The Politics of Getting Around Things: Geopolitics as Couples Therapy
By Peter Bach [Excerpts]
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/09/20/the-politics-of-getting-around-things/
Imagine Trump and Xi disappearing into a room for an hour and emerging with the gentlest of smiles to announce that the United States and China had agreed to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons—with Russia and North Korea waiting in the wings to get rid of them too.
I suppose the most famous political friendship was the one between a blanketed Roosevelt and boiler-suited Churchill during World War II. It was a friendship forged in hell. Both men were prepared to wage a war that included mass bombing of cities, accepting huge civilian casualties as part of the price of victory.
The Roosevelt–Churchill partnership was actually where Britain transferred its predominance to the US. Nor was Roosevelt especially sentimental about it. He frequently outmaneuvered Churchill, and the two disagreed sharply over empire and colonialism, the Mediterranean and the conduct of the war, and how Stalin and the Soviet Union should be handled. Personal affection did not erase national interest.
Churchill’s gift for friendship was already playing out with Roosevelt during that notoriously awkward period before [the US] entered the war. By the end of 1940, Britain was running out of the dollars and gold to buy the weapons and supplies crucial to its survival. Churchill sidestepped ordinary diplomatic channels to send Roosevelt a long, intensely personal account of Britain’s situation. It was forwarded to the president while he was cruising the Caribbean on the Tuscaloosa. The letter was roughly 4,000 words long.
Churchill regarded it as one of the most important letters he would ever write. It was not just a plea for money. It was an attempt to make Roosevelt live inside Britain’s head. The country had survived 1940, but, as Churchill explained, survival in 1941 depended upon shipping, weapons and US industrial production. Most ominously, Britain’s ability to pay was fast approaching exhaustion. The crucial passage was devastatingly simple: “The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies.”
Within days, Roosevelt was working on the mechanism that became Lend-Lease. The US would supply Britain without demanding immediate payment. The two men’s extraordinary closeness did not create the crisis, remove Roosevelt’s domestic political shackles or invent American self-interest. It simply gave Churchill a way of putting Britain directly in front of the one man capable of turning those constraints into something new. Britain did not make the final payments on its Second World War-era US loans until 29 December 2006.
S. Lewis once wrote that “every real friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion.” There is something of that in political friendship. Two people establish a tiny jurisdiction of their own. The interesting question is what they then use it to get around.
I remember watching the Gorbachev cavalcade pass the NY Public Library. This was during the improbable Reagan–Gorbachev rapprochement of the late 1980s. The two men had been so suspicious of one another, wary as hell, but their four summits went on to create a remarkable atmosphere of personal and abiding trust. It helped make nuclear agreements that had previously seemed unimaginable suddenly politically feasible.
The 1986 Reykjavík summit produced one incredible moment after another. Reagan and Gorbachev began bargaining in a way that left their teams of advisers not just uncomfortable, but terrified. When Reagan asked what Gorbachev meant by eliminating “all strategic forces”, Gorbachev said he favored eliminating all nuclear weapons. Reagan replied that this was his goal too.
They did not, in fact, negotiate a particularly workable abolition of all nuclear weapons there and then. But for a spaced-out moment the leaders of the world’s two nuclear superpowers had found themselves contemplating something remarkably close to it. A more concrete proposal would have eliminated every single offensive ballistic missile within ten years.
The deal ultimately collapsed over Reagan’s refusal to accept Gorbachev’s restrictions on his “Star Wars” missile defense program, particularly the Soviet demand that testing be confined to laboratories.
Yet Reykjavík revealed something quite extraordinary. Reagan and Gorbachev discovered that each of them was more radical about nuclear disarmament than important parts of their own national-security establishments. Four days later, Reagan’s national-security adviser was privately urging him to step back from talk of eliminating all nuclear weapons.
Reykjavík looked like failure. It wasn’t. A year later, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty. It was a massively improbable outcome for a president whom critics had long portrayed as a Cold War warmonger.
I mean, imagine Trump and Xi disappearing into a room for an hour and emerging with the gentlest of smiles to announce that the United States and China had agreed to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons—with Russia and North Korea waiting in the wings to get rid of them too.
One could make equally interesting other lists containing Churchill and Stalin, Nixon and Kissinger, Mandela and de Klerk, Tony Blair and Dubya Bush, France’s socialist Mitterand and Germany’s conservative Kohl, or Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin. The last pair developed a highly personal diplomacy through the chaotic 1990s. At Hyde Park in 1995, with their governments divided over Bosnia and NATO, Yeltsin was telling Clinton that while there was no personal animosity or mistrust between them, their countries had begun pulling against each other. They needed to restore their personal rapport as the driving force in the relationship. Which may be as concise a description of the political usefulness of friendship as anybody has managed.
We know far less about leaders’ private feelings than their public presentation suggests. That is especially worth remembering with leaders still in power. Nevertheless, several relationships in 2026 stand out.
Take Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Theirs is one of the most consequential personal relationships among current great-power leaders. The two have met repeatedly over their long years in power and publicly use conspicuously warm language about one another.
Putin’s visit to China in May 2026 was, according to Xi, his twenty-fifth. Nor does the relationship exist simply for the cameras. It sits atop an extensive strategic partnership involving energy, trade, diplomacy and increasingly close coordination over the international order. As recently as August 31, meeting Putin in Bishkek, Xi said that under their joint strategic guidance the foundations of China–Russia relations would become still stronger.
Donald Trump’s relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu is enormously consequential too, but it is also harder to describe straightforwardly as friendship. It is intensely personal, frequently theatrical and remarkably transactional. In other words, a relationship in which extravagant public praise coexists with private fury, and in which both men seem acutely conscious of what the other owes him.
There’s real warmth in it. Netanyahu has repeatedly called Trump the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House, language rooted in a formidable list of things Trump has done that Israeli governments wanted: recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US embassy there, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, leaving the Iran nuclear agreement and brokering the Abraham Accords.
Gaza belongs in a darker category. Throughout the enormous Palestinian death toll in Gaza, Trump has continued to give Netanyahu substantial political and military backing, even when the two men have disagreed over tactics, timing and what should come next. That support has made the personal relationship consequential in a way that ceremonial friendship never could.
But this is a friendship where perceived disloyalty can produce massive sulks. After Netanyahu congratulated Joe Biden on winning the 2020 election, Trump brooded on it for months. In a 2021 interview he moaned that, after everything he’d done for Netanyahu, the Israeli leader could simply have kept quiet. “I haven’t spoken to him since,” he said, followed by an expletive directed at Netanyahu.
Netanyahu’s people spent years trying to repair the breach. According to one aide, an emissary even took Netanyahu’s book to Mar-a-Lago and read Trump passages in which Netanyahu praised him. “Every time we thought we managed to put this behind us,” the aide recalled, “we discovered that it didn’t work and that Trump was still angry.”
Trump obviously loves Netanyahu’s praise, but also adores reminding him where he believes the hierarchy lies. In July 2026, discussing a possible Netanyahu visit to Washington, Trump summed up the relationship with characteristic bluntness: “We get along very good. He knows who the boss is.”
Trump often does hot and cold, but these two can move from exasperation to praise at the touch of a document. The US–Israeli strategic relationship is, in any case, more durable than the chemistry between the two men. It is materially more than weighty. As of mid-September 2026, the Trump administration was preparing a proposed $2.8 billion arms sale to Israel containing 40,000 2,000-pound bombs—20,000 Mk84s and 20,000 BLU-117s—together with 20,000 I-2000 penetrator warheads. That is a whole load of hell.
So maybe “friendship” is not quite the right word if it implies ease, sentimentality or automatic agreement. The friendship can look intimate because the quarrels are personal. But beneath that lies something much harder.
What about the bullshit of friendship—the carefully contrived optics of it—in politics? [Trump likes to boast of his friendship with adversaries, Korea’s Kim Jung Un during his first term, and China’s Xi Jin Ping currently.] Which raises another sticky element to political friendships. Sometimes we can see the handshake. Sometimes we can count the meetings. What remains harder to measure is where personal trust ends and the interests of states begin.
Friendship is neither inherently good nor bad in international politics. What makes it powerful is that it can sometimes reach beyond the normal institutional restraints on leaders. It can permit a candor that official channels don’t like, make an assurance believable, keep an adversary talking—or make a bad idea harder to resist.
Change Links note: The official Chinese view about the relationship between Donald Trump and Xi Jin Ping is more sober and less sentimental. Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, says Xi Jinping’s visit ‘maintained [the] overall stability’ of relations and will have ‘deep impact’ on world peace. The South China Morning Post described it as “aimed at putting the relationship on an equal footing.” The concrete outcome was a reduction in the tariff-based trade war that Trump had initiated.
Will it lay a basis for any kind of joint measures on A-I, which many now see as a threat to humanity equivalent to the mutually-assured destruction nuclear stand-off that Reagan and Gorbachev tried to deal with? That seems unlikely at best, given Trump’s expressed opinion that he opposes any guardrails. He intends to “beat” China in A-I development. Hegseth has made it clear that the entire US military is now laser-focused on A-I weaponry and strategy.
Trump reportedly asked Xi to halt any Chinese assistance to Iran, attempting to isolate Iran internationally. According to Xinhua, the official Chinese press agency, Xi Jinping expressed hope that “the United States and Iran will return to the track of resolving issues through dialogue and negotiation as soon as possible. China has encouraged relevant parties to stay committed to peaceful solutions and maintain the momentum of talks,” he said.
Xi also said China supports the United States and Iran in returning to the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (which is essentially Iran’s position). He also voiced the hope that the two countries will ultimately reach a comprehensive agreement covering the nuclear issue and other matters, and achieve peace at an early date.
