Henry A. Kissinger
Henry A. Kissinger
Henry Alfred Kissingeris an American diplomat and political scientist. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as United States Secretary of State in the administrations of presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. For his actions negotiating the ceasefire in Vietnam, Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize under controversial circumstances, with two members of the committee resigning in protest. Kissinger later sought, unsuccessfully, to return the prize. After his term, his advice has been sought by world leaders...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionStatesman
Date of Birth27 May 1923
CountryGermany
Certainly not a party of the workers and the peasants. In fact, Jiang Zemin in recent weeks has officially said that capitalists and the entrepreneurs should be enrolled in the Communist Party.
The China of the 1970s was a communist dictatorship. The China of the twenty-first century is a one-party state without a firm ideological foundation, more similar to Mexico under the PRI than Russia under Stalin. But the measurement of the political and the economic evolution has not yet been completed, and is one of the weak points of the system.
We first became conscious of the plane publicly on a Monday. I thought then by the weekend it would be done. But then the Chinese military, the defense minister made a statement saying that if there was no apology from the United States, the Chinese military and the Chinese people would never understand. No reference to the government or the Communist Party, and that obviously presented an internal problem to the Chinese leadership, which was travelling at that moment.
China is a one party state. Sooner or later China will get to the point when the new social classes, which have emerged thanks to economic success, will have to be integrated into the political system. There is no guarantee that this process will run smoothly.
Every American president, regardless of party, has said that America has an intense interest in a peaceful resolution. And I think it should be left at that.
Now when I bore people at a party they think it's their fault.
Deng Xiaoping thought of himself as a great revolutionary and a great reformer. He had dismantled the Chinese communist management of the economy. In my next-to-last conversation with him, which was about six months before Tiananmen Square, he said to me that his aim would be the next phase to reduce the Communist Party to philosophical issues. And I said, "What's a philosophical issue?" And he said, "Well, like if we make an alliance with Russia." Given his view of Russia, that was not the likeliest thing that would ever happen.
I do not know what will happen in China politically. I do know that it is impossible to maintain the communist system or probably even a strict one-party system when the economy becomes so pluralistic. Now, what form that takes and what institutions will evolve, I do not have a clear view about. I do not think the United States, as a general principle, ought to intervene in this.
Congress can't do much more damage to us than they already have. To this extent we're liberated to do what is right. ... Our successors will be living in a nightmare if we don't do what is right.
For me, the tragedy of Vietnam was the divisions that occurred in the United States that made it, in the end, impossible to achieve an outcome that was compatible with the sacrifices that had been made, ... Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.
Ninety percent of all politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
My heart goes out to the president because I've served in an administration that faced a very divided country in a very difficult set of circumstances.
Because of the axiom that guerrillas win if they do not lose, stalemate is unacceptable, ... the military challenge in Iraq is more elusive.
We will go where the facts lead us,