When Donald Trump declared during his first presidential campaign that the United States “should get along with Russia,” many dismissed it as naive, provocative or 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 repeatedly made the point throughout his presidency: the US and Russia should cooperate where possible; China, not Russia, was America’s principal rival; and the coming era would be defined less by ideology than by shifting global alignments.
These statements were neither improvisations nor random departures from US strategy. They closely echo a prediction made nearly half a century earlier by the American futurist Larry Taub (1936–2018). In a macrohistorical model first developed in 1976, Taub argued that the US and Russia would eventually gravitate toward a strategic partnership — a northern “polar bloc” he called Polario.
Taub argued that this bloc would arise not from ideological affinity but from deeper forces: geography, the rise of East Asia, resource access and a shared “frontier psychology” between two vast continental powers. As the Arctic melts, supply chains shift and China rises, Taub’s Polario framework offers a striking lens for understanding Trump’s instincts toward Russia and broader 21st-century realignment.
Geography is destiny
Taub’s futurism focused on long-term civilizational patterns rather than short-term politics. He saw both the United States and Russia as frontier cultures: the Russians with a Cossack frontier, Americans with a cowboy frontier. Both developed an ethos of expansion, improvisation and rugged individualism. That doesn’t make them politically identical, but it places them in a similar civilizational category: restless, exploratory, resource-oriented and territorially vast.
In Taub’s view, a partnership between these “northern giants” would become attractive when global conditions shifted. Natural resources, new shipping routes and strategic chokepoints would draw the US and Russia together as surely as Cold War ideology once drove them apart.
Taub identified parallels between the US and the USSR (as Russia was then). He echoed Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation in Democracy in America (1835) that two great nations — Russia and America — though different in origin and course, seemed destined to shape large swaths of the globe. Tocqueville noted that both emerged from relative obscurity, expanded across vast resource-rich territories, and faced open frontiers allowing rapid growth unlike the constrained European powers.
In The Spiritual Imperative (1980), Taub expanded the comparison: both nations had superpower mentalities, multiethnic populations dominated by a principal group (WASPs in North America, Russians in Russia), revolutionary origins against European empires, expansion histories that displaced indigenous peoples, federated political structures and the largest weapons arsenals. Both carried a Cowboy/Cossack mystique and a tendency toward black-and-white thinking.
Nixon redux
Seen through this lens, Trump’s foreign-policy instincts take on renewed meaning. Trump consistently argued that China, not Russia, posed the primary long-term challenge to American primacy. That argument resurrected a geopolitical logic formulated by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1970s: keep China and Russia apart. Nixon’s opening to China aimed to prevent an integrated Eurasian bloc centered on Moscow and Beijing.
By the time Vladimir Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin, American policymakers largely assumed Russia was too weakened or corrupt to serve as a meaningful swing power. The US then pursued NATO enlargement — a consequential post-war choice that deepened Europe’s alignment with the West and, critics argue, contributed to Russia’s estrangement from Eurasian partnership possibilities.
Resurgent nationalism
A second Taubian theme evident today is the resurgence of nationalism. After decades of hyper-globalization — deregulated capital flows, offshoring and weakened state capacity — societies across political spectrums are reasserting cultural identity, domestic control and economic sovereignty. From Trump’s “America First” to Modi’s “Make in India,” Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman impulses to Xi Jinping’s “national rejuvenation,” nationalism has become the dominant political grammar of the early 21st century.
This shift appears across democracies and autocracies alike: voters demand functioning borders, domestic industry and governments that prioritize internal stability over abstract global commitments benefiting footloose capital. Taub treated this resurgence not as a moral regression but as a structural correction. Hyper-globalization delivered efficiency and growth but also hollowed industrial bases, widened regional inequalities and produced cultural dislocation and political alienation. In such conditions, appeals to global responsibility lose legitimacy.
Taub argued that foreign policy is downstream from domestic strength. A nation that cannot maintain social cohesion, economic resilience or a shared purpose at home cannot credibly project power abroad. When internal foundations erode, states retrench, consolidate and redefine priorities. Trump’s emphasis on borders, manufacturing, energy independence and transactional diplomacy reflected this broader realignment as much as his personal style.
In Taub’s macro-history, periods of outward integration are inevitably followed by phases of inward reconstruction. The current nationalist wave, then, is not a rejection of the world but a political manifestation of a civilizational shift: from expansion to consolidation, from global abstraction to territorial reality, and from unipolarity to multipolarity.
What about BRICS?
Some critics argue that BRICS contradicts Taub’s Polario prediction. But BRICS functions more as a coalition of convenience than a coherent geopolitical bloc. Its purpose is to dilute Western dominance in finance and governance, not to form an integrated Eurasian bloc. Nothing in BRICS prevents Russia from aligning with the US if strategic conditions push in that direction. For Taub, BRICS is a tactical formation in an era of flux, not a permanent world order.
Taub’s critics often labeled his forecasts far-fetched. He responded that most people focus on headlines and ignore historical arcs; alliances can shift rapidly — Germany and France co-founded the EU in 1957, just 12 years after World War II ended. The value of Taub’s macro-history lies not in precise predictions but in revealing that major geopolitical reconfigurations follow civilizational patterns.
Whether Polario will fully materialize is unknowable. But the drivers Taub identified — geography, resources and China’s continuing industrial and technological rise, which may peak decades from now — could strengthen a gravitational pull between the two northern giants. Trump sensed such a 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).”
