Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said he believes military conflict between China and Taiwan is likely if tensions continue on their current course, though he still holds out for dialogue that will lead to deescalation — as he’s been urging.
(Bloomberg) — Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said he believes military conflict between China and Taiwan is likely if tensions continue on their current course, though he still holds out for dialogue that will lead to deescalation — as he’s been urging.
“On the current trajectory of relations, I think some military conflict is probable,” Kissinger said in an interview with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, when asked about the possibility that China would invade Taiwan. “But I also think the current trajectory of relations must be altered.”
The remarks, delivered as Kissinger looked back on his life and career soon after his 100th birthday, were some of his most downbeat about the state of relations between China and the US, which has vowed to back Taiwan in the event China attacks. Kissinger said it was up to both Washington and Beijing to step back from their standoff, which he said was at “the top of a precipice.”
Kissinger, who served as top US diplomat and national security advisor at the White House in the 1970s, spoke days before his latest successor, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, is set to travel to Beijing. Blinken will be the highest-level US official to visit in five years, and the White House is looking to set expectations low, saying there will be no breakthroughs.
Kissinger, the author of numerous books including “On China,” written a year before President Xi Jinping took power, is closely watched for his views on Asian geopolitics given his secret trip to China in 1972 and his role in normalizing US-China relations under President Richard Nixon.
Taiwan has long been one of the most sensitive issues in US-China relations. Beijing — which claims the self-ruled democracy of Taiwan as its own — has long sought to regain control of the island through “reunification,” and regularly warns Washington about arms sales and and any sort of political engagement with Taiwanese leadership.
Senior US military officials have repeatedly warned that China’s leadership is intent on an invasion and wants its People’s Liberation Army to be capable of seizing Taiwan in the coming years — possibly as early as 2027.
All these years later, Kissinger said he’s still undecided about the outcome of the strains between the US and China, given that “they have not yet actually engaged in the sort of dialogs that I’ve suggested.” But the one thing he said he knows for sure is that wars between two superpowers cannot be won. Or as he put it, they are “winnable only at costs that are out of proportion.”
“It’s a unique situation in the sense that the biggest threat of each country is the other — that is, the biggest threat to China is America, in their perception, and the same is true here,” Kissinger said.
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