mr kissinger emerges from the deep past and says that a piece of ukraine should be given to russia
supposedly that there is no alienation of russia from europe
that you get the impression that mr kissinger's calendar is not 2022 but 1938
and he thinks he is talking to an audience not in davos in munich
i was amazed at the press coverage of what henry kissinger said at davos
last week because it seemed entirely at odds with the words that he used the headlines
were essentially kissinger urges uh ukrainians to give away territory uh president zelinski
presumably read those headlines rather than uh studying kissinger's remarks and accused him of uh
appeasement uh mentioning the dread date 1938 as if henry kissinger needs a lesson about uh munich
1938 was of course uh the year when his uh family left uh germany uh and moved to the united states
if you actually go back to what kissinger said he said three things first he pointed out
uh not quite as assertively as he might have that in 2014 he wrote a piece at the time of the
first russian uh incursion into ukraine warning that if uh we persisted with the idea that ukraine
might ultimately join nato that would likely lead to conflict and that a better solution would be
for ukraine to be a neutral state with uh guarantees and and i think he has a right
to say i told you so at this point because we continue to talk about nato membership without
ever showing any sign of delivering it and i think that's part of the reason that we've uh
ended up in this situation part of the reason i stress the second thing he said was the most
uncontroversial thing of all that there needs to be a peace the war can't go on indefinitely it's a
hugely disruptive war and not just for eastern europe and that that piece needs to be based
on the status quo ante now i wonder if journalists don't study latin anymore because the status quo
antebellum means the situation uh before the war now that's a a critical issue because it seems to
me what we're really implicitly talking about is which borders of ukraine are we seeking to restore
if it's the borders as they were on the eve of the invasion february the 24th that is a
very different thing from the restoration of the borders of ukraine prior to 2014 because
that would include uh restoring crimea uh as well as parts of donetsk and luhansk to ukraine
now zelensky has on multiple occasions said that that's not actually what he's aiming at that the
borders pre-february 24th will suffice so quite why anybody was attacking kissinger on that score
i can't imagine if zelinski himself would accept a return to pre-february 24th and the third thing
that kissinger said which got almost no attention was that we have to see this conflict in a broader
global perspective and we have to recognize that a much bigger risk than anything we currently see
is actually for the united states and china to end up in a conflict that didn't get any coverage at
all but i think it's right to see this not just in the context of us of the relationship between the
u.s and russia but in a broader context something along the lines of what i've called cold war ii
um i don't think we really disagree condi but first of all i i was trying to make sure
we all understood what henry kissinger had said i completely agree with you about uh
on the russian empire i i'm entirely with you that was exactly my argument back on
january the second when i said war was coming i think the problem with uh the whole discussion
about ukraine and nato was that uh ukraine was going to become a member of nato but never was the
sort of the scheduled date and that was the worst possible position to be in for ukraine to have
the possibility but never the reality of nato membership i think if we followed through uh
then i think we would be in a very different place so i think that's that's the critical problem
uh notice of course this has backfired on putin in ways that i can't imagine he foresaw
with the prospect now of finland and sweden joining nato nato will actually be larger
as a result of his action but but i i sense that there's another point we should be focusing on
here i welcome joe biden's article in the new york times because it's clarified a number of
things that were not clear when we last discussed this it wasn't clear when we last discussed this
that the united states was not aiming to weaken russia as a goal of
our support for ukraine it wasn't clear that the united states wasn't aiming at regime change in
russia so biden's explicitly taken a couple of things off the table that got onto the table
as a result of i think some rather casual talk in the early phase of the war he's made it clear too
that he doesn't want to equip the ukrainians so that they can attack russian territory and that's
a really extremely important distinction some of this gets down into the minutiae of weapon systems
but i think even a lay reader can get there's a difference between using western weapons mainly
american weapons to get the russians uh back uh into uh the the territory they controlled in
february the 23rd but we don't want our us weapons to be used to to hit russian targets even although
there are certainly ukrainians who would like to be able to do that so i think the new york
times piece that just came out is a really welcome clarification of what the united states is trying
to achieve and it's not something that i disagree with what i disagreed with was some of the things
that were being said earlier on when lloyd austin talks about weakening russia as a goal when biden
himself rather i thought recklessly said in warsaw that he wanted to see putin removed from power
well the dangerous thing about taiwan is that we have a rather tried and tested
formula of strategic ambiguity that goes back 50 years uh it goes all the way back uh to talking
of henry kissinger richard nixon's famous trip to china and a change in u.s policy that
that essentially uh said we we now will accept china's claim that taiwan is in fact a province of
the people's republic however there was important rider added by congressional legislation in 1979
we won't accept a violent change in the de facto autonomy
of taiwan and that strategic ambiguity has served the united states pretty well
over half a century notice taiwan rather against the expectations of the nixon administration
not only survived as a de facto autonomous state but actually became a very successful
flourishing democracy it's one of the big success stories uh of the last 50 years
but it meant that the chinese could never be quite sure what we would do if they decided to assert
their claim over taiwan by force now i think we should stick with strategic ambiguity
and it's dangerous for us to make unambiguous commitments to taiwan because if we do that
we do set ourselves uh potentially on the path to collision with china and one of the things i
agreed with very much when i listened to uh henry kissinger last week was his point that
a confrontation between the united states and china would be a catastrophic event for the reason
that condi said earlier the scale of the resources on both sides and the formidable military
technology that both sides can now deploy it's in many ways a scarier cold war than cold war one if
it turns into a hot war so i think joe biden made a genuine slip but it's not a slip inconsistent
with the direction of travel in u.s policy going all the way back to the trump administration
both the trump and by administrations have been more explicitly supportive of taiwan than their
predecessors and it's odd to me actually that the biden administration has taken this policy
on and run with it but i think there's a reason for that and the reason is that this
this administration is quite hawkish on china in some ways i think it's more hawkish than the trump
administration was my sense is that if trump had been re-elected he would have sought to do a deal
with xi jinping quite soon after that because i don't think trump was particularly committed
to the ideological dimensions or indeed even the geopolitical dimensions of this he was interested
in the trade war full stop uh end of paragraph so we're in a rather odd situation in which
dubai demonstration is more hawkish from china than trump was and it tends to broaden out its
hawkishness uh whether it's on taiwan or xinjiang on a range of other issues part of what i was
struck by as i listened to kissinger last week was this point that we are driving russia into china's
arms it's not that russia has been cut off from the world it's been cut off from the western world
from the the world that can impose the sanctions that we essentially have have imposed china's
not doing that china's not going to cross certain lines that i think we've drawn uh fairly clearly
it's not going to supply weaponry as far as i can see to russia but it's certainly
uh going to trade with russia and this takes us back again 50 years because what was the great
kissinger principle that the united states should be closer to russia and china than they are to
one another we've completely reversed that they're now very close indeed together and in a way one of
the unintended consequences of policy uh of the sanctions regime is to drive russia even closer
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