Kissinger says U.S., China must cease escalating threats, or ‘we will slide... about:reader?url=https://www.marketwatch.com/story/kissinger-says-us-...

marketwatch.com

Kissinger says U.S., China must cease

escalating threats, or ‘we will slide into
a situation similar to World War I’
Chris Matthews

5-6 minutes

Published: Oct. 7, 2020 at 6:00 p.m. ET

The U.S. must realize that it can no longer achieve

‘unilateral superiority’ in economic, technological
strength, the famed diplomat says

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger

Getty Images

Henry Kissinger is no stranger to a hostile China.

As President Nixon’s national security adviser, Kissinger helped

engineer the first official visit by an American delegation to the
People’s Republic of China, which ultimately paved the way for
Nixon to visit Beijing and the U.S. to resume a cooperative
relationship with the country after a long period of diplomatic

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isolation.

On Wednesday afternoon, the famed diplomat warned that rising

tensions between the U.S. and China could ultimately lead to a
disastrous, kinetic war, in a virtual discussion with Federal Reserve
Bank of New York President sponsored by the Economic Club of
New York.

“Our leaders and [China’s] leaders have to discuss the limits

beyond which they will not push threats, and how to define that,”
Kissinger said, adding that a these talks must be designed in such
a way that they can be conducted over a long period of time, across
administrations of both parties.

“You can say this is totally impossible, but if it is, we will slide into a
situation similar to World War I,” he continued, pointing out that
during the years leading up to the outbreak of war in the summer of
1914, the conventional wisdom then, as today, was that war
between the great powers was not conceivable.

But even as world leaders at that time didn’t take the threat of war
seriously, they were simultaneously building military capabilities and
strategies that made it more likely. There are parallels to that
technological race and the one occurring today, as the U.S. and
China compete for unassailable dominance in domains like artificial
intelligence.

Instead of striving for such dominance, he argued, we should “think

of an economic world in which no other country should be able to
blackmail us, but where that objective is not designed in such a way
that all potential technological capabilities in other countries have to
be confronted and reduced.

“This is a big challenge for any administration, and it’s not a

partisan challenge, it’s a historic challenge because we can’t review
it every four to eight years, and if we cannot get clear in our own
country about this, we can’t deal with other countries,” he added.

U.S.-China relations have receded somewhat from the spotlight in

the American political discourse as the COVID-19 epidemic and
issues of racial justice and policing have overshadowed the
ongoing trade conflict and disputes over Hong Kong’s
independence from the mainland. But the Trump administration has

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sought to blame China, where the novel coronavirus originated, for

the international epidemic while it has continued to take a hard line
on Chinese companies like the owner of the popular TikTok video-
sharing app.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has become more united in its

desire to strike a combative posture with China. Democratic
nominee Joe Biden once championed China’s accession to the
World Trade Organization but has recently argued that the U.S.
should join with its allies to “confront China’s abusive behaviors and
human rights violations,” in an article in Foreign Affairs earlier this
year.

“The United States does need to get tough with China. If China has
its way, it will keep robbing the United States and American
companies of their technology and intellectual property,” he wrote.
“It will also keep using subsidies to give its state-owned enterprises
an unfair advantage—and a leg up on dominating the technologies
and industries of the future.”

Kissinger argued that the nature of the technologies and industries

of the future make the current U.S.-China conflict a particularly
dangerous one, because it’s possible that technologies like artificial
intelligence lend themselves to zero-sum thinking and winner-take-
all outcomes.

“The last time we have a comparable technological change was

hundreds of years ago, during the enlightenment, when printing
was invented and it enabled the unprecedented distribution of
knowledge,” Kissinger said.

The essential difference between that time and now, however, is

that there was a concurrent flowering of philosophical thinking that
created conceptual frameworks for societies to deal with what this
new technology had wrought. Kissinger warned, “In the present
world, technological thinking is way ahead of conceptual thinking.”

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