Henry Kissinger will celebrate his 100th birthday on Saturday and still keeps the ear of the powerful. Russian journalist, photographer and editor, Natalia Turine seizes on this news to take stock of the “real-politics” of the former American Secretary of State. The founder of Louison Éditions, owner of the Librairie du Globe in Paris, believes that this “shuttle diplomacy” has led democracies “from Charybdis to Scylla” and urges not to reproduce Henry Kissinger’s calculations with the war in Ukraine . Here is his text.
May 27, Henry Kissinger will celebrate his 100th birthday. Nobel Peace Prize winner and practitioner of realpolitics, he knows better than anyone what the values of democracy cost. If the character makes us think of ping-pong diplomacy, we must not forget that it is above all shuttle diplomacy that this man was an ace. It may be time to reflect on where the shuttles have taken us.
But first, what is Kissinger’s shuttle policy that before him Talleyrand, Metternich and many others were already using? Before Kissinger, the United States did not recognize the power of the People’s Republic of China. Only the Taipei one was legitimate. It was therefore the government of Taiwan that occupied China’s place in the UN Security Council when the USSR was isolated there. Kissinger then decided that the creation of relations of trust with the People’s Republic of China would help him in his confrontation with the Soviet Union.
The trick was simple as pie: fight together with Mao against Brezhnev, and with Brezhnev against Mao. But, since the broken clock shows the correct time twice a day, Kissinger only repeated the error made by the allies after the Second World War. This war began as a confrontation of the purely democratic countries (France, United Kingdom), then Czechoslovakia and Poland, and the totalitarian countries (Germany, Italy and later Japan.) Two of the totalitarian countries (Germany and the USSR) agreed with each other, but later one of them declared war on the other. So the democracies agreed with one of the totalitarian countries attacked to defeat the aggressor.
The result of the Second World War is nothing but a moral catastrophe, which allowed the totalitarian system to emerge as the big winner from the conflict.
Natalia Turine
Using divergences is the basis of this “Shuttle Diplomacy”. Roosevelt and Churchill together with Stalin against Hitler. But on May 8, an event took place that we must recognize today as a global moral drama that can put an end to the principles of democracy, and even to the very existence of democratic countries. Because Hitler was absolute evil, Stalin became the component of good in the eyes of the whole world. When Hering, Kaltenbrunner, Ribbentrop, etc. were tried and hanged, Stalin, Beria, Molotov, etc., whose pens signed millions of civilian death warrants in their own country, were celebrating the victory against the German war criminals. The Soviets liberated Auschwitz and have since been associated with the end of the Holocaust. But it was the same Soviets who deported the Tatars, the Chechens, the Kalmuks, who organized the anti-Semitic campaign of the 1950s, taking the lives of so many intellectual Jews. Convinced that they belonged to the camp of good, the Soviets began the descent into the afterlife of evil.
The horror is that the democratic countries allowed Soviet totalitarianism to devour the territories occupied in the 1920s, as well as the territories annexed, following the agreements with Hitler and – the height! – part of Czechoslovakia. Recall that the Second World War began when Hitler occupied the territories of Czechoslovakia on the pretext that Germans lived there. The whole world found this outrageous. But nobody cried foul when Stalin stole part of Czechoslovakia based on the same principles as Hitler, namely that the inhabitants of this part of the country were neither Czechs nor Slovaks. The result of the Second World War is nothing but a moral catastrophe, which allowed the totalitarian system to emerge as the big winner of the conflict, provoking the threat of nuclear war 78 years later.
By deciding that the totalitarian economy is worth that of the liberal and democratic world, the American sat on the values of the Western world
Natalia Turine
Back to the jubilant Nobel Peace Prize, Henry Kissinger. Whoever ended the very shameful war in Vietnam in reality only committed the even more shameful betrayal of the Republic of Vietnam, delivered on a platter to the Communists. Starting from “Kissinger act” the principles of democracy have been buried, giving way to political reality – “the whore of liberalism”, as Lissenko might have said, if he were alive. Thanks to the agreements between the USA and Mao’s China against the USSR, Kissinger gave birth to the monstrous dragon of post-Maoist China – the real danger not only of the United States, but above all of the democratic world in principle. By deciding that the totalitarian economy is worth that of the liberal and democratic world, the American sat on the values of the Western world.
Faithful to “business as usual”, at the start of the war, Henry Kissinger had proposed a Ukraine to sacrifice some of its territories in the name of world peace and prosperity.
A few months later, on the eve of his hundredth birthday, he persists. He says he is ready to call the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, and go see Vladimir Poutine, convinced that both will accept his intervention. Does he reckon we all want to forget how some shut down nuclear power plants to thrive on cheap Russian gas? How did we close the textile factories to sew our clothes in China? That we are going to pretend not to know that the Chinese worker is paid crumbs, while ours is well paid, even if he is unemployed? Is he aware that one day someone will come knocking on our door to tell us that the shops are closing and that it is no longer up to us to decide which world we will live in, because everything we wear, what we use is not ours? So we’re going to rush to the negotiating table to save face. But it will be too late. Kissinger will no longer be of this world, when of our values there will be nothing left.
Happy birthday, Mr. Kissinger.
