22 February 2025
My comments seem to be coming true.
This is an update on my previous letter and, whilst lengthy, is well worth a read.
It’s interesting to look back to 2015 when National Interest magazine published an interview with Henry Kissinger. The Kissinger doctrine of triangular diplomacy was developed during the cold war years and attempted to define the relationship between the USA, the Soviet Union and China.
Conceived in a period of American political weakness, Kissinger's doctrine argues that foreign policy needed to rely on a combination of diplomacy and military power in order to bring benefits to all relevant players, and subsequently ensure international stability.
Kissinger sought to reshape the US approach to international relations, seeking a balance of power which could produce stability and thereby reduce military and political tensions between the three main players in the international order; the Soviet Union, the United States and China. Triangular diplomacy consequently included the aim of achieving this balance of power and pursuing the policy of détente with the Soviet Union.
Source Lukacsova, V. (2009). “Kissinger’s Triangular Diplomacy” (PDF). Retrieved 6 May 2019.
Turning to the National Interest article, Kissinger said:
A country that has had three thousand years of dominating its region can be said to have an inherent reality. The alternative would have been to keep China permanently subdued in collusion with the Soviet Union, and therefore making the Soviet Union – already an advanced nuclear country – the dominant country of Eurasia with American connivance. But China inherently presents a fundamental challenge to American strategy.
Well, you have the view that Reagan started the process with his Evil Empire speech, which, in my opinion, occurred at the point when the Soviet Union was already well on the way to defeat. We were engaged in a long-term struggle, generating many competing analyses. I was on the hard-line side of the analysis. But I stressed also the diplomatic and psychological dimensions. We needed to wage the Cold War from a posture in which we would not be isolated, and in which we would have the best possible basis for conducting unavoidable conflicts. Finally, we had a special obligation to find a way to avoid nuclear conflict, since that risked civilization. We sought a position to be ready to use force when necessary but always in the context of making it clearly demonstrable as a last resort.
Kissinger went on to comment on China. A country that has had three thousand years of dominating its region can be said to have an inherent reality. The alternative would have been to keep China permanently subdued in collusion with the Soviet Union, and therefore making the Soviet Union – already an advanced nuclear country – the dominant country of Eurasia with American connivance. But China inherently presents a fundamental challenge to American strategy.
The challenge of China is a much subtler problem than that of the Soviet Union. The Soviet problem was largely strategic. This is a cultural issue: Can two civilizations that do not, at least as yet, think alike come to a coexistence formula that produces world order?
The issue is not to extricate the United States from the Ukrainian impasse but to solve it in a way conducive to international order. A number of things need to be recognized. One, the relationship between Ukraine and Russia will always have a special character in the Russian mind. It can never be limited to a relationship of two traditional sovereign states, not from the Russian point of view, maybe not even from Ukraine’s. So, what happens in Ukraine cannot be put into a simple formula of applying principles that worked in Western Europe, not that close to Stalingrad and Moscow.
In that context, one has to analyse how the Ukraine crisis occurred. It is not conceivable that Putin spends sixty billion euros on turning a summer resort into a winter Olympic village in order to start a military crisis the week after a concluding ceremony that depicted Russia as a part of Western civilization.
So then, one has to ask: How did that happen? I saw Putin at the end of November 2013. He raised a lot of issues; Ukraine he listed at the end as an economic problem that Russia would handle via tariffs and oil prices. The first mistake was the inadvertent conduct of the European Union. They did not understand the implications of some of their own conditions. Ukrainian domestic politics made it look impossible for Yanukovych to accept the EU terms and be re-elected or for Russia to view them as purely economic. So, the Ukrainian president rejected the EU terms.
The Europeans panicked, and Putin became overconfident. He perceived the deadlock as a great opportunity to implement immediately what had heretofore been his long-range goal. He offered fifteen billion dollars to draw Ukraine into his Eurasian Union. In all of this, America was passive. There was no significant political discussion with Russia or the EU of what was in the making. Each side acted sort of rationally based on its misconception of the other, while Ukraine slid into the Maidan uprising right in the middle of what Putin had spent ten years building as a recognition of Russia’s status. No doubt in Moscow this looked as if the West was exploiting what had been conceived as a Russian festival to move Ukraine out of the Russian orbit. Then Putin started acting like a Russian czar – like Nicholas I over a century ago. I am not excusing the tactics, only setting them in context.
If we treat Russia seriously as a great power, we need at an early stage to determine whether their concerns can be reconciled with our necessities. We should explore the possibilities of a status of nonmilitary grouping on the territory between Russia and the existing frontiers of NATO.
The West hesitates to take on the economic recovery of Greece; it’s surely not going to take on Ukraine as a unilateral project. So one should at least examine the possibility of some cooperation between the West and Russia in a militarily nonaligned Ukraine. The Ukraine crisis is turning into a tragedy because it is confusing the long-range interests of global order with the immediate need of restoring Ukrainian identity. I favour an independent Ukraine in its existing borders. I have advocated it from the start of the post-Soviet period. When you read now that Muslim units are fighting on behalf of Ukraine, then the sense of proportion has been lost.
It means that breaking Russia has become an objective; the long-range purpose should be to integrate it.
Source Henry Kissinger 19 August 2015, National Interest magazine. nationalinterest.org/feature/the-interview-henry-kissinger-13615. Retrieved 22 February 2025.
I wonder where Trump and his advisors got their ideas from?
After the large scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Kissinger had modified his views and gave his last interview on the subject in November 2023.
At the same time, when asked whether China wanted to impose its culture on the world:
Kissinger told the Economist he wasn’t sure but said the US could prevent this through a combination of diplomacy and force.
He added that if it proves impossible for the US to co-exist with China and avoid an all-out war, “we have to be militarily strong enough to sustain the failure.”
On the Russia/Ukraine War, Kissinger told The Economist that Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was “a catastrophic mistake of judgment.”
However, he also said the West bore some responsibility for this catastrophe by dangling the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine, which enraged Putin, while failing to properly defend Ukraine.
Kissinger came out in favour of Ukraine joining NATO early this year after opposing it a year earlier because he concluded that Ukraine could never be neutral.
Kissinger decided that NATO membership for Ukraine after the conclusion of the war will be essential for stability in Europe.
Kissinger told the Economist he believed it was essential to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible.
A peace agreement, in Kissinger’s view, would require territorial concessions by both sides. Because this would result in instability that could spark new wars, he called for a rapprochement between Europe and Russia to secure Europe’s eastern border.
Kissinger told Bloomberg News in June that he thought it was “improbable” that Putin would remain in power if Russia agreed to end the war in Ukraine and accepted the fact that it cannot conquer Europe and must become part of a peaceful European “consensus.”
Kissinger’s assessment of the war in Ukraine is relevant today as opposition grows in the US and Europe to providing military aid to Ukraine, and many experts assessing that the war has become an unwinnable stalemate. Many of the calls we will hear during the 2024 presidential election year for peace talks and a cease-fire to end the war in Ukraine will be heavily influenced by Kissinger’s recommendations.
I found one observation that Kissinger made to the Economist to be especially interesting.
Despite recent highly publicized efforts by China and Russia to demonstrate their new cooperation and friendship, Kissinger doubts China and Russia can ever work well together because “they have an instinctive distrust of one another” and are not natural allies. Let’s hope Kissinger was right about this.
Source. Fred Fleitz, Newsmax. Retrieved from www.newsmax.com/fred-fleitz/shuttle-diplomacy/2023/11/30/id/1144251/. 22 February 2025.
So, there we have it. I think we can see where the USA’s policy has come from. Trump, in his own clumsy way has seen (in his eyes) a need to maintain Russia and not undermine it too much, to provide a counterbalance to China whilst the USA builds reserves of military, financial and economic assets and prepare for the forthcoming battle with China. This will also have the impact of putting Australia and New Zealand at the forefront of a strategic competition between the USA and China. In Trump’s view he sees Russia as less of a threat to the USA than China, and by the previous administration drip feeding Ukraine it has kept the war going, debilitating Russia to the point where they would be grateful for a peace which consolidates its gains. The USA would have a weakened Russia for a few years allowing it to concentrate on its relationships with China.
We live in interesting times.
