Henry Kissinger is one of the most influential politicians of the 20th century. The Harvard professor and former US Secretary of State served under Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and was largely responsible for the broad outlines of US foreign policy. Kissinger, who will turn 100 on May 27, is regarded as an important political strategist.
In an interview with Zeit, he now commented on the war in Ukraine, his meetings with Russian ruler Vladimir Putin and the possibility of nuclear war. “I don’t think Putin will use nuclear weapons to defend his conquests in Ukraine. But the more it touches the core of Russian identity, the more likely it is that he will.”
Kissinger said of Putin’s motivation to invade his forces in the neighboring country, destroy entire cities and commit the most serious crimes against the civilian population: “I think he pushed himself too far. I think he got the impression that he was not was taken seriously. For him, Ukraine is a symbol of Russia’s humiliation.”
>> All current developments in the live ticker
The Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin sees “our country’s greatest tragedy” in the autocrat’s exaggerated identification with his people. Putin equates himself with Russia and like Ivan the Terrible, the cruel ruler of the Middle Ages, the Kremlin man also sits at the top of the Russian power pyramid. “A crux of the power pyramid is that the person at the top transmits his psychosomatics to the entire country,” says Sorokin. A crucial part of this psychosomatics is the thinking of the KGB officer, which Putin “never got out of.”
“Would be extremely dangerous for Russia to use nuclear weapons”
Former diplomat Kissinger would likely share this analysis. He knows Putin personally and first met the former KGB officer, then unknown outside Russia, in the 1990s.
Putin told Kissinger that he started his career in intelligence. “All good people start their careers in intelligence. Me too,” Kissinger replied.
Kissinger is one of the few Americans who has long had access to the Russian autocrat. Until recently, he regularly met Putin for talks, sometimes at the Kremlin, sometimes at Putin’s dacha. He knows how Putin ticks, which worries him. When former US President Donald Trump wanted to align US Russia policy more closely with the Kremlin in 2016, Kissinger offered to mediate.
Recently, signals have come from Moscow to involve him as an intermediary in the war in Ukraine. But Kissinger refused. He does not want to interfere with the current government.
Regarding Putin’s repeated threats in the first few months of the illegal war against Ukraine to use nuclear weapons if necessary, Kissinger told Die Zeit: “It would be extremely dangerous for Russia to use nuclear weapons. Because the West cannot allow nuclear weapons to become the decisive factor in a war.”
Kissinger’s dubious role in Vietnam and Chile
In the case of such a nuclear scenario, he sees a dark age ahead. Kissinger, who was born in Fürth in Franconia in 1923 and fled with his family to the US from the Nazis at the age of fifteen, speaks in this context of a new dimension in global armament. “That would lead to nuclear armament of all states. Then nuclear weapons would become conventional.” The West must make it clear that nuclear weapons can never be the solution to political problems. Only politics itself, ie diplomacy, can do that.
In the 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, Kissinger made a decisive contribution to the policy of detente between the US and the Soviet Union. At the same time, he caused the Vietnam War to increase in brutality. The violent coup in Chile also fell during his term in office, after which socialist president Salvador Allende was carried away dead from the presidential palace in Santiago de Chile.
Socialized in a geopolitically bipolar world, in which two major blocs – the democratic West led by the US and the communist Soviet Union with its vassal states – determined world events, Kissinger is skeptical about the direction of current US foreign policy in an increasingly multipolar world order.
He does not think a trial against Putin is a good idea
“Today the challenges are even greater than then. In the 1950s there was only one challenge for the West – from Stalin,” he said. He thinks the China factor is crucial. If Beijing decides to get involved in the war in Ukraine, peace talks could be held between Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he said. Kissinger recently told US broadcaster CBS To do this, however, Xi Jinping would have to move away from Putin a bit.
Kissinger, on the other hand, does not think it is a good idea to take Putin before an international court. The greater the pressure on a political leader, the more inscrutable his actions are. This makes it less likely that the war will end.
On March 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lwova-Belowa, the Russian President’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights. They are accused of illegally abducting Ukrainian children to Russia.
Kissinger: There is no longer any alternative for Ukraine to join NATO
Kissinger’s assessment of the causes of the war in Ukraine is also astonishing. The discussion about Ukraine’s NATO membership has therefore done considerable damage to the relationship between the Russian leadership and the West. “If Putin’s attack on Ukraine were successful, the whole concept of NATO would be overthrown. It cannot be in the national interest of the United States.”
The nearly 100-year-old political strategist would have thought it wiser to give Ukraine a status of neutrality along the lines of that of Finland from the outset. The country could therefore have acted as a kind of buffer state between the West and Russia. But it didn’t come to that.
Although former Chancellor Angela Merkel prevented Ukraine from joining the defense alliance at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, nothing came of Ukrainian neutrality on the Finnish model. In March 2022, during peace talks in Istanbul, Ukrainian negotiators again offered Russia the status of neutrality and renunciation of NATO membership on the condition that Putin immediately withdraw his troops from Ukrainian territory. But the autocrat in the Kremlin was apparently not ready for that.
A year and many thousands of deaths and destroyed cities later, Kissinger also sees no other way out than for Ukraine to join NATO. “This ensures that conflicts that could arise after the end of the war or that arise from the peace agreement cannot be settled by unilateral attacks by Russia or Ukraine.”
Soource :Watson
I am Amelia James, a passionate journalist with a deep-rooted interest in current affairs. I have more than five years of experience in the media industry, working both as an author and editor for 24 Instant News. My main focus lies in international news, particularly regional conflicts and political issues around the world.
