In Beijing they have come to the conclusion that the United States will do anything to keep China in check. In Washington they insist that China is plotting to wrest the position of the world's leading power from the United States. For a calm analysis of this growing antagonism (and a plan to prevent it from escalating into superpower war), visit the 33rd floor of an Art Deco building in the heart of Manhattan, the office of Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger will turn 100 on May 27. No one alive has more experience in international affairs; first as a scholar of 19th-century diplomacy, later as US national security adviser and secretary of state, and, for the past 46 years, as an adviser and emissary to monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers. Kissinger is concerned. "Both are convinced that the other party represents a strategic danger," he says. “We are heading towards a great power showdown.”
In late April, The Economist spoke to him for more than eight hours about how to prevent the feud between China and the United States from escalating into war. His body is hunched and he walks with difficulty, but his mind remains sharp and lucid. He already plans two of his next books, one on artificial intelligence and one on the nature of alliances; and he is still more interested in looking ahead than in reminiscing about the past.
He is alarmed by the growing competition from China and the United States for technological and economic pre-eminence. As Russia slides into China's orbit and war darkens Europe's eastern flank, he fears that artificial intelligence will fuel the Sino-American rivalry. Around the world, the balance of power and the technological base of warfare are changing so fast and in so many ways that countries have no set principle on which to establish order. If they don't find any, they may resort to force. “We are in the classic pre-World War I situation,” he says, “in which neither side has much room for political concession and in which any upsetting of the balance can have catastrophic consequences.”
Kissinger is reviled by many, who see him as a warmonger for his participation in the Vietnam War; but he considers that avoiding conflicts between the great powers is his life's goal. After witnessing the carnage caused by Nazi Germany and suffering the murder of 13 close family members in the Holocaust, he became convinced that the only way to avoid a disastrous conflict is dogged diplomacy, ideally bolstered by shared values. “That is the problem that must be solved. And I think I've spent my life facing him." In his opinion, the fate of humanity depends on the United States and China understanding each other. In particular, he believes, the rapid progress of artificial intelligence leaves them only five to 10 years to find a way.
Kissinger gives some initial advice to those who aspire to become leaders: “Identify where you are. Crudely." Following that principle, the starting point for avoiding war is to analyze China's growing nervousness. Despite his reputation as a conciliatory figure with the Beijing government, he acknowledges that many Chinese thinkers believe that the United States is in decline and that "therefore, as a result of historical evolution, it will end up supplanting us."
He thinks the Chinese leadership resents Western policymakers talking about a rules-based world order, when what they really mean is rules-based and US order. Chinese leaders are insulted by what they see as the patronizing treatment offered by the West to grant privileges to China if it behaves (no doubt they think the privileges should be theirs by right, as a rising power). In fact, some in China suspect that the United States will never treat the country as an equal and that it is absurd to imagine that it could.
However, Kissinger also warns against misreading Chinese ambitions. In Washington, "they say that China wants to rule the world ... The answer is that they want to be powerful," he says. “They are not heading for world domination in the Hitlerian sense. This is not how they think or how they have ever thought about the world order.”
In Nazi Germany, war was inevitable because Adolf Hitler needed it, he continues, but China is different. Kissinger has met many Chinese leaders, starting with Mao Zedong. He never doubted the ideological commitment of any of them, but that commitment was always combined with a keen sense of the country's interests and capabilities.
Kissinger considers the Chinese system to be more Confucian than Marxist. That teaches Chinese leaders to reach for the maximum strength the country is capable of and to try to be respected for their achievements. China's leaders want to be recognized as the ultimate judge of the international system when it comes to their own interests. “If they achieved a superiority that could really be used, would they take it to the point of imposing Chinese culture?” he wonders. "I don't know. My gut tells me no... [but] I think we have the capabilities to prevent such a situation from happening through a combination of diplomacy and force."
A natural US response to the challenge of Chinese ambition is to probe it, as a way of identifying how to maintain the balance between the two powers. Another is to establish a permanent dialogue. China “is trying to play a global role. We have to evaluate at each moment if the conceptions about a strategic role are compatible”. If they are not, then the question of strength will arise. “Is it possible for China and the United States to coexist without the threat of all-out war between them? I thought and still think that it is." However, Kissinger acknowledges that success is not guaranteed. “Failure is possible. And therefore we have to be strong enough militarily to withstand failure.”
The urgent test is the behavior of China and the United States in relation to Taiwan. Kissinger recalls how, on Richard Nixon's first visit to China in 1972, only Mao had authority to negotiate on the island. “Every time Nixon raised a specific issue, Mao would reply: 'I am a philosopher. I do not deal with these issues. Let Zhou [Enlai] and Kissinger talk about that'... Now, in relation to Taiwan, he was very explicit. He said: 'They are a bunch of counterrevolutionaries. We don't need them now. We can wait 100 years. Someday we will claim it. But there's still a long way to go.'”
Kissinger believes that the understanding forged between Nixon and Mao was annulled by Donald Trump when only 50 of those 100 years had passed. Trump wanted to boost his tough image by extracting concessions from China on trade. In his politics, the Biden administration has followed Trump's lead, albeit with liberal rhetoric.
Kissinger would not have chosen that path with respect to Taiwan, because a Ukrainian-style war will destroy the island and devastate the world economy. War can also push China back domestically, and the biggest fear of its leaders remains internal turmoil.
The fear of war creates grounds for hope. The problem is that neither party has much room to make concessions. All Chinese leaders have affirmed their country's connection to Taiwan. At the same time, however, "as things have now evolved, it is not easy for the United States to leave Taiwan without undermining its position elsewhere."
Kissinger's way out of such a dead end is based on his experience in his public office. He would start by lowering the temperature and then slowly build trust and a working relationship. Instead of listing all his grievances, the American president should say to his Chinese counterpart: “President, right now, the two greatest dangers to peace are the two of us. Because we have the ability to destroy humanity." Without formally announcing anything, China and the United States should aim to practice restraint.
Kissinger, who has never been a fan of policy-making bureaucracies, prefers to imagine a small group of advisers with easy access to each other and tacit collaboration. Neither side would fundamentally change its position on Taiwan, although the United States would be careful in deploying its forces and try not to fuel suspicions that it supports the island's independence.
Kissinger's second piece of advice to aspiring leaders is: “Define goals that can garner support. He finds means, describable means, of achieving those goals.” Taiwan would be just the first of a series of areas where the superpowers could find common ground and thus foster global stability.
In a recent speech, Janet Yellen, US Treasury Secretary, proposed including climate change and the economy among those areas. Kissinger is skeptical on both questions. Although he is "strongly in favor" of climate action, he doubts that such an issue can help build confidence or strike a balance between the two superpowers. As for the economy, the danger is that the trade agenda will be hijacked by hawks who are not willing to leave China any room for development.
This all-or-nothing attitude is a threat to the general pursuit of détente. If the United States wants to find a way to live with China, it should not seek regime change. Kissinger resorts to a theme present from the beginning in his thoughts. “In any stability diplomacy, there has to be an element of the 19th century world. And the 19th century world was founded on the premise that the existence of warring states was not in question.
Some Americans believe that a defeated China would become democratic and peaceful. However, as much as he would prefer to see China become a democracy, Kissinger sees no precedent for such an outcome. Most likely, a collapse of the communist regime would lead to a civil war that would escalate into an ideological conflict and would only increase global instability. “We are not interested in leading China to dissolution,” he says. Instead of getting locked up, the United States must recognize that China has interests. A good example is Ukraine.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has recently made contact with Volodymyr Zelensky, his Ukrainian counterpart, for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year. Many observers have dismissed Xi's call as an empty gesture meant to placate Europeans who complain China is too close to Russia. Kissinger, by contrast, sees it as a serious statement of intent that will complicate diplomacy around the war, but may also create the kind of useful opportunity to build mutual trust between the superpowers.
Kissinger begins his analysis by condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Ultimately, Putin has made a catastrophic misjudgment." However, the West is not blameless: "I think the decision to... leave open Ukraine's NATO membership has been very wrong." It has been destabilizing, because offering the promise of NATO protection without a plan to carry it out leaves Ukraine poorly defended and, in turn, guarantees not only Putin's anger, but also that of many of his compatriots.
The task now is to end the war, without preparing the ground for the next round of conflicts. Kissinger says he wants Russia to cede as much of the territory it conquered in 2014 as possible, but the reality is that in any ceasefire Russia is likely to retain at least Sevastopol (the largest city in Crimea and the main Russian naval base in the Black Sea). Such an agreement, in which Russia loses some gains but retains others, could leave both Russia and Ukraine unsatisfied.
It is, in his opinion, a recipe for future confrontation. “What the Europeans are saying now is, in my opinion, extremely dangerous. Because what they say is: 'We don't want them in NATO, because they are too adventurous. And therefore we will arm them to the teeth and give them the most advanced weapons.'” His conclusion is blunt: "We have now armed Ukraine to the point that it will be the best armed country with the least strategically experienced political leaders in Europe."
To establish a lasting peace in Europe it is necessary for the West to make two stretches of imagination. The first is for Ukraine to join NATO, as a means of containing it, as well as protecting it. The second is for Europe to achieve a rapprochement with Russia in order to create a stable eastern border.
Understandably, many Western countries will oppose one or the other of these goals. And, with China in the middle as an ally of Russia and an opponent of NATO, the task will be even more difficult. China has a primary interest in seeing Russia emerge from the Ukraine war intact. Xi not only has to fulfill a “no limits” partnership with Putin, but a collapse of Moscow would pose a problem for China, creating a power vacuum in Central Asia that risks being filled with a “civil war of Syrian guy."
Following Xi's call to Zelensky, Kissinger believes China may be positioning itself to mediate between Russia and Ukraine. As one of the architects of the policy that pitted the United States and China against the Soviet Union, he doubts that China and Russia can work well together. It is true that they share a suspicion of the United States, but he also believes that they instinctively distrust each other. “I have never met a Russian leader who has spoken well of China. And I have never met a Chinese leader who has spoken well of Russia." They are not natural allies.
The Chinese have engaged in diplomatic action in relation to Ukraine as an expression of their national interest, Kissinger says. Although they refuse to condone the destruction of Russia, they acknowledge that Ukraine must remain an independent country and have warned against the use of nuclear weapons. They may even accept Ukraine's desire to join NATO. "China does that, in part, because it doesn't want to come into conflict with the United States," he says. "They are creating their own world order, to the extent that they can."
The second area that China and the United States need to talk about is artificial intelligence. “We are at the beginnings of a capacity where machines could impose a global plague or other pandemics; not just nuclear destruction, but any kind of human destruction.”
Kissinger acknowledges that not even experts in artificial intelligence know what its capabilities will be (judging by our conversations, the transcription of a thick, harsh German accent is still out of reach). However, he believes that artificial intelligence will become a key factor in security within five years. He likens its disruptive potential to the invention of the printing press, which spread ideas that played a role in the outbreak of the devastating wars of the 16th and 17th centuries.
“We live in a world with an unprecedented capacity for destruction,” he warns. Despite the doctrine that there must be a human in the circuit, it is possible that automatic and unstoppable weapons could be created. “If we analyze military history, we can state that it has never been possible to destroy all adversaries, due to geographic and precision limitations. [Now] there are no limitations. Every adversary is 100% vulnerable.”
Artificial intelligence cannot be abolished. Therefore, China and the United States will have to take advantage of their military power to some extent, as a deterrent. But they could also limit the threat it poses, just as the arms control talks limited the threat of nuclear weapons. “I think we have to start the exchanges about the consequences of technology on the other. We have to take baby steps towards gun control; steps in which each party presents the other with controllable material about the capabilities.” In fact, Kissinger thinks that the negotiations themselves could help build mutual trust that would allow the superpowers to practice restraint. The secret lies in leaders who are strong and sensible enough to understand that artificial intelligence must not be pushed to the limit. “And if you also fully trust what you can achieve through power, you are likely to destroy the world.”
Kissinger's third piece of advice for aspiring leaders is: "Tie all of that back to internal goals, whatever they are." For the United States, that means learning to be more pragmatic, focusing on leadership qualities and, above all, revamping the country's political culture.
Kissinger's model of pragmatic thinking is India. He recalls an event where a former high-level Indian official explained that foreign policy should be based on loose alliances tailored to the problems, rather than tying a country into large multilateral structures.
That transactional approach doesn't come naturally to the United States. The theme that runs through Diplomacy, Kissinger's monumental history of international relations, is that the United States insists on portraying all major foreign interventions as expressions of its manifest destiny to remake the world in its own image as a free, democratic, capitalist society. .
The problem for Kissinger is the corollary, which is that moral principles all too often override interests, even when they do not produce the desired change. He recognizes the importance of human rights, but disagrees with placing them at the center of politics. The difference is to impose them or to say: they will affect our relationships, but the decision is yours.
“We tried to impose them on Sudan. How is Sudan now? In fact, the knee-jerk insistence on doing the right thing can become an excuse for not thinking about the consequences of politics, he says. People who want to use power to change today's world, Kissinger argues, are often idealists, although realists are more often perceived as willing to use force.
India is an essential counterweight to China's growing power. Yet that country also has an increasingly dark record of religious intolerance, judicial bias, and press censorship. One inference (although Kissinger did not express it directly) is that India will be a test of whether the United States can be pragmatic. Japan will be another. Relations will become strained if, as Kissinger predicts, Japan takes steps to get nuclear weapons within five years. With an eye on the diplomatic maneuvers that more or less kept the peace in the 19th century, he hopes Britain and France will help the United States think strategically about the balance of power in Asia.
Leadership is also important. Kissinger has long believed in the power of individuals. Franklin D. Roosevelt was farsighted enough to prepare an isolationist United States for what he considered an inevitable war against the Axis powers. Charles de Gaulle made France believe in the future. John F. Kennedy inspired a generation. Otto von Bismarck achieved German unification and ruled with skill and restraint, but his country succumbed to war fever after his removal from power.
Kissinger acknowledges that 24-hour news and social media make his brand of diplomacy difficult. "I don't think a president today can send an emissary with the powers that I had," he says. However, he argues that it would be a mistake to worry about whether there is a possibility of a way forward. “If we look at the leaders that I have respected, they did not ask themselves that question. They wondered: ‘Is it necessary?’”
He recalls the example of Winston Lord, a member of his team in the Nixon administration. “When we intervened in Cambodia, he wanted to resign. And I told him: 'You can resign and go around the street with a banner. Or you can help us solve the Vietnam War. And she decided to stay… What we need is people who make that decision: who live in the times that they live in and who want to do something about it, beyond feeling sorry for themselves.”
Leadership reflects the political culture of a country. Kissinger, like many Republicans, worries that American education is focused on the country's darkest moments. “To have a strategic vision you need to have faith in your country,” he says. The shared perception of America's worth has been lost.
He also complains that the media lack a sense of proportion and judgment. When he was in charge of her, the press was hostile to him, but he continued to dialogue with her. “They drove me crazy. But that was part of the game…they weren't unfair.” Today, however, the media have no incentive to be thoughtful, he says. “My theme is the need for balance and moderation. To institutionalize that. That is the goal.”
Worst of all, however, is the politics itself. When Kissinger arrived in Washington, politicians from both parties regularly dined together. He got along well with George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate. He believes that as a national security adviser to the other side, that would be unlikely today. Gerald Ford, who took office after Nixon resigned, was the kind of person from whom his opponents could expect respectable behavior. Today, any means is considered acceptable.
“I think Trump and now Biden have pushed [the animosity] to the max,” Kissinger says. His fear is that a Watergate-like situation will lead to widespread violence and the United States will lack leadership. “I don't think Biden can inspire and ... I hope the Republicans can put up someone better,” he says. "It's not a great historical moment," he laments, "but the alternative is total abdication."
The United States badly needs long-term strategic thinking, he says. "That is our great challenge, and we must solve it. If we don't, the predictions about our failure will come true."
If time is short and leadership is lacking, where are the prospects for China and the United States to find a way to live together in peace?
"We all have to admit that we are in a new world," says Kissinger, "because anything we do can go wrong. And there is no guaranteed direction." Even so, he says he feels hope. “Look, my life has been difficult, but that gives rise to optimism. And the difficulty is also a challenge. It shouldn't always be an obstacle."
It underlines that humanity has taken giant steps. True, such progress has often come after terrible conflicts (after the Thirty Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, and World War II, for example), but the rivalry between China and the United States may be different. History indicates that when two such powers clash, the normal result is military conflict. "But we are not in a normal circumstance," Kissinger argues, "because of mutual assured destruction and artificial intelligence."
“I think it is possible to create a world order based on rules that Europe, China and India could adhere to. That's already a good portion of humanity... So, if we look at its usefulness, it can end well; or, at least, it can end without catastrophes.”
That is the task of today's superpower leaders. "Immanuel Kant said that peace would come through human understanding or some calamity," Kissinger explains. “He thought it would happen through reason, but he couldn't guarantee it. It's more or less what I think."
Therefore, world leaders have a great responsibility. They need realism to face the dangers that lie ahead, vision to realize that the solution lies in striking a balance between their countries' forces, and restraint to refrain from using their offensive powers to the full. “This is an unprecedented challenge and a great opportunity,” says Kissinger.
The future of humanity depends on us not making mistakes. Well into the fourth hour of the day's conversation, and a few weeks away from his birthday celebration, Kissinger adds with a characteristic wink: "Anyway, I won't be here to see it."
© 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved
Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix
