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.
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.