Nixon policy was in the first place at all enabled by Zhou Enlai policy - the doctrine that upheld that USSR revisionism was a more immediate and more advantegous to fight threat than Americanism. Without this idea (which in hindsight paid off BIG time by letting China get the best parts of the USSR) there would not have been a reapproachment.
China had a reason to "betray" the USSR, because the USSR was at that point a dead end. If USSR was a 10 in strength, Russia is a 7 or 8, but the fact that Russia is fully subordinate to China while USSR never would be means Russia is a far better deal for Beijing (and by extension, a better deal for the whole world that's interested in defending itself from Washington).
Today, Russia has no reason to betray China at all. China occupies the same position as US did in the 1980s, while US occupies the position of the USSR. You don't betray the guy with the upper hand to go to someone who can't even appoint half decent leadership. In the first place, China judged USSR incapable of carrying the torch precisely because they appointed idiots over and over. Which is what US today does, not China. So even if there existed a Russian Zhou Enlai today, he would not plot against China.
To think that Russia is fully subordinate to China is the kind of delusional though coming full time from westoids to pretend that for that reason they can repeat Nixon politics.
No country with such amount of natural resources and means of massive destruction is going to be fully subordinate to nobody.
The reality is that the interest of China and Russia simply align.
Main population center of both countries is very far from their frontiers, and those frontiers are not warm paradise but a rather inhospitable land whom nobody has real interest in.
China interest in South Asia and the Pacific and Russia interest is mainly to reintegrate all Ruski Mir and other Slavs into them. It is like diametrically opposite interest. So they don’t clash at all in them.
Also your last paragraph is totally true, no way Russia exchange the U.S. for China in 2025
To start with China is an industrial power that need natural resources, that is an ideal match for Russia.
US is a de industrialised natural resources exporter.
Finally, from an ideological point of view the clash of Russia and the west is clear.
China and Russia don’t have any clash
Russia would never exchange China for the U.S. or Europe.
That maybe could have worked in 2007. Now? No way
