Former President Richard Nixon’s children also paid tribute to his former national security adviser who served their father and ended the Vietnam War…reports TN Ashok
Former US President George Bush led the Republicans in mourning the death of former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, as he described him as a “distinctive voice” on foreign affairs.
He recalled that Kissinger was “one of the most dependable and distinctive voices” on foreign affairs.
“America has lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices on foreign affairs with the passing of Henry Kissinger. I have long admired the man who fled the Nazis as a young boy from a Jewish family, then fought them in the US Army,” he was quoted in multiple reports quoted as saying.
“When he later became Secretary of State, his appointment as a former refugee said as much about his greatness as it did America’s greatness,” Bush said, adding: “He worked in the Administrations of two Presidents and counselled many more. I am grateful for that service and advice, but I am most grateful for his friendship. Laura and I will miss his wisdom, his charm, and his humor. And we will always be thankful for the contributions of Henry Kissinger.”
Former President Richard Nixon’s children also paid tribute to his former national security adviser who served their father and ended the Vietnam War.
“Kissinger played an important role in the historic opening to the People’s Republic of China and in advancing detente with the Soviet Union, bold initiatives which initiated the beginning of the end of the Cold War,” the Nixon daughters said in a statement.
“His ‘shuttle diplomacy’ to the Middle East helped to advance the relaxation of tensions in that troubled region of the world.”
Kissinger became Nixon’s National Security Advisor in 1968 and led the US’ withdrawal from Vietnam.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Kissinger’s death signalled the ‘end of an era’.
“It is with a heavy heart that I mourn the passing of a great statesman, scholar, and friend, Dr. Henry Kissinger, who left us at the age of 100,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
“Kissinger’s departure marks the end of an era, one in which his formidable intellect and diplomatic prowess shaped not only the course of American foreign policy but also had a profound impact on the global stage,” he said.
“Henry Kissinger was not just a diplomat; he was a thinker who believed in the power of ideas and the importance of intellectual capital in public life. His contributions to the field of international relations and his efforts in navigating some of the most challenging diplomatic terrains are a testament to his extraordinary capabilities,” media reports from Tel Aviv said.
Xi was even warmer with his words, “The Chinese people never forget their old friends and Sino-US relations will always be linked with the name of Henry Kissinger.”…reports Asian Lite News
China’s leadership last week gave a warm welcome to former US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger not only met with China’s President Xi Jinping but also with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, and also with defence minister Li Shangfu, whom US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin was not allowed to see, Poltico reported. During the 1970s, Kissinger served as the US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald R Ford.
The Biden administration has spent most of 2023 trying to restart high-level contacts with their Chinese counterparts after a wayward Chinese military balloon blew up relations beyond the control of both countries.
The Biden administration wants to see a return to regular diplomatic exchange. In recent months Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry have all been to Beijing, reported the US-based politics-focused media outlet.
The results of Kissinger’s visit have been mixed. China’s response to these visits has not been warm. Of the three Biden policy principals who recently visit Beijing, Chinese Prime Minister Xi Jinping only met with Blinken, Politico reported.
Wang said, “Kissinger has made historic contributions to breaking the ice in China-US relations, and played an irreplaceable role in enhancing understanding between the two countries.”
Xi was even warmer with his words, “The Chinese people never forget their old friends and Sino-US relations will always be linked with the name of Henry Kissinger.”
Kissinger reciprocated the warm vibe, telling his interlocutors that he was a “friend of China.”
However, the State Department discarded that last possibility in their daily briefing, stressing that Kissinger was travelling as a private citizen and not under the aegis of the US government.
Still, the contrast was striking between the warmth on display at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse with Kissinger compared to the chilly atmosphere at the Great Hall of the People, where Biden officials met with their counterparts.
It is in China’s and Kissinger’s mutual interests to play nice. For China, it was an opportunity to suggest that they would respond better to US policies. For Kissinger, the visit represents an opportunity to do what he has been trying to do ever since he left public office, maintain his relevancy and influence, POLITICO reported.
To understand Beijing’s perspective, it is important to remember that the political climate in Washington has turned sharply against the Chinese Communist Party over the last decade. For all the talk of polarization of American foreign policy, one of the few areas of recent bipartisan consensus has been to view China as a rival rather than a partner.
This began at the tail end of the Obama administration. The Trump administration ramped up the hostility, highlighting human rights abuses in Xinjiang, bolstering its support of Taiwan, and launching a trade war with China, the US publication reported.
In its first two years, the Biden administration has accelerated the retreat from engagement and the turn towards strategic competition. This became evident in the first high-level meeting between Chinese and US officials in Anchorage, Alaska in March 2021.
After Chinese officials castigated their US counterparts, Blinken responded in kind in front of television cameras, warning China that its actions would result in a “far more violent” world.
The United States and China share the most important relationship of the 21st century.
— Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (@InstituteGC) July 25, 2023
For the next two years, the Biden administration made it clear that it took strategic competition with China seriously. The United States jumpstarted the Quad and launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, structures that were clearly designed to counter China, the Politico reported.
In his statements, President Joe Biden seemed to signal an end to US “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan, making it quite clear that the United States would step in to help defend the island from a PRC military attack. The administration imposed export controls that made the Trump administration’s measures seem picayune by comparison.
After 30-plus years of breakneck engagement, started by Kissinger’s first visit to China in 1971, it is understandable that Xi and his leadership cadre felt nostalgic for a time when US officials were more interested in opening up China’s market to American exports than closing the US economy to Chinese exports, the US media outlet said.
Politico opined that Kissinger’s reputation has taken a hit in recent years, as his past policy mistakes and attempts to attain power have become clearer to the untrained eye. Great power politics, however, remains the one area where even Kissinger’s bitterest critics acknowledge that he had some juice. (ANI)
Leaders with visions are able to create strategies to reform societies. It is quite natural for them to face problems and find solutions. Success is abstract and the book is an attempt to compile the success of six leaders … reports Anasudhin Azeez
Former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor of the US Dr Henry Kissinger believes that leaders without a vision are putting people in trouble.
Dr Henry Kissinger @C Jurgen Frank
Addressing a press meet organised by Foreign Press Association (FPA) in London as part of his book release, Kissinger said, “Transformational changes are taking place across the world. My book, ‘Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy’, is my concern about the changes. Leaders with visions are able to create strategies to reform societies. It is quite natural for them to face problems and find solutions. Success is abstract and the book is an attempt to compile the success of six leaders.”
Responding to a question on Ukraine, 99-year-old Kissinger said leaders should have a clear idea about their political objectives and should be aware about the military situation. “You can’t simply go on fighting without any objective,” he added.
In May 2022, speaking at the World Economic Forum, Kissinger advocated for a diplomatic settlement that would restore status quo, effectively ceding Crimea and the occupied territories of Ukraine to Russian control.
Kissinger also urged Ukrainians to “match the heroism they have shown with wisdom,” arguing that “pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself.”
However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rejected Kissinger’s suggestions, saying Ukraine would not agree to peace until Russia agreed to return Crimea and the Donbas region to Ukraine.
In his latest book, Kissinger analyses the lives of six extraordinary leaders through the distinctive strategies of statecraft which he believes they embodied. After the World War II, Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany, brought defeated and morally bankrupt Germany back into the community of nations by what Kissinger calls ‘the strategy of humility’.
According to Kissinger, Charles de Gaulle set France beside the victorious Allies and renewed its historic grandeur by ‘the strategy of will’.
During the Cold War, US President Richard Nixon gave geostrategic advantage to the United States by ‘the strategy of equilibrium’.
Regarding the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, he said the assassinated leader brought a vision of peace to the Middle East by a ‘strategy of transcendence’.
Against the odds, Singapore’s first prime minister Lee Kwan Yew created a powerhouse city-state by ‘the strategy of excellence’.
In the book, he has praised British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for her determination to stay with the US despite opposition from her own party. Kissinger said that Thatcher wanted Britain to be a bridge between the US and Europe.
“Although when she came to power Britain was known as ‘the sick man of Europe’, Thatcher renewed her country’s morale and international position by ‘the strategy of conviction,’” he said.
To each of these studies, Kissinger brings historical perception, public experience and – because he knew each of their subjects and participated in many of the events he describes as personal knowledge. The book is enriched by insights and judgements such as only he could make, and concludes with his reflections on world order and the indispensability of leadership today.
For their pipeline to Beijing, Kissinger, Nixon and the Secretary of State William Rogers disregarded the warnings by Dhaka-based US diplomats in what came to be known as “The Blood Telegram” about the “genocide’ in East Pakistan …writes Arul Louis
The US realpolitik has taken a 180-degree turn between 1971 and now, but Washington continues to pay a heavy price for the decision that drove it to virtually condoning the genocide in Bangladesh by Pakistani troops.
The US under President Richard Nixon and his then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger tried in 1971 to develop close ties with China with barely veiled hostility to India, but Washington is now trying to build a strategic partnership with India, which it sees as an ally against China.
As Kissinger has said, the driving force behind the US failure to condemn the Pakistani atrocities in what was then East Pakistan was Washington trying to build a bridge to Beijing via Islamabad.
Kissinger admitted in an Atlantic magazine interview that Pakistan used “extreme violence and gross human rights violations” to put down the Bangladeshi independence movement, but “to condemn these violations publicly would have destroyed the Pakistani channel” to China.
For their pipeline to Beijing, Kissinger, Nixon and the Secretary of State William Rogers disregarded the warnings by Dhaka-based US diplomats in what came to be known as “The Blood Telegram” about the “genocide’ in East Pakistan and their denunciation of the US “moral bankruptcy” in failing to condemn the atrocities and the suppression of democracy.
Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State
The US went on to intimidate India that was inundated by millions of Bangladeshis fleeing the killing fields of East Pakistan by trying to use its diplomatic muscle and by moving the Seventh Fleet close to India when New Delhi backed the Mukhti Bahini freedom fighters.
And there were the vulgar insults — revealed decades later — by Nixon aimed at India’s then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
For someone hailed as the master of realpolitik, Kissinger has in retrospect worked against the national interests of the US, paving the way for a massive challenge to his country by China, outmanoeuvred by Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and their successors.
As a result of the Nixon-Kissinger folly that made it an accomplice of the Pakistani crimes in Bangladesh, Washington is now facing a formidable rival that built itself economically at the expense of the US and is trying to emerge as the dominant world power and a challenger to the world order, especially in the Indo-Pacific.
To counter China’s power the US — under President Joe Biden and before him Donald Trump — is turning to India, a nation reviled by their predecessor, Nixon, as “repulsive” and ridiculed with racist and sexual vulgarities.
Decades later as the effects of Kissinger’s China diplomacy haunt the US, Trump had India declared a major defence partner of the US and the bookend with it of democracies in the Indo-Pacific.
Biden has moved the strategic cooperation further making cooperation with India a priority for his administration as it confronts China’s aggressive behaviour from the Himalayas to the South China Sea and beyond.
After their meeting in Washington in September, they said that because of the “growing strategic convergence, President Biden and Prime Minister Modi resolved to advance the US-India Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership”.
The world has also changed in other ways.
When the Cold War raged in 1971 with the Soviet Union and the US as the main protagonists, Moscow and Beijing were at loggerheads ideologically and were coming off prolonged border clashes in 1969.
The US was trying to pull China into its orbit to counter the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union’s rift with China was a factor in propelling Moscow towards close ties with India.
Historical photograph of the Rayerbazar killing fields in Bangladesh, 1971(WIKIPEDIA)
India and the Soviet Union had signed the Treaty of Friendship, Peace and Cooperation in 1971, which stopped just short of an overt military pact.
It said that if either of them was attacked they “shall immediately enter into mutual consultations in order to remove such threat and to take appropriate effective measures to ensure peace and the security of their countries”.
Moscow was the main provider of arms to New Delhi mostly on concessional terms based on rupee trade for then-foreign exchange starved India.
Now China is closer to the Soviet Union’s successor, Russia, drawn by their mutual antipathy towards the US.
India, on the other hand, is drawing away from Russia and moving closer to the US and the West, the residual military purchases and joint manufacturing notwithstanding.
Economically, too, India and the US see the benefits from cooperation, while India’s move away from its vaunted pseudo-socialism has paid dividends.
While India pushes its Make In India agenda, the US sees value in diversifying its supply chain on mutually beneficial terms having seen the results of its over-reliance on China during the Covid-19 crisis.
The US has unequivocally backed India during the clashes with China.
The US and India have made several agreements on defence and strategic matters, including the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), Communications, Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA), and the Industrial Security Agreement (ISA) and are working towards interoperability of their militaries.
But in the 1970s India’s brand of Non-Alignment with a pro-Soviet tilt would have made any cooperation with the US unlikely, nor would the US attraction to dictators like Pakistan’s generals.
India, too, has paid its own price for the Soviet-branded Non-Alignment in economic terms, which in turn has impacted its strategic and diplomatic standing.
In “The Blood Telegram”, which got its name from the US Consul General Archer Blood who endorsed their stand, the diplomats witnessing the genocide said they “fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected in order to salvage our nation’s position as a moral leader of the free world”.
Fifty years later, Biden may be trying to do just that even as the US pays its price for Kissinger’s realpolitik folly.
