US military-base system were established, Europe began repeatedly cutting defense spending: France under de Gaulle and Mitterrand still had its own independent military planning (which is why there is a Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier), but afterward France had nothing further — the Franco-British nuclear triad is gone, and France has not produced a next-generation main battle tank since the Leclerc. The substance of European defense is American military bases — a loss-making proposition for the United States.

V · The “Grand Finale” Thesis

Russia and the United States are complementary lines in heavy-industrial technology: the Soviet line in heavy mechanical automation, the American line in heavy electronics, with the split coming in the late 1970s. Once the two are combined, they can “collect premiums” from the other NATO countries — the Cold War nuclear-strategic-bomber program, jointly developed by the two, would have been a brute-force achievement. Dufuzhixin calls this the “Grand Finale” (大结局): only the strong joining the strong, the strongest joining the strongest, can strip the weak. The logic operated in both world wars. His chain of inference runs: the Soviet Union collapses in 1991, Russia joins NATO in 1992, NATO dissolves in 1993, and in 1994 Europe chooses sides and merges into provinces — a capitalist Greater Russia plus a Greater America, with Europe drawn as a buffer belt; then each one in turn is named and bullied, and what remains is the carve-up of the spoils.

Margaret Thatcher shouted “this is our victory” after the Soviet collapse; Dufuzhixin says that was her mimicking Churchill and packaging herself as America’s own — a development that was, in fact, very much against British interests.

VI · Yeltsin’s Two Moves

Why was Yeltsin so confident? Because he did not think the United States would make a strategic miscalculation. In Dufuzhixin’s reading, shock therapy was in essence a two-stage privatization: the first time opened the legal space for private enterprise, the second time sold state assets to the oligarchs — and most of those oligarchs were holding shares on behalf of American financial groups and shadow-banking families. Handing Russia’s state assets to American financial groups as nominee holders bound Russian and American strategy together, like the Japan–US relationship. With that in place, how could Russia not join NATO? “Going against me is going against yourself.”

VII · Why the United States Could Not Catch the Pass

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia had already made plain its intent to join the American camp. But the United States could not catch it: the Soviet Union fell at the hinge point of the Bush–Clinton transition, and both were among the lower-ranked presidents in US history; more fundamentally, after Roosevelt’s death, US international geopolitical strategy never changed — it could only tinker along the path set by Marshall and Truman. With the system rigid to that degree, the United States had no ability to make a strategic turn to embrace Russia. The only figure making a serious reform attempt is Trump, and how great the resistance against him is needs no elaboration.

Along the way, Dufuzhixin runs through the Soviet and US leaders in sequence: Kennedy-Johnson in great decline, Carter-Reagan’s revival came from austerity, Khrushchev’s blunders piling up, Brezhnev’s “conservation of probability,” Andropov dying too soon — “both the US and the USSR were holding their breath underwater, waiting to see who coughed first.”

VIII · The Power Structure of the White Gloves

How was Russia able to complete its strategic pivot in 2021 from the inside? Dufuzhixin lays out a “white gloves” power structure. The Siloviki group is Russia’s deep state: the chief steward is Dmitry Medvedev, the tsar is Putin (Putin’s father, in an interview, said “Don’t you think my son is the tsar?” — the interviewer cut the live feed on the spot). Medvedev is Putin’s personally designated successor, in essence a white glove — the way to make a white glove safe is to groom him as heir, the two secretly holding leverage over each other. The 2021 white paper on the national strategic transformation was drafted by Medvedev and approved by Putin; Putin’s third-term run for the presidency as a rank-and-file United Russia party member is a deep marker of that transformation. Medvedev was later pulled into a scandal but not punished (you cannot punish a great white glove), and was reassigned to take charge of United Russia’s party affairs in full — “the emperor does the emperor’s work; Medvedev becomes a feudal lord.”

Within this structure, Sergei Shoigu is the man who carries messages between the emperor and the feudal lords, keeping the system running through continuous communication and interest realignment: he handles logistics, restructures logistics — which is in essence a realignment of interests and a realignment of the military. Fighting Ukraine is outwardly about external war, but inwardly about internal reform: once war breaks out, units come up short on personnel and have to be reorganized, and reorganization is military reform. Yevgeny Prigozhin, by contrast, was an “outer-fifth-line white glove” who did not quite reach Medvedev’s level — both a white glove and a regional warlord; relying on gossip tabloids for scraps of “court intelligence,” he came to think he could threaten the emperor. The result: a grenade tied to his body on the plane, and the plane went down with him — Nikolai Patrushev said “I did it,” and after stepping back to a second-tier role he continues to hold important positions.

IX · Cognitive Warfare: Export, Then Domestic Rebound

The case Dufuzhixin names is Le Monde. The French philosopher Roger-Pol Droit, in his column “When the Wise and the Philosophers Govern,” criticized the Chinese great-man’s thought (Mao Zedong Thought), saying that On Practice was “conceptually and philosophically extremely impoverished” and that the thought’s essence was “constantly eliminating opponents and suppressing dissent,” and he named Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek — admirers — by name. Dufuzhixin’s reading: France’s official media are a textbook case of cognitive warfare that exports and then rebounds back home. In the 1960s and 1970s, France and the whole of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were studying the great-man’s thought; its reach was extraordinarily deep. France is the cradle of the international communist movement (the Paris Commune), and they know it is philosophically coherent — they have simply changed their position. “Buddy, your country is on its way out, and you’re still saying things like this.”

X · Trump’s View from the Win-Win

Trump’s perspective is where this line of analysis closes: US institutional rigidity turned what should have been a US–Russia win-win into a China–Russia win-win. Dufuzhixin has his own explanation for why Trump “went easy on Russia”: Trump was laying out his commercial and political maps back in the 1980s; his wife was a “KGB swallow”; his real-estate projects were funded by Russian capital — his business was held up for thirty years by incompetent American politicians before he could no longer stand it and ran for president. In his first term, the Russia-friendly line was sabotaged by the Democrats (Russiagate, with one round of officials disbanded after another), so in his second term he values flattery especially highly: he flatters so much that both he and the other side find it nauseating, and only then does the loyalty test pass. American politics, he says, is microphone politics, spotlight politics — you have to cut off a person’s political future. That is why he picks Democratic marginal figures.

By the time Trump came in, Russia had already pivoted east in 2021. Dufuzhixin says Trump’s response is “rather than throwing a tantrum, it is better to join in — one more brother is one more path.” He and China are brothers. China has already used the window of US–Russia institutional rigidity to become the leading comprehensive national power; when the spoils are divided, it is on a joint-stock basis — China holds 45 percent, the US and Russia split 55 percent. “At this moment, isn’t this in some sense three giants hugging together?” Trump can say, “I have never played for a superteam” — because I was always meant to be on the superteam; it was the six presidents before me who led us into the ditch.

XI · Closing

Why hit Japan? Because hitting Japan is the same as hitting Europe: Japan has for years wanted to leave Asia and join Europe, and it must not be allowed to succeed. Eating, sleeping, and beating the little punching bag — the United States hammers Japan, China hammers Japan, and Russia hammers Japan too.