Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is warning that the United States could be “on the edge of war” with Russia and China.
The 99-year-old former statesman told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published this past Friday, “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead it,” he said.
“You can’t just now say we’re going to split them off and turn them against each other. All you can do is not to accelerate the tensions and to create options, and for that you have to have some purpose,” he said.
Kissinger had little more to say on the subject, although he did not shy away from expressing an opinion on Russia’s war with Ukraine — nor has he refrained from suggesting steps to Kyiv in recent remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland earlier this year.
In a virtual address to the Forum, Kissinger said he believed Ukraine should give up part of its territory in exchange for a peace deal with Russia.
“In my view, movement towards negotiations and negotiations on peace need to begin in the next two months or so,” he said at the time.
“The outcome of the war should be outlined by them before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be – could be, if not at all, overcome. And particularly between the eventual relationship of Russia towards Europe and of Ukraine towards Europe.
“Ideally, the dividing line should return to the status quo ante. I believe pursuing the war beyond that point would turn it into a war not about the freedom of Ukraine, which has been undertaken with great cohesion by NATO, but a new war against Russia itself.
“It seems to me to be the dividing line that it is just impossible to define, and it will be difficult,” he added.
Kissinger has since slightly revised his opinion with Russia-Ukraine war nearly through its sixth month and well on the way to another.
He told the Wall Street Journal that after the way Russia has behaved in Ukraine, “Now I consider, one way or the other, formally or not, Ukraine has to be treated in the aftermath of this as a member of NATO.”
In his recently published tome “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy,” Kissinger analyzed the vision, style and achievements of six post-World War II global leaders, including Egypt’s Anwar Sadat.
All six, he wrote, were “leaders who, in the unending contest between the willed and the inevitable, understood that what seems inevitable becomes so by human agency. They mattered because they transcended the circumstances they inherited and thereby carried their societies to the frontiers of the possible.”
