"At the end of April The Economist spoke to Mr Kissinger for over eight hours about how to prevent the contest between China and America from descending into war."
“Both sides have convinced themselves that the other represents a strategic danger,” he says. “We are on the path to great-power confrontation.”
China wants respect
“They say China wants world domination…The answer is that they [in China] want to be powerful,” he says. “They’re not heading for world domination in a Hitlerian sense,” he says. “That is not how they think or have ever thought of world order.”
The urgent test is how China and America behave over Taiwan... China and America, without formally announcing anything, would aim to practise restraint.
“We have now armed Ukraine to a point where it will be the best-armed country and with the least strategically experienced leadership in Europe.”
To establish a lasting peace in Europe requires the West to take two leaps of imagination. The first is for Ukraine to join nato, as a means of restraining it, as well as protecting it. The second is for Europe to engineer a rapprochement with Russia, as a way to create a stable eastern border.
Mr Kissinger believes that AI will become a key factor in security within five years... China and America will therefore need to harness its power militarily to a degree, as a deterrent. But they can also limit the threat it poses, in the way that arms-control talks limited the threat of nuclear weapons.
He acknowledges that human rights matter, but disagrees with putting them at the heart of your policy. The difference is between imposing them, or saying that it will affect relations, but the decision is theirs.
Mr Kissinger, like many Republicans, worries that American education dwells on America’s darkest moments. “In order to get a strategic view you need faith in your country,” he says. The shared perception of America’s worth has been lost.
America desperately needs long-term strategic thinking, he believes. “That’s our big challenge which we must solve. If we don’t, the predictions of failure will be proved true.”
World leaders therefore bear a heavy responsibility. They require the realism to face up to the dangers ahead, the vision to see that a solution lies in achieving a balance between their countries’ forces, and the restraint to refrain from using their offensive powers to the maximum. “It is an unprecedented challenge and great opportunity,” Mr Kissinger says.
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