Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has published his new (and 19th) book, Leadership. In it, he writes that in order to defuse the conflicts between Russia and Europe, and the US and China, we must have a 'Nixonian flexibility.'
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Biden must 'understand the permanence of China'
Kissinger was Nixon’s top diplomat, and assisted the former President in re-establishing ties between the US and China in the 1970s. He now warns that China shouldn’t become a 'global hegemon,' as reported by Bloomberg.
Kissinger also said that recent administrations in Washington have been too influenced by domestic politics, urging President Joe Biden not to allow this to impede 'the importance of understanding the permanence of China.'
We must 'prevent a war' between the US and China
In an interview published earlier this month with Spiegel magazine, he states 'itis an overriding obligation now to prevent a war... between the two biggest high-tech countries, China and the United States.'
When asked whether Washington should seek to lessen tensions with Beijing in response to the threat of Russia and whether America 'is strong enough to take on its two biggest adversaries at the same time', Kissinger responded:
If taking on two adversaries means expanding the war in Ukraine into a war against Russia, while at the same time remaining in an extremely hostile position to China, I think that would be a very unwise course.
In another interview with Time magazine, Kissinger warned that 'a war between these countries [the US and China] would have implications of catastrophe that were not imaginable even 30 years ago.'
In order to avoid this, he believes that 'the United States and China have a special responsibility— one, to be in contact with each other to define that danger for each other, and secondly, to make this the basic principle of their foreign policy, even while they disagree on a wide range of other things.'
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