Washington loves to make overreaching predictions about geopolitical events, and the Trump administration’s Russia peace negotiations are no exception. Depending on who one listens to, these talks could unleash China to subjugate Taiwan—or they might box China in by severing its relations with Russia.

Both critics and supporters have sought to cast the effort as a “Reverse Nixon.” Where President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger (his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State) sought to engage with China to pressure the Soviet Union, many argue Trump’s efforts reflect an opposite attempt to split Russia from China.

However, Trump administration officials have wisely demurred from embracing this comparison. Kissinger is no model for the modern conservative, and his decades-long dalliance with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a cautionary tale, not a playbook for the current strategic challenges facing the U.S.

Reaching for the historical comparison is understandable. Then, as now, the situation involved a similar triangular relationship.

Like Nixon and Kissinger’s opening to China, the Trump administration’s peace negotiations with Russia are an exercise in realpolitik. They reflect a sober, realist recognition that preventing China’s hegemony of the Indo-Pacific is a greater concern for the U.S. than expending a seemingly unlimited stream of resources in an increasingly frozen conflict in a non-NATO state that Europe hasn’t mustered the wherewithal to defend.

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But there are key differences between then and now.

While Kissinger’s missions to China have been lionized as quintessential diplomatic coups, the reality is that he was pushing on an open door. By 1971, the interests of Communist Russia and Communist China had already diverged. The two powers had already started shooting at each other over a territorial dispute in 1969.

Today’s situation is the opposite. China and Russia are substantially and increasingly aligned, and they are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

To be sure, disrupting the axis of tyrannies forming among China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and other authoritarian states would benefit the free world. China’s special envoy to the EU recently attacked the U.S.-Russia talks, a reminder that China cares only for its own interests, which often clash with Russia’s.

The United States’ nascent strategic alignment with India, and President Trump’s prioritization of minilateral groupings (like the Quad), will increase pressure on the China-led authoritarian bloc. Both of these trends are opportunities to weaken the emerging axis of American adversaries.

However, the Trump administration rightly recognizes that our ability to drive wedges between our adversaries is more limited today than it was during the first Cold War. Recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Russia becoming “permanently a junior partner to China” would be adverse to U.S. interests. Yet, at the same time, he acknowledged that engaging with Russia would likely not be “successful at peeling them completely off a relationship with the Chinese.”

Kissinger’s approach was also problematic for other reasons.

He monetized his relationship with China and spent decades helping to ingrain a complacent China policy—even as that policy grew increasingly untethered from the strategic logic of the Nixon administration and increasingly at odds with the national interest. Opening a limited relationship with Communist China to prevent war and hedge against the Soviet Union may have been a sound strategy. However, spending decades empowering the CCP and intertwining the U.S. economy with China’s certainly was not.

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In contrast, the Trump administration has avoided overstretching the objectives of peace talks with Russia. Administration officials remain tightly focused on fulfilling President Trump’s campaign promise to end the war, and they are deliberating on whether to increase sanctions on Russia dramatically.

Observers should adopt a similar level of discipline. Specifically, they should avoid the kind of overwrought hyperbole that encouraged the Biden administration to lurch into an open-ended, unconditional commitment to subsidize Europe’s defense.

Ukraine’s fate is not the sole (or even a particularly influential) determinant of Xi Jinping’s designs on Taiwan. U.S.-Russia peace negotiations will not function as a green light for China to invade across the Taiwan Strait. Nor will they prove a silver bullet that will destroy Russia-China relations.

The CCP is surely gratified to see the peace talks cause friction within NATO and will do its best to increase these divisions. Successful peace talks would mean fewer U.S. resources bogged down in Europe and a less desperate Russia—both of which would cut against CCP interests.

Ultimately, the CCP will seek to frustrate and exploit the talks to maximize its own interests, not to achieve peace. Taiwan’s fate will be decided in Asia, not in Europe.

In short, Trump’s negotiations with Russia differ completely from those of Kissinger and Nixon, and they reflect a response to altogether different circumstances. Kissinger’s diplomacy with China cannot be accurately compared to today’s situation, and such comparisons don’t fairly represent the actions of the Trump administration. Moreover, Kissinger’s actions certainly don’t offer a useful guide for what should be done today.

Washington has only recently been freed from Kissinger’s specter. Let’s let him rest a while longer.