Posted on 04/03/2007 1:33:33 PM PDT by Paul Ross
Tuesday, April 3, 2007 7:29 a.m. EDT
Font size=+3>Kissinger: U.S., China Can Form 'New Global Order'
Newsmax, Reporting Reuters.
China's rise as a global power is inevitable and could lead to conflict unless Beijing and Washington can cooperate to create a new global order, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said on Tuesday.
Kissinger first came to Beijing in 1971, on a secret mission to re-establish Sino-U.S. ties after more than two decades of diplomatic silence.
Since then, economic reforms have turned China into a powerhouse. Beijing is now running a trade surplus with the United States that Washington last year put at $230 billion, and helps keep its rival afloat by buying vast amounts of U.S. debt.
Washington politicians have also sparred with Beijing over issues related to its rapid development from currency controls to military spending and foreign policy in countries like Sudan.
But Kissinger said China's growing political and economic prominence was irreversible, and if the two nations could not cooperate it raised the specter of war.
"When friends and colleagues in the United States talk about the rise of China and the problems it presents to us, I say the rise is inevitable. There is nothing we can do to prevent it, there is nothing we should do to prevent it," Kissinger said.
"When the centre of gravity moves from one region to another, and another country becomes suddenly very powerful, what history teaches you is that conflict is inevitable. What we have to learn is that cooperation is essential," he said in a lecture to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Challenges ranging from nuclear proliferation to increasingly tight energy supplies and environmental degradation needed to be tackled together.
"I look at Sino-American relations as a challenge to build a new international system based on human insight, on cooperative action, to avoid catastrophe," Kissinger said.
"Those of you who are students and who will be shaping the world should not think of the other country as adversaries."
Kissinger insisted the world must avoid exoticizing China. When he first came to Beijing, he said, his prepared speech contained a line about reaching a "mysterious country", prompting a challenge by master diplomat Zhou Enlai, then China's premier.
"Zhou Enlai put up his hand and said 'What is so mysterious about China? There are 900 million of us and it is not mysterious to us.' That was an important lesson," Kissinger said.
Did you post that just to have something to say?
True. Whatever else can be said about them, the rulers of China are basically driven by rational self-interest (like the old Soviet leadership, and unlike the Islamic Fundamentalist terror networks).
Wrong then, wrong now. Kissinger’s take on China’s ascendancy is based on similar premises, too, and ignores the same underlying dynamics. China has enormous potential—its people are hardworking and smart, its resources vast—yet that potential can never be realized while the country is led by a privileged cadre of communist autocrats holding fast to a Marxist delusion completely at odds with certain truths about human nature and economic value. Without free exchange of ideas or liberty of expression, such a state can go so far, and no farther. It’s what dictators never grasp—the personal is the political: freedom to think and say what one likes translates to independent decision-making and promotes the primacy of the individual over the collective. The free market is a market of ideas that drive the generation of goods and services, and these ideas don’t come from a top-down collective. Grafting a capitalist branch onto a communist tree won’t work, either, at least in the long term. At some point, the Chinese will need to make a choice. In the meantime, I wish discredited, self-styled oracles like Kissinger would shut up and play golf or something.
“As long as we have nuke subs that roam the ocean we can wipe them out. “
But we gotta have the will to use them.
25 years from now will Democrat/Socialist thinking have so permeated America that we would rather lay down than fight???
We’re almost there now.
IIRC, Kissinger is heavily invested in China.
I’d rather die than accept what Kissenger is laying out.
History is neither a process nor an event. It is a recounting as told by the victors.
China’s recounting of its past has always been one of surpressing those with whom they deal.
And eat their rice.
America has been trading with China for 1000 years, and Europe has been trading with China for 2700 years. Modern America is Europe’s way of trading with China by moving Europe one continent to the west since the Bedouins have pretty much cut off the overland trade routes to the east; it’s obvious that the problem is continuing and will continue forever, so trade from the American west coast has permanently taken the place of trade from the European west coast.
IMHO Marxism is to China what Perry's Black Ships were to Japan - the spur to throw off an outdated feudal system and embrace the modern world, however smoothly it went (not very in either case!).
It seems to me dubious that *any* real good came from its Marxist experience. From what I know of history Chang Kai-shek made a reasonably serious attempt to modernize China (first started by Sun Yat Sen - too bad he died prematurely) but was foiled by the Japanese invasion first and Mao's insurgents later - at this point Chinese Marxism is completely counterproductive - no sane person believes in Marxism anymore - any Chinese who claim they do are hypocrites more interested in the economic benefits of being the decider class...
that said, the world is entering a very, very dangerous period while China's Marxist government morphs into something more stable (and democratic, allowing the new, talented Chinese middle class to have a say in how things should be done), and throws off the last vestiges of real *imperialism* and joins the great economic game which has knitted together most the planet.
China need to learn to tolerate Taiwan at their doorstep just as the US has tolerated Cuba at *its* doorstep - if it learns to, there will be peace. if it doesn't, there will be war.
I’d rather die than accept what Kissenger is laying out.
I’d rather it were Kissenger and his ilk that died. They screwed up America for one generation, it’s time they move on.
And why is not strange to hear Kissinger touting more “global order” BS - that totalitarian dictatorships and and a democratic Republic can lie down in the green grass of bliss with each other? ‘Cause a leopard never changes his spots.
The world will be much better off WITHOUT any system of a “global order” because it will be more honest in admitting our honest differences, instead of submerging them under some “order”, which is no more than an attempt to dismiss those differences as invalid.
If Kissinger had been honest, he could have just as easily have said: “screw your Constitution, your freedom, your rights - they are not really important”.
No...just me committing a typo, missing a bracket!
But just because they aren't using our posts to send messages....doesn't mean that the CFR and Trilateralists aren't keeping tabs on us, however!
(If only for grim amusement...watching the SHeeple shake their electronic fists at them....)
The Chinese need to focus on making cheap products for Americans to consume. Their military budget amounts to toilet paper in relation the US military budget. They are our servants, so they need to stop the pocket knife rattling, make like a few factories and shut it. I need cheap chinese crap, not tedious hypotheticals, from has been strategists.
You don’t believe this?
Hell no!
Bump! Absolutely correct. And I second your further sentiments in full.
Kissinger was dissed all during the Reagan Administration because of precisely this. Reagan promised Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum that he would keep Kissinger out of his administration...and he did, E.g.:
Of the many times I met with Ronald Reagan, I count as the most important my visit with him on March 28, 1980, in his Los Angeles office. I directly asked him, "You did promise, didn't you, that you would not reappoint Henry Kissinger or give him any role in making our policy toward the Soviet Union?" Reagan replied, "That's right; I did."Bush hasn't, and I think the results are already "in" as to which one had the vastly more effective foreign policy....Reagan kept his word to me and to America, both in the backroom negotiations during the 1980 Convention and throughout his two terms in the White House. Reagan reversed the Kissinger policy of accepting second-place to the Soviet Union and adopted the goal of victory over Soviet Communism.
I disagree. In the future we will move from europe to asia. Our interest in western europe is near finished.
Gengis Khan
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