Warning of new cold war
Henry Kissinger has warned that the entire world could be drawn into a US-China confrontation on a scale greater than the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union.
Kissinger, 97, a former US secretary of state, said that the threat of nuclear war was compounded by China’s economic strength and technological capabilities.
President Joe Biden has described China as the greatest challenge facing the US and framed their rivalry as one of autocracy against the world’s democracies, amid signs of greater co-operation between Beijing and Moscow.
Biden is seeking to use the threat of China’s economic expansion as a key argument for his US$4 trillion (NZ$5.57 trillion) domestic infrastructure and social support spending plans. He is also seeking to boost solidarity between US allies in the Pacific, notably Japan and South Korea, as tensions rise over Beijing’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea and towards Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Tensions with China were ‘‘the biggest problem for America, the biggest problem for the world’’, Kissinger told the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum on global issues. ‘‘Because if we can’t solve that, then the risk is that all over the world a kind of cold war will develop between China and the United States,’’ he said.
While nuclear weapons were already powerful enough to damage the entire globe during the Cold War in the last century, he said that advances in nuclear technology and artificial intelligence, where China and the US are both leaders, have multiplied the doomsday threat.
‘‘For the first time in human history, humanity has the capacity to extinguish itself in a finite period of time,’’ Kissinger said. ‘‘We have developed the technology of a power that is beyond what anybody imagined even 70 years ago. And now, to the nuclear issue is added the high-tech issue, which in the field of artificial intelligence, in its essence is based on the fact that man becomes a partner of machines and machines can develop their own judgment. In a conflict between high-tech powers, it’s of colossal significance.’’
The Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union was more one-dimensional, focused on nuclear weapons competition, Kissinger said.
‘‘[The Soviet Union] didn’t have developmental technological capacity as China does. China is a huge economic power in addition to being a significant military power.’’
Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the 1970s led to President Richard Nixon’s meeting with Mao Tsedong and a thawing of USChina relations.
Kissinger puts his faith in diplomacy.
‘‘I’m not saying that diplomacy will always lead to beneficial results,’’ he said. ‘‘This is the complex task we have . . . Nobody has succeeded completely.’’
In unscripted remarks during his first speech to a joint session of Congress last week Biden said that under President Xi Jinping China was ‘‘deadly earnest on becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world’’. Kissinger told Die Welt that the US and China should seek co-existence on artificial intelligence technology rather than trying to beat each other. ‘‘Strive for it, the alternative of an all-out conflict strains the imagination,’’ he said.
‘‘For the first time in human history, humanity has the capacity to extinguish itself in a finite period of time.’’
Henry Kissinger