Love him or hate him, Henry Kissinger has been awkwardly frank amid the neocon-ization of Washington’s ruling elite in the last year or so.
He was lambasted by the blue check marks in May when he dared to suggest Ukraine should cede territory to Russia with the goal of peace.
“I hope the Ukrainians will match the heroism they have shown with wisdom,” Kissinger warned an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, adding with his famous sense of realpolitik that the proper role for the country is to be a neutral buffer state rather than the frontier of Europe.
And we suggest his latest remarks will be met with a wall of group-think-tank-ism attacks as he dares to suggest it is not a good idea for Ukraine to join NATO.
Mr. Kissinger courted controversy earlier this year by suggesting that incautious policies on the part of the U.S. and NATO may have touched off the crisis in Ukraine.
He saw no choice but to take Vladimir Putin’s stated security concerns seriously and believes that it was a mistake for NATO to signal to Ukraine that it might eventually join the alliance:
“I thought that Poland — all the traditional Western countries that have been part of Western history — were logical members of NATO,” he says.
But Ukraine, in his view, is a collection of territories once appended to Russia, which Russians see as their own, even though “some Ukrainians” do not.
Stability would be better served by its acting as a buffer between Russia and the West:
“I was in favor of the full independence of Ukraine, but I thought its best role was something like Finland.”
Well the 99-year-old has doubled-down on them now, bluntly telling the Council on Foreign Relations that any attempt to remove Russia’s historic “safety belt” was unwise.
“From the Russian point of view, the United States then attempted to integrate this whole region, without exception, into an American-led strategic system,” thus stressing that “it was not a wise American policy to attempt to include Ukraine into NATO.”
Finally, the former US Secretary of State said that sooner or later, the West and Russia must engage in dialogue.
“Some dialogue, maybe on an unofficial level, maybe in an exploratory way is very important,” he reiterated, adding that “in the nuclear environment” such an outcome is preferable to a “battlefield decision.”
In early August, Kissinger warned that the US had found itself “at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created,” arguing that Washington has rejected traditional diplomacy, as it has been “seeking to convert or condemn their interlocutors rather than to penetrate their thinking.”
Kissinger: “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 to.” https://t.co/mytxSajU6Q
— Gal Luft (@GalLuft) August 13, 2022
As Caitlin Johnstone succinctly noted earlier in the year, Henry Kissinger is warning about the dangers of US warmongering not because he has gotten saner, but because the US war machine has gotten crazier:
That we are now hurtling toward confrontations that don’t appear rational to someone who has spent the majority of his life watching the mechanics of empire from inside its inner chambers should concern us all. When you are talking about brinkmanship between major world powers, especially nuclear brinkmanship, the last thing you need is for one of the parties involved to be acting erratically and nonsensically. We need de-escalation and detente, and we need it yesterday. If you’re too hawkish for Henry Kissinger, you’re too motherfucking hawkish.
We couldn’t have said it better.
Reprinted with permission from Zero Hedge.
