Kissinger Recalibrates

Henry Kissinger, 99, has been making occasional public remarks since the start of the Russo-Ukraine War, and there's little question that at his age, he's sharper than President Biden, almost 20 years his junior, although he was certainly sharper 50 years ago as well. In July, as I've noted here, he backtracked on his May assessment that Ukraine would need to give up land for peace. Just last week, he gave a new assessment about China:

After watching China’s “no limits” partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin fall well short of expectations, the stage is set for President Xi Jinping to tilt at least modestly toward the United States after the 20th party congress, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said on Monday.

“Xi gave a rather blank check to Putin,” Kissinger said at the Asia Society in New York. “He must have thought the invasion would succeed. He must need to recalibrate.”

. . . Xi almost certainly expected Putin to be successful after Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine – an offensive that has revealed deep weaknesses in the Russian military – and wants to avoid seeing a wall of Western opposition against China develop in the way it has against Russia, potentially raising questions at home, Kissinger said.

Well, it wasn't just President Xi who expected Putin to be successful, was it? I would say that just about everyone but President Zelensky and his inner circle expected the same thing, and that would have to include Sec Kissinger. And it isn't just Xi who's having to recalibrate; by changing his position on Ukraine's prospects for success between May and July, Kissinger has done the same thing.

But let's consider that Kissinger was the executor of Nixon's China policy, which was that China needed to develop as a counterbalance to the Soviet threat. The Soviet threat was in turn the dominant theme of Cold War politics and diplomacy. The Kissinger-Nixon solution would be a three-poled balance of world power that would avert Soviet domination by producing a second near-peer to the US in the form of China.

On one hand, Reagan departed from this policy with his view that the West could successfully compete both economically and militarily with the Soviet Union, and that view was vindicated in Gorbachev's reported remark that the Chernobyl accident "bankrupted" the Soviet Union and led to its collapse. Nevertheless, Western diplomatic and military policy has continued to view the balance as being essentially three-poled, with the US, NATO, and the Pacific allies having only slight superiority to near-peers Russia and China.

But let's consider the implications of only one recent public assessment of the actual military state of affairs, that of Gen Petraeus. (I assume his remarks were at least tacitly cleared with Secs Blinken and Austin; the White House -- 'Jake' -- would have been irrelevant):

Retired Gen. David Petraeus predicted Sunday that the U.S., along with NATO allies, would “take out” Russian forces if Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to use nuclear weapons in his war against neighboring Ukraine.

. . . “And what would happen?” [interviewer Jonathan] Karl asked.

“Well, again, I have deliberately not talked to Jake about this. I mean, just to give you a hypothetical, we would respond by leading a NATO, a collective effort, that would take out every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in Crimea and every ship in the Black Sea,” Petraeus replied.

The implication here is hard to avoid: what has taken Ukraine seven months to accomplish so far, with secondhand former Warsaw Pact weapons comparable to those Russia has been using, plus second-tier US weapons like HIMARS, would likely be finished within days by NATO with first-tier weapons and air power; that is, Russia would be driven out of Ukraine's pre-2014 borders and rendered militarily innocuous, without resorting to nuclear weapons.

Given US battlefield success in the First and Second Gulf Wars, plus proven Russian failure in Ukraine, this is simply a foregone conclusion. Not only that, but the end state Gen Petraeus proposes is inevitable, but there are only two scenarios: if the job is left to Ukraine as a proxy for NATO, it will take months, though likely less than a year. If NATO steps in directly, it will take days.

But that's just an interim end stage. The problem for Kissinger and the shades of Nixon is what next -- there is no longer a three-pole balance of world power. If Kissinger isn't thinking about this, I assume Blinken is, or at least he should be.