Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state and national-security adviser under Presidents Nixon and Ford, sat down to lunch with the Financial Times and, over the course of two hours (and three courses), offered his unique perspectives on the “special” U.S.-U.K. relationship, on artificial intelligence, on Donald Trump’s meeting in Helsinki with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, on the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, and on one of his most famous utterances.
Here’s the Bavaria-born Realpolitiker on power, which, in the 1970s, he called the ultimate aphrodisiac but at 95 puts a more prosaic spin on:
‘I would certainly say that being able to make decisions has a dimension that you don’t have in ordinary life.’Of the Helsinki summit, which he said he favored in principle, Kissinger said this:
‘I think we are in a very, very grave period for the world. I have conducted innumerable summit meetings, so they didn’t learn this one from me.’And on Trump himself:
‘I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences.’On NATO, particularly vis-à-vis Russia, in its Putin era:
‘The mistake Nato has made is to think that there is a sort of historic evolution that will march across Eurasia and not to understand that somewhere on that march it will encounter something very different to a Westphalian entity. And for Russia this is a challenge to its identity.’On Putin:
‘I do not think Putin is a character like Hitler. He comes out of Dostoyevsky.’On Brzezinski, national-security adviser to Jimmy Carter, who died this year at 89:
‘Zbig was almost unique in my generation. We both considered ideas about the world order to be the key problem of our time. How could we create it? We had somewhat different ideas. But for both of us, we were above all concerned to raise diplomacy to that level of influence.’On artificial intelligence, a topic on which he has advocated the creation of a presidential commission:
‘If we do not start this effort soon, before long we shall discover that we started too late.’And on the so-called special relationship:
‘I am a believer in the special relationship because I think America needs a psychological balance and this is a natural one based on history — not just on contributions.’
