https://pjmedia.com/spengler/misleading-advice-from-henry-kissinger-again/
Oddly, Dr. Henry Kissinger was the star speaker at the Nov. 9 “Jews and Conservatism” conference in New York. Kissinger, who made his bones by melding game theory with balance-of-power theory, insisted that the United States couldn’t win the Cold War. The Reagan wing of the Republican Party rejected Kissinger’s version of conventional wisdom. Reagan told his team that our policy was we win, they lose, and proceeded to win the Cold War without firing a shot. Kissinger surely deserves credit for America’s 1972 opening to China–which contributed to our victory over the Soviet Union–but it is implausible to put him forward as an exemplar of conservative thinking.
Kissinger remains as brilliant and as misleading as ever, propounding a pessimistic, even defeatist view of America’s position in the world. On Nov. 14 he told a business group that promotes China trade that a strategic conflict “will be worse than the world wars that ruined European civilization,” adding, “It’s no longer possible to think that one side can dominate the other. They have to get used to the fact that they have that kind of a rivalry.” That’s the same Kissinger who told us we couldn’t win the Cold War.
His warning is correct but misleading. Some of my conservative friends, for example Steve Bannon, appear to think that we can destabilize China, help the good Chinese people overthrow the wicked Chinese Communist Party, and dispense with the greatest challenge to American world leadership with a few deft maneuvers. They are frothing-at-the-mouth mad, and I have had to dissociate myself from their madness. China’s GDP per person has multiplied 48 times (that’s 4,800%) since Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 reforms. The grandparents of today’s Chinese faced starvation during the Great Leap Forward of 1959-1961. This is the first time in China’s history where no-one is hungry.
