As Donald Trump pleads with the war-mongering media to give peace a chance with Russia, the right-wing intellectual apparatus surrounding his presidency is preparing for a more titanic clash of civilizations. “We’re at war with China,” declared Steve Bannon, the ideological godfather of Trump’s early days in office. The former White House chief strategist, sporting his trademark double collar, was delivering remarks at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha event at the luxury Pierre hotel on Fifth Avenue. “How it ends is in victory,” he predicted. “Victory is when they give all full access to their markets.”

Bannon, of course, has been fixated on the threat arising in the East for years. So has Trump, who has been ranting about shifty Asian interlopers since the 1980s. On the campaign trail, he accused China of “raping” the United States with its trade policies, and “killing” American jobs; shortly after the election, he angrily tweeted that China did not have his “permission” to construct artificial islands in the South China Sea, a geopolitical flash point that experts fear could one day ignite a regional war. For a handful of China hard-liners in the president’s inner circle, that conflict may be inevitable. Trump, Bannon, explained at the CNBC event, is aware that he needs to “unite the West against the rise of a totalitarian China.”

From the outside, Trumpworld’s concurrent belligerence toward China and passivity toward Russia seem contradictory. Both, after all, represent potent geopolitical risks to the United States. For years, Moscow has waged a covert campaign to disrupt democratic institutions in Europe and the United States, propped up abhorrent regimes in the Middle East, and thwarted U.S. diplomatic efforts around the world. China has quickly become a muscular economic power seeking to project its influence across Asia and into Africa. In truth, however, the far right’s Sinophobia is not inconsistent with its Russophilia. For Bannon, China and the former Ottoman Empire, as he calls it, are civilizational threats. Like many nationalists, Bannon sees in arch-conservative Russia a traditionalist, ethnically white ally.

Bannon, who has spent the year since his eviction from the White House supporting proto-fascist movements throughout Europe, neatly elucidated the importance of this alliance in a 2014 talk at the Vatican. Traditionalists “believe that at least Putin is standing up for traditional institutions, and he’s trying to do it in a form of nationalism—and I think that people, particularly in certain countries, want to see the sovereignty for their country. They want to see nationalism for their country,” he explained during a question-and-answer session following his speech. “They don’t believe in this kind of pan-European Union, or they don’t believe in the centralized government in the United States. They’d rather see more of a states-based entity that the founders originally set up, where freedoms were controlled at the local level.”

The “Judeo-Christian West,” he concluded, “really have to look at what he’s talking about, as far as traditionalism goes—particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism—and I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing. I think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors, and that is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.”

This mind-meld is more than philosophical. As Jeet Heer notes in The New Republic, the ideology underpinning a potential geopolitical re-alignment is also racial. He points to a quote from the conservative historian John Lukacs: “It is not impossible that the most important condition of the next hundred years might be that the Russians are, after all, white.” In 1986, the essayist Gore Vidal made the same argument in The Nation, writing that “an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity” to unite “the white race” against “one billion grimly efficient Asiatics.” For those unconvinced by the racial argument, there is the matter of religious orthodoxy: after the fall of the Soviet Union, many Christian conservative leaders in the U.S. awoke to the reality that they had more in common with their anti-gay, anti-feminist Russian analogues than they had previously realized.

That promise of a U.S.-Russia alliance, formerly relegated to dark corners of the far right, has resisted mainstream acceptance in U.S. foreign policy—until now. Since Trump took office, the percentage of Republicans expressing “somewhat favorable” or “very favorable” views of Putin has skyrocketed from 8 percent to around 30 percent. Still, there is a rich irony in the way Trump and the Bannonites have gone about trying to establish this new world order. The same protectionist policies that the White House has implemented to strike at Beijing have in fact done the most damage to America’s Western partners, undermining relations with Canada, Britain, France, Germany, and Australia, among other allies. So far, the only party that seems to be profiting from the mischief is Moscow.

Bannon, however, seems to have a longer game in mind. While Trump’s trade policies drive up the price of MAGA hats and accelerate the movement of jobs overseas, the former White House chief strategist has been busy cultivating a new generation of nativist, pro-Russian leaders in Europe to invert the continent’s current liberal-democratic orientation—and to precipitate an antipodal alliance. That movement, until recently, had been mostly kept at bay. But a new era of mass immigration, Islamophobia, and a rising China could change the equation. If Bannon has his way, he may yet get the war he has been yearning for.

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