Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has called on the Biden White House to practice “Nixonian flexibility” and to be aware of “the importance of understanding the permanence of China.”
“That one could not eliminate the Chinese problem, so therefore one had to find a way of living with China. That it was very important to prevent China from becoming the hegemon of the world, but it was also important to recognize that this could not be achieved by permanent confrontation,” Kissinger said, speaking to Bloomberg in an interview published Wednesday, when asked what the late Singaporean statesman Lee Kuan Yew might tell the US president today.
Kissinger rapped Joe Biden and his predecessors for being “too much influenced by the domestic aspects of the view of China.”
“It is of course important to prevent Chinese or any other country’s hegemony, but that it’s a permanent assignment – that it’s not something that can be achieved by endless confrontations, but it rather will require some occasional periods of adjustment, but also periods of confrontation but above all a strategic design,” he stressed.
Kissinger suggested that China at the moment has “an array of problems, but whatever judgment one makes of that, China has seen itself as central kingdom and acted like that. It’s not an attitude we can accept; it’s an attitude we must resist.”
Kissinger, 99, is the architect of the Nixon-Ford policy of establishing relations with China, and has also been credited with establishing détente with the Soviet Union in the 1970s, basing US strategy on the central thesis that Washington would have to recognize Moscow and Beijing’s right to exist, even if this did not end the strategic competition with the communist adversaries.
Eight years ago, shortly after the February 2014 Euromaidan coup, Kissinger warned of Ukraine’s divided cultural and linguistic identity, and stressed that Kiev should not be allowed to join NATO. In May, at the World Economic Forum, Kissinger called for a diplomatic settlement in Ukraine to restore the status quo ante bellum, i.e. the situation as it was before Russia launched its military special operation in February.
In his Bloomberg interview, Kissinger said that the moment for a pause in the conflict and peace talks was getting closer, but updated his perspective, suggesting that the West should not accept Crimea’s status as Russian before negotiations begin.
He also complained about the lack of quality European leaders today, suggesting that the current crop of “European leadership does not have the sense of direction and mission” their mid-late 20th century predecessors did. He suggested that the late French President Charles de Gaulle, or his own old boss Richard Nixon, would be good candidates as the strongest possible negotiators with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Nixon was “a very good foreign policy president. He destroyed himself domestically,” Kissinger said.
Earlier this month, Kissinger told The Spectator that there were three possible scenarios for bringing the Ukraine crisis to an end, ranging from a freeze of the current situation at the front, which Russia would be able to consider a victory, to a scenario under which the US makes an attempt to drive Russia out of “all Ukrainian territories,” which would risk all-out Russia-NATO confrontation, and finally, a return to the situation as it was in February, i.e. the start of the special military operation. The latter is the preferred option, according to the former US secretary of state.
Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine on February 24 after receiving a request for assistance from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, which it recognized two days prior, following weeks of escalating tensions and fears that Kiev may begin a new offensive to try to crush the fledgling breakaways.