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Henry Kissinger Surveys the World as He Turns 100
The great strategist sees a globe riven by U.S.-China competition and threatened by fearsome new weapons and explains why he now thinks Ukraine should be in NATO.
By Tunku VaradarajanMay 26, 2023 at 2:27 pm ET
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Eight years—that’s all the time Henry Kissinger was in public office. From January 1969 to January 1977, Mr. Kissinger was first national security adviser and secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, holding both titles concurrently for more than two years. He was 53 when he cleared his desk at Foggy Bottom to make way for Cyrus Vance. In the 4½ decades since, he has worked as a consultant on strategic relations to governments around the world and consolidated beyond dispute his reputation—first earned when he co-piloted the U.S. opening to China in 1972—as the pre-eminent philosopher of global order and the most original, erudite and hard-nosed statesman of his era.
Mr. Kissinger turns 100 on Saturday, and his appetite for the world he’s spent a lifetime setting to rights is still zestful. We meet at his office four days before his birthday, and he offers swift proof not just of his charm but of his facility as a diplomat. “You never came to see me in my office,” he scolds, reminding me of an invitation he’d made three years ago over dinner at the home of a common friend, my only previous meeting with Mr. Kissinger. I’d dismissed the invitation at the time as a grand old man’s courtesy to a stranger.
The dinner was with Charles Hill, a onetime speechwriter for Mr. Kissinger and later a senior adviser to another secretary of state, George Shultz. The memory of Hill, who died in 2021, prompts Mr. Kissinger to offer an observation on Shultz, who lived to be 100 and also died in 2021. Shultz’s approach to international affairs was “really not the same as mine,” Mr. Kissinger says. “He looked at the economic motivations. I look at the historical and moral motivations of the people involved.”
What Mr. Kissinger sees when he looks at the world today is “disorder.” Almost all “major countries,” he says, “are asking themselves about their basic orientation. Most of them have no internal orientation, and are in the process of changing or adapting to the new circumstances”—by which he means a world riven by competition between the U.S. and China. Big countries such as India, and also a lot of “subordinate” ones, “do not have a dominant view of what they want to achieve in the world.” They wonder if they should “modify” the actions of the superpowers (a word Mr. Kissinger says he hates), or strive for “a degree of autonomy.”
Some major nations have wrestled with these choices ever since the “debacle of the Suez intervention” in 1956. While Britain chose close cooperation with the U.S. thereafter, France opted for strategic autonomy, but of a kind “that was closely linked to the U.S. on matters that affected the global equilibrium.”
The French desire to determine its own global policy gave rise to awkwardness with President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to Beijing. While critics say he pandered to the Chinese, Mr. Kissinger sees an example of French strategic autonomy at work: “In principle, if you have to conduct Western policy, you would like allies that only ask you about what contribution they can make to your direction. But that is not how nations have been formed, and so I’m sympathetic to the Macron approach.”
It doesn’t bother him that Mr. Macron, on his return from Beijing, called on his fellow Europeans to be more than “just America’s followers.” Mr. Kissinger doesn’t “take it literally.” Besides, “I’m not here as a defender of French policy,” and he appears to attribute Mr. Macron’s words to cultural factors. “The French approach to discussion is to convince their adversary or their opposite number of his stupidity.” The British “try to draw you into their intellectual framework and to persuade you. The French try to convince you of the inadequacy of your thinking.”
And what is the American way? “The American view of itself is righteousness,” says the man famed for his realpolitik. “We believe we are unselfish, that we have no purely national objectives, and also that our national objectives are achieved in foreign policy with such difficulty that when we expose them to modification through discussion, we get resentful of opponents.” And so “we expect that our views will carry the day, not because we think we are intellectually superior, but because we think the views in themselves should be dominant. It’s an expression of strong moral feelings coupled with great power. But it’s usually not put forward as a power position.”
Asked whether this American assertion of inherent unselfishness strikes a chord with other countries, Mr. Kissinger is quick to say: “No, of course not.” Does Xi Jinping buy it? “No, absolutely not. That is the inherent difference between us.” Mr. Xi is stronger globally than any previous Chinese leader, and he has “confronted, in the last two U.S. presidents,” men who “want to exact concessions from China and announce them as concessions.” This is quite the wrong approach, in Mr. Kissinger’s view: “I think the art is to present relations with China as a mutual concern in which agreements are made because both parties think it is best for themselves. That’s the technique of diplomacy that I favor.”
Opinion | Henry Kissinger Surveys the World as He Turns 100
The great strategist sees a globe riven by U.S.-China competition and threatened by fearsome new weapons and explains why he now thinks Ukraine should be in NATO.
www.wsj.com
Henry Kissinger Surveys the World as He Turns 100
The great strategist sees a globe riven by U.S.-China competition and threatened by fearsome new weapons and explains why he now thinks Ukraine should be in NATO.
By Tunku VaradarajanMay 26, 2023 at 2:27 pm ET
image
Eight years—that’s all the time Henry Kissinger was in public office. From January 1969 to January 1977, Mr. Kissinger was first national security adviser and secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, holding both titles concurrently for more than two years. He was 53 when he cleared his desk at Foggy Bottom to make way for Cyrus Vance. In the 4½ decades since, he has worked as a consultant on strategic relations to governments around the world and consolidated beyond dispute his reputation—first earned when he co-piloted the U.S. opening to China in 1972—as the pre-eminent philosopher of global order and the most original, erudite and hard-nosed statesman of his era.
Mr. Kissinger turns 100 on Saturday, and his appetite for the world he’s spent a lifetime setting to rights is still zestful. We meet at his office four days before his birthday, and he offers swift proof not just of his charm but of his facility as a diplomat. “You never came to see me in my office,” he scolds, reminding me of an invitation he’d made three years ago over dinner at the home of a common friend, my only previous meeting with Mr. Kissinger. I’d dismissed the invitation at the time as a grand old man’s courtesy to a stranger.
The dinner was with Charles Hill, a onetime speechwriter for Mr. Kissinger and later a senior adviser to another secretary of state, George Shultz. The memory of Hill, who died in 2021, prompts Mr. Kissinger to offer an observation on Shultz, who lived to be 100 and also died in 2021. Shultz’s approach to international affairs was “really not the same as mine,” Mr. Kissinger says. “He looked at the economic motivations. I look at the historical and moral motivations of the people involved.”
What Mr. Kissinger sees when he looks at the world today is “disorder.” Almost all “major countries,” he says, “are asking themselves about their basic orientation. Most of them have no internal orientation, and are in the process of changing or adapting to the new circumstances”—by which he means a world riven by competition between the U.S. and China. Big countries such as India, and also a lot of “subordinate” ones, “do not have a dominant view of what they want to achieve in the world.” They wonder if they should “modify” the actions of the superpowers (a word Mr. Kissinger says he hates), or strive for “a degree of autonomy.”
Some major nations have wrestled with these choices ever since the “debacle of the Suez intervention” in 1956. While Britain chose close cooperation with the U.S. thereafter, France opted for strategic autonomy, but of a kind “that was closely linked to the U.S. on matters that affected the global equilibrium.”
The French desire to determine its own global policy gave rise to awkwardness with President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to Beijing. While critics say he pandered to the Chinese, Mr. Kissinger sees an example of French strategic autonomy at work: “In principle, if you have to conduct Western policy, you would like allies that only ask you about what contribution they can make to your direction. But that is not how nations have been formed, and so I’m sympathetic to the Macron approach.”
It doesn’t bother him that Mr. Macron, on his return from Beijing, called on his fellow Europeans to be more than “just America’s followers.” Mr. Kissinger doesn’t “take it literally.” Besides, “I’m not here as a defender of French policy,” and he appears to attribute Mr. Macron’s words to cultural factors. “The French approach to discussion is to convince their adversary or their opposite number of his stupidity.” The British “try to draw you into their intellectual framework and to persuade you. The French try to convince you of the inadequacy of your thinking.”
And what is the American way? “The American view of itself is righteousness,” says the man famed for his realpolitik. “We believe we are unselfish, that we have no purely national objectives, and also that our national objectives are achieved in foreign policy with such difficulty that when we expose them to modification through discussion, we get resentful of opponents.” And so “we expect that our views will carry the day, not because we think we are intellectually superior, but because we think the views in themselves should be dominant. It’s an expression of strong moral feelings coupled with great power. But it’s usually not put forward as a power position.”
Asked whether this American assertion of inherent unselfishness strikes a chord with other countries, Mr. Kissinger is quick to say: “No, of course not.” Does Xi Jinping buy it? “No, absolutely not. That is the inherent difference between us.” Mr. Xi is stronger globally than any previous Chinese leader, and he has “confronted, in the last two U.S. presidents,” men who “want to exact concessions from China and announce them as concessions.” This is quite the wrong approach, in Mr. Kissinger’s view: “I think the art is to present relations with China as a mutual concern in which agreements are made because both parties think it is best for themselves. That’s the technique of diplomacy that I favor.”
