2023-05-25 22:12:00
Henry Kissinger is someone who has known Vladimir Putin for a long time and has met him often. The US diplomat talks about the motives of the Kremlin ruler and the probability of a nuclear war.
Henry Kissinger is one of the most influential politicians of the 20th century. The Harvard professor and former US Secretary of State served under Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and was largely responsible for the broad lines of American foreign policy. Kissinger, who turns 100 on May 27, is considered an important political strategist.
In an interview with “Zeit” he now commented on the Ukraine war, his meetings with the Russian ruler Vladimir Putin and the possibility of a nuclear war. “I don’t think Putin will use nuclear weapons to defend his conquests in Ukraine. But the more it gets to the core of Russian identity, the more likely he will.”
Kissinger said of Putin’s motivation for invading his troops in the neighboring country, destroying entire cities and committing the most serious crimes against the civilian population: “I think he overreached himself. I think he got the impression that he wasn’t taking it seriously taken. For him, Ukraine is a symbol of Russia’s humiliation.”
“Would be extremely dangerous for Russia to use nuclear weapons”
The feeling of humiliation is apparently accompanied by a not inconsiderable hubris, as the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin notes. He sees “the main tragedy of our country” in the autocrat’s over-identification with his people. Putin equates himself with Russia and, like Ivan the Terrible, the cruel ruler of the Middle Ages, the man in the Kremlin is also enthroned at the top of the Russian power pyramid.
“A crux of the power pyramid is that the person sitting at the top transmits his psychosomatics to the whole country,” says Sorokin. A crucial part of this psychosomatics is the way the KGB officer thinks, which Putin “never got out of himself.”
Former diplomat Kissinger would probably share this analysis. He knows Putin personally and met the former KGB officer, who was then still unknown outside of Russia, for the first time in the 1990s. Putin told Kissinger that he started his career in intelligence. “All good people start their careers in the secret service. Me too,” Kissinger replied.
Kissinger is one of the few Americans with longstanding access to the Russian autocrat. Until the very end, he met Putin regularly for talks, sometimes in the Kremlin, sometimes at Putin’s dacha. He knows how Putin ticks, what worries him. When former US President Donald Trump wanted to align US Russia policy more closely with the Kremlin in 2016, Kissinger offered to mediate.
Recently there have been signals from Moscow to involve him as a middleman in the Ukraine war. But Kissinger refused. He does not want to interfere with the current government.
Regarding Putin’s repeated threats in the first few months of the war against Ukraine, which was in violation of international law, to use nuclear weapons if necessary, Kissinger told Die Zeit: “It would be extremely dangerous for Russia to use nuclear weapons. Because the West cannot allow nuclear weapons to become the decisive factor become a factor in a war.”
Kissinger’s dubious role in Vietnam and Chile
In the event of such a nuclear scenario, he sees a dark epoch ahead. Kissinger, who was born in Fürth in Franconia in 1923 and fled to the USA with his family from the Nazis at the age of fifteen, speaks in this context of a new dimension in global armament. “That would lead to nuclear armament of all states. Then nuclear weapons would become conventional.” The West must make it clear that nuclear weapons can never be the solution to political problems. Only politics itself, i.e. diplomacy, can do that.
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