At the age of 99, in an effort to promote his new book, released in July, “Leadership” or leadership, Henry Kissinger has now spoken to the Wall Street Journal, after Bloomberg, CNN and the German Der Spiegel, among others.
On the back cover of the weekend issue, the former secretary of state was more detailed about the US’s escalating conflicts with China and Russia. In the newspaper’s spotlight, he fears global “imbalance”. He argues that, “if you believe that the result of your effort has to be the imposition of your values, then balance is not possible.”
The Americans, he says, refuse to separate diplomacy from “personal relations with the adversary.” They tend to see negotiations “in missionary terms, seeking to convert or condemn their interlocutors rather than penetrating their thinking.”
It wasn’t always like that. “The current period responds too much to the emotion of the moment”, he says, hence his main warning: “We are on the verge of war with Russia and China over issues that in part we created, with no concept of how it will end or what it should to take”. About Taiwan specifically:
“The policy that was implemented by both parties produced and enabled Taiwan’s progress towards an autonomous democratic entity and preserved the peace between China and the US for 50 years. Great care must be taken with measures that appear to alter the basic structure.” .”
COLLISION COURSE
The New York Times and others noted that “five US lawmakers arrive in Taiwan amid tensions with China”, in a visit that “may contribute to the escalation cycle”, with Washington and Beijing on “a collision course”. It was supposed to have been programmed before the recent crisis.
CROSSING THE NARROW
It was also news in the Taiwanese press, but sharing attention with the repercussions of another trip, this one little reported in the USA.
As confirmed by Taipei’s Zhongguo Shibao, the vice president of the opposition Kuomintang party, in government until 2016, traveled to Xiamen, across the strait, for measures to support mainland Taiwanese, including businessmen. It too would have been programmed before the crisis.
THE NAMES AND THE FACES
With the headline “The names and faces of the 36 Palestinian civilians killed during Israel’s operation in Gaza”, Tel Aviv’s Haaretz highlighted over the weekend, including in its print edition in hebrewa panel of photographs of confirmed victims, half of them children.
