“The Chinese, recently disclosed that the Russians approach Nixon with a plan to wage preemptive war on Maoist China, perhaps suggesting that the U.S. could play either a supporting role or simply step aside, and that Nixon “saved China” by telling the Soviet Russians in no uncertain terms of don’t do it or risk atomic war.”

This actually confirms a story I heard once, that Mao once remarked to Kruschev at the time of the Sino-Soviet split that the Soviets would run out nukes before China ran out of peasants. Even Solzhenitsyn, the archetypal anti-Soviet Russian intellectual, once warned the West in his famous Harvard speech that if the Chinese got the latest Western modern weapons and could build them in bigger quantities it would be game over for the West. Solzhenitysn may have been slightly off on that but he was not wrong about the internal decline of the West.

Even back in the mid-80s supposedly at the height of the Reagan era tensions, P.J. O’Rourke reported getting drunk with some Russian guys along the Volga, one of them a WWII vet, and toasting to the U.S. and Russia someday being allies against China.