Kissinger on China and AI

Kissinger, nearing his 100th birthday, remains “sharp as a needle” as he speaks for eight hours with the Economist.

2023-05-17: Kissinger on how to avoid WW3

However, Mr Kissinger also warns against misinterpreting China’s ambitions. In Washington, “They say China wants world domination…The answer is that they [in China] want to be powerful,” he says. “They’re not heading for world domination in a Hitlerian sense,” he says. “That is not how they think or have ever thought of world order.

Mr Kissinger sees the Chinese system as more Confucian than Marxist. That teaches Chinese leaders to attain the maximum strength of which their country is capable and to seek to be respected for their accomplishments. Chinese leaders want to be recognised as the international system’s final judges of their own interests. “If they achieved superiority that can genuinely be used, would they drive it to the point of imposing Chinese culture?” he asks. “I don’t know. My instinct is No…[But] I believe it is in our capacity to prevent that situation from arising by a combination of diplomacy and force.”

Trump overturned 50 years of strategic ambiguity, and Biden has largely followed in those footsteps.

Diplomacy has to be based on recognition that the existence of your counterpart, as a state, as a regime, is not at risk.

AI

AI will become a key factor in security within five years.

AI cannot be abolished. China and America will therefore need to harness its power militarily to a degree, as a deterrent.

“And if you then rely entirely on what you can achieve through power, you’re likely to destroy the world.”

Mr Kissinger’s model for pragmatic thinking is India. He recalls a function at which a former senior Indian administrator explained that foreign policy should be based on non-permanent alliances geared to the issues, rather than tying up a country in big multilateral structures.

The theme running through Mr Kissinger’s epic history of international relations, “Diplomacy”, is that the United States insists on depicting all its main foreign interventions as expressions of its manifest destiny to remake the world in its own image as a free, democratic, capitalist society.

The problem for Mr Kissinger is the corollary, which is that moral principles too often override interests—even when they will not produce desirable change. He acknowledges that human rights matter, but disagrees with putting them at the heart of your policy. The difference is between imposing them, or saying that it will affect relations, but the decision is theirs.