Latest news with #Kissinger
Newsweek
5 days ago
- Politics
- Newsweek
Welcome to the Age of Dumb Kissinger
Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. For all his controversies, Henry Kissinger, who would have turned 102 last month, was a master strategist. His vision of realpolitik—rooted in cold calculation, balance of power, and pragmatic diplomacy—helped shape global politics for decades. His legacy is instructive—and not just because Marco Rubio is the first person to serve simultaneously as secretary of State and national security advisor since Kissinger. President Donald Trump has stripped down and distorted the lessons of the late statesman into a crude, transactional, impulsive worldview that mistakes bluffing for strength and coercion for strategy. Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty Welcome to the Age of Dumb Kissinger, where Washington is undermining its leverage, weakening alliances, and emboldening adversaries. Kissinger understood that power isn't just about threats—it's about credibility, relationships, and patience. Trump's transactional instincts betray an obsession with performative actions regardless of long-term costs. Kissinger believed that power stemmed from a combination of economic strength, diplomatic influence, national self-interests, and military deterrence—but most importantly, the perception of resolve and strategic consistency. Trump's version of power, however, is modeled on a shallow and superficial grasp of the bar takeover in Goodfellas—all chest-puffing bravado, but without the discipline, foresight, or grasp of power dynamics that true grand strategy requires. In repeatedly weakening the coalitions that sustain American influence, Trump has demonstrated that he fundamentally misunderstands the sources of American power. His public skepticism of our NATO treaty commitments, at least unless allies pay more, ignores the alliance's strategic value as a bulwark against Russian expansionism and source for democratic resilience. His efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into making concessions, while credulously accepting Russian President Vladimir Putin's lies and manipulations has not only undercut Kyiv's fight against Russian aggression but also signaled to Moscow that U.S. support for Europe is transactional and unreliable—a message Beijing appears to be taking away about Taiwan as well. Trump can oscillate between impatience with Putin, even threatening Russia with sanctions coordinated with Europe, and backtracking after Putin makes just a marginal counteroffer in bad faith. Trump can be quick in throwing his fellow European leaders under the bus. Why? For no other reason than being entranced by Putin's lies and flirtations. This is a sign of profound weakness, damaging to our nation's credibility, and, on the other side of the world, showing Chinese President Xi Jinping exactly who he's dealing with in Washington—a president prone to endless temper tantrums, whose mind can be changed in the last minute, sometimes with as little as a vague public statement, with no higher strategic thought than that. Similarly, Trump's erratic behavior toward key economic partners further reflects his shallow grasp of power dynamics. His repeated tariff threats against Canada—a cornerstone of North American economic might—and bizarre musings about Greenland reveal a mindset that conflates economic leverage with diplomatic strategy. And in perhaps the one instance where a much tougher stance on trade would engender broader public and even allies and partners' support—China—Trump has made it remarkably clear that his actions are driven by his feelings rather than solid, long-term policy planning to bring jobs and industry back to the United States. A strategic approach would have consulted and coordinated with like-minded countries, especially in Europe and Japan, to put Beijing on notice about its beggar thy neighbors practices—such as overcapacities that erode others' industrial base. But instead he went on his own, slapping a 145 percent rate on Beijing, convinced that it would bring China to the table to make concessions, only to back down later—generating "TACO" ("Trump always chickens out") headlines that describe his tariff hammer as less mighty than he claims because, very narrowly and without regard to the larger national interest, it would hurt his own base. Taking America Off Center Perhaps where Dumb Kissinger rings most true is in Trump's inability to understand Kissinger's ultimate goal: that maintaining a stable balance of power was consistent with our interests. Kissinger knew that stability required a web of relationships where each great power balanced the others—and where Washington operated as the fulcrum around which the system pivoted. Trump's foreign policy, however, leans on disruption rather than order. Kissinger's diplomacy excelled because he understood the value of predictability—that rivals must understand the limits of your ambition and the consequences of crossing redlines. Trump, however, mistakes unpredictability for strength and chaos for leverage. His admiration for strong men mirrors a mafioso-style belief in dominance and intimidation, rather than the calculated balance Kissinger sought. The legacy of Dumb Kissinger diplomacy is a world less stable and certain of American leadership. By misunderstanding the foundations of power, Trump is squandering U.S. influence. By misapplying coercion without strategy, he is inflaming conflicts rather than resolving them. And by failing to understand the delicate balance that Kissinger worked to maintain, Trump is making America's rivals stronger and its allies more vulnerable. Kissinger's realpolitik may have had its flaws—often ruthless and always morally ambiguous— but it was grounded in a coherent understanding of power and diplomacy. Trump's misunderstanding of the lessons of this approach have resulted in a foreign policy that is simple, crude, and ineffective. Trump is showing what happens when realpolitik is reduced to mere transactionalism—and where spectacle outweighs strategy. So welcome to the Age of Dumb Kissinger—a world of bluster without balance, power without purpose, and chaos without control. Michael Schiffer served as assistant administrator for Asia at USAID in the Biden administration, senior advisor and counselor at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and prior to that, at the Department of Defense in the Obama administration. Anka Lee served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia at the Pentagon and led China policy and strategy at USAID in the Biden administration. The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
Bloomberg
6 days ago
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Is Marco Rubio Really the Next Henry Kissinger?
This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, the most powerful resident of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. And of course I'm going to bug you about this quick survey again. I'm nothing if not persistent! Marco Rubio sure has come a long way from his first job building exotic bird cages in Miami as a teenager. But is he really the next Henry Kissinger?
Irish Times
01-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
‘There's a menace, an edge to life in America that wasn't there before. And the possibility of dark stuff'
Night after night on the drive from the White House to the family home in McLean, across the Potomac in Virginia, Zbigniew Brzezinski would recall the events of the day into a recorder as he watched the city slip by from the rear window. He couldn't have known it then, but he was speaking to an unlikely future lunch companion and a collaboration he would not live to see. Edward Luce, now the Financial Times' US national editor and columnist, was a schoolboy in England when Brzezinski was at the peak of his influence as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter during the crowded, significant four years between 1977 and 1981 of international crisis and diplomacy. 'I got a radio for Christmas in 1979,' recalls Luce when we meet. 'And I remember running into my parents' bedroom on Boxing Day and telling them the Russians invaded Afghanistan. I had a pretty bad impression then of Brzezinski as an ultra-hawk, which was not a rounded impression of him. I knew of him, but not in the way people knew about Kissinger. I mean, John Cleese was referencing Kissinger in Fawlty Towers.' Brzezinski was a counterweight to Henry Kissinger in the fraught cold war decades: never as famous, not as quotable, but just as consequential. He and Kissinger passed through Ellis Island within six weeks of one another, as adolescents, in 1938. It was the beginning of what Luce describes as a 'frenemyship', with a cinematic arc covering seven decades. The Brzezinski family gave Luce the transcriptions of those recordings when their father died, in 2017, aged 89. To the end, Brzezinski, a precocious Polish emigrant who arrived in Washington via Harvard to become the pre-eminent Sovietologist of the era, remained a fiercely independent thinker – and a Washington outsider. READ MORE Edward Luce. Photograph: Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullan via Getty Fortunately for Luce, he was an immaculate keeper of records. Part of him always mourned his Warsaw childhood, and he developed an intense friendship with Pope John Paul II. Brzezinski's children also gave Luce full access to their father's letters and papers and their blessing to write an unauthorised biography. Luce was hooked, and understood that as well as immersing himself in contemporary histories, he was, as he writes, in 'a race against the actuarial clock' with Madeleine Albright and president Carter among the 100-odd interviewees he sat with in the twilight of their lives. 'It is obsessional,' says Luce, hopping on to the couch in his livingroom on a dazzling Saturday afternoon. Luce is a sprightly 56, quick to find humour and slightly bleary from a Friday evening book-publishing party held in his honour. His wife, Niamh King, who is Irish and director of the Aspen Strategy Group, says the most dedicated guests drifted back here, to their home in Georgetown, to prolong the night. She makes coffee and sets down a plate of Cadbury's Fingers, a treat she correctly predicts an Irish guest will appreciate – and shares the name of the store that stocks them. In the acknowledgments, Luce includes an exchange that became an in-joke during his four years spent on the book: at the dinner table, Niamh asks him to pass the salt. 'SALT 1 or SALT 2?″ comes the absent-minded reply. The term – referencing the strategic arms limitations talks – is a useful metaphor for the vanished world of high geostrategy to which Luce returned. 'It is apocryphal,' he says of the dinner table story. 'But what does Trump call it? Truthful hyperbole. Yeah, it is obsessional. Any other reading is an opportunity lost. It is a vast subject covering about 90 years. You need to include the rivals to Brzezinski and what their Sovietology was: you can't understand him without understanding his context. But it is inexhaustible. You either write a biography properly or not at all. And I felt it was not irrelevant to what happens today.' Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski arrives to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007. Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters The subtitle to Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski is America's Cold War Prophet. Brzezinski's steadfast view- that the Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of its distinct internal nationalities – was borne out. But his reputation was welded to that of Jimmy Carter. The men could hardly have been more different – the laconic southern Baptist and the bright, abrasive son of Polish aristocrats. They shared an intellectual hunger, a thriftiness that one reviewer described as 'comical tightfistedness' and, perhaps, too, an aloofness that did not go down well in Washington. 'That was a big mistake,' says Luce of the Carters' decision to keep their distance from Washington society events. 'Carter thought the people he was shunning were snobs – but they thought he was being snobbish by spurning them. And there was a sort of preachiness about Carter that really rubbed them up the wrong way. Carter was the first real modern outsider president. The way to fix that was to dive in and immerse yourself. There was a bit of Obama there, too – an impression of being supercilious and above-you-people. Which is not good politics.' After losing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, Carter found himself, as Luce writes, 'an orphan of history, disavowed by his party'. But Brzezinski also found himself in the wilderness through the 1980s. 'Yeah. He was really cast out. And he did a lot to get himself cast out. He was extremely rude to people. And his memoirs were ill-advised. He really did lionise himself and take down everybody else – except for Carter,' says Luce, laughing. 'And it was strange – he was actually very generous intellectually with people he thought were worth it. He usually attacked arguments, not people. But that memoir did him an enormous amount of damage. And he was a pariah amongst Democrats for years. The fall of the Soviet Union redeemed him. He was a superstar again. But he was a very restless soul. He was at his best having battles. So he didn't bask in any glory. In the 1990s he got very involved in Bosnia, and that is where Clinton used him. He was very pro-Nato. He really saw through Putin post-9/11 and was a really incisive critic of what was the establishment view. He was not part of the establishment – even in his grandest, most vindicated autumn years, he never was. And I think that is a good thing.' By then, Luce had moved from India, where he was a correspondent with the Financial Times, to Washington, where his weekly columns are frequently scathing of the current administration. He occasionally met Brzezinski for lunch in various haunts and came to like the senior man, who was generous with what Luce calls a 'deep fund of historical memory'. [ No limits? Why the United States could be on the verge of a constitutional crisis Opens in new window ] So Luce has had a busy May, double-jobbing as both guest at the recent FT Spring Festival, where he spoke with the newspaper's editor, Roula Khalaf, about his biography, before turning public interviewer to Steve Bannon. That event closed the show in front of a packed auditorium. The crowd was giddy: evening drinks loomed and Bannon excels at provocation, drawing murmurs of polite outrage when he cheerfully declared the recent papal conclave rigged and predicted that Trump would run for – and win – a third term (the constitutional limit is two terms). Luce has lived in the US for two decades and has travelled enough of the country to understand the reasons why the Maga faithful have come to see Trump as a messianic figure. 'Yes, I can. And as I said to Bannon: I agree with half of what you are saying. The diagnosis is good. But ... habeas corpus being suspended does not follow 'this is a plutocracy'. He is correct. It is a plutocracy. And the Left is too much a part of it. They are the cognitive and managerial elites who don't want to upset their part in the firmament. And until they get fire in their belly – and it has to be populist – then Trump or Trump-like figures are going to win or have a really good chance, assuming the system is free and fair next time. But Bannon understands that people hate the establishment in America and have pretty good reason to. And with Trump, it is not that people believe what he says. It is that him lying to them sounds more authentic and truthful than the Democrat blow-dried, focus group-tested, risk-averse talking points that so many of them campaign on.' Recently, Luce and Niamh found themselves chatting about the sense of unease they both detect in Washington now. His first experience of the city was as a speechwriter for Larry Summers, who was an avid FT reader, in the carefree 1990s. 'Summers and Greenspan and Rubin and these people – what were they called? 'Masters of the Universe' by Time magazine. When I came back here, the Pentagon was the department, not the treasury. It was a fortress mentality, and a very different town to the one I left. Less pleasant. But nothing like today. Trump has been the real change. Ten years ago, when your plane touched down in Dulles or DCA [Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport], you were coming home. Because we had been here for so long. And you would relax. Now I just tense up wherever I am coming in from. There is a menace, an edge to life. Not just in Washington, but in America, that just wasn't there before. And the possibility of dark stuff. I guess what schoolkids must feel when they do shooting drills. You are suddenly aware of something.' If Kamala Harris won ... in some ways it would have been darker than what we are going through now. I think the country would have broken down For the first time, he finds his 'heart skips a beat' going through emigration as a green-card holder. It is just six months into the new administration. It is impossible to predict the state of the nation in 2028. And there are no heavyweight strategic thinkers of Brzezinski's ilk to be found in government in Washington any more. Luce's biography, which has received uniformly dazzling notices, is a salute to a vanished age of intellectual and moral rigour. Luce's daughter Mimi, in a welter of school exam study, pops in to say hello. Luce describes his family background as 'privileged, quite posh ... not moneyed'. His father, Baron Richard Luce, was lord chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth. During the royal funeral, Ed and his father were guests on the popular MSNBC show Morning Joe, co-hosted by Joe Scarborough and Brzezinski's daughter, Mika: the hosts are a couple. Luce walks across to the bookcase and finds a photo-still of the television appearance. He had advised his father about video-link decorum. 'Just: please don't put the iPad up your nose.' His father paid no heed and then delighted in telling the hosts that Ed had been expelled from school in his younger days. 'It was excruciating,' says Luce cheerfully. 'But it was good television.' Then US vice-president Kamala Harris shakes hands with her presidential rival Donald Trump during a debate last September. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty London will always be home, even if Britain, post-Brexit, feels 'very Lilliputian and kind of grey'. But still, there were times last year, with the political atmosphere truly poisonous and the election forecasts see-sawing between Trump and Kamala Harris, that the family 'were seriously considering, if Kamala Harris won, we could actually move to London'. 'In practice, it would have been the Weimar Republic on steroids,' he explains. 'In some ways it would have been darker than what we are going through now. I think the country would have broken down. So, the Trump victory was the least-bad outcome in terms of social stability and the worst in governance. There would have been violence.' Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Cold War Prophet is published by Simon & Schuster in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK. Ed Luce will appear at the Dalkey Book Festival on Friday and Saturday, June 13th and 14th
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Eric Schmidt Says He Often Meets People Who Can't Tell Apart The Real World From The Online One, Now The Ex-Google Boss Is Warning AI Will Only Make It Worse
Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told a Faena Forum audience that artificial intelligence will "exacerbate" people's tendency to confuse life online with life offline, a problem he said the late Henry Kissinger had anticipated years ago. What Happened: Sitting beside journalist Sean McManus at the Faena Forum, Schmidt recalled Kissinger's lifelong interest in how humans construct reality and warned that generative AI is "going to be exacerbated ... to a level that's hard for all of us to understand." "I meet all sorts of people who seem to be confused between the difference between the online world and the real world," he said, predicting the gulf will widen as large models tailor hyper-personalised content. Trending: Maker of the $60,000 foldable home has 3 factory buildings, 600+ houses built, and big plans to solve housing — Schmidt traced the conversation back to a 2010s Bilderberg meeting where he first engaged Kissinger on algorithmic power— an exchange the strategist later called a "new definition of reality." Kissinger, then 95, pressed Schmidt to co-author The Age of AI and its sequel Genesis, finishing edits a week before his death. Schmidt has long warned policymakers of the 'existential risk' AI may pose to the masses and has also expressed concerns over the U.S. government's potential pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI).Why It Matters: OpenAI boss Sam Altman has likewise cautioned that the scale of the coming AI wave is "beyond what we can wrap our heads around," urging "humility and caution." Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Sundar Pichai has also emphasized the need for an open mind and acknowledged the weight of technology like AI, which can progress rapidly and potentially cause large-scale societal disruptions. Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk have gone further, warning that deepfakes are nudging society toward a "simulated future" where citizens struggle to prove anything is real. Read Next: Hasbro, MGM, and Skechers trust this AI marketing firm — Invest before it's too late. 'Scrolling To UBI' — Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. You can invest today for just $0.30/share with a $1000 minimum. Photo Courtesy: Frederic Legrand – COMEO on Send To MSN: Send to MSN Up Next: Transform your trading with Benzinga Edge's one-of-a-kind market trade ideas and tools. Click now to access unique insights that can set you ahead in today's competitive market. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? This article Eric Schmidt Says He Often Meets People Who Can't Tell Apart The Real World From The Online One, Now The Ex-Google Boss Is Warning AI Will Only Make It Worse originally appeared on © 2025 Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Eric Schmidt Says He Often Meets People Who Can't Tell Apart The Real World From The Online One, Now The Ex-Google Boss Is Warning AI Will Only Make It Worse
Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told a Faena Forum audience that artificial intelligence will "exacerbate" people's tendency to confuse life online with life offline, a problem he said the late Henry Kissinger had anticipated years ago. What Happened: Sitting beside journalist Sean McManus at the Faena Forum, Schmidt recalled Kissinger's lifelong interest in how humans construct reality and warned that generative AI is "going to be exacerbated ... to a level that's hard for all of us to understand." "I meet all sorts of people who seem to be confused between the difference between the online world and the real world," he said, predicting the gulf will widen as large models tailor hyper-personalised content. Trending: Maker of the $60,000 foldable home has 3 factory buildings, 600+ houses built, and big plans to solve housing — Schmidt traced the conversation back to a 2010s Bilderberg meeting where he first engaged Kissinger on algorithmic power— an exchange the strategist later called a "new definition of reality." Kissinger, then 95, pressed Schmidt to co-author The Age of AI and its sequel Genesis, finishing edits a week before his death. Schmidt has long warned policymakers of the 'existential risk' AI may pose to the masses and has also expressed concerns over the U.S. government's potential pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI).Why It Matters: OpenAI boss Sam Altman has likewise cautioned that the scale of the coming AI wave is "beyond what we can wrap our heads around," urging "humility and caution." Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Sundar Pichai has also emphasized the need for an open mind and acknowledged the weight of technology like AI, which can progress rapidly and potentially cause large-scale societal disruptions. Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk have gone further, warning that deepfakes are nudging society toward a "simulated future" where citizens struggle to prove anything is real. Read Next: Hasbro, MGM, and Skechers trust this AI marketing firm — Invest before it's too late. 'Scrolling To UBI' — Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. You can invest today for just $0.30/share with a $1000 minimum. Photo Courtesy: Frederic Legrand – COMEO on Send To MSN: Send to MSN Up Next: Transform your trading with Benzinga Edge's one-of-a-kind market trade ideas and tools. Click now to access unique insights that can set you ahead in today's competitive market. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? This article Eric Schmidt Says He Often Meets People Who Can't Tell Apart The Real World From The Online One, Now The Ex-Google Boss Is Warning AI Will Only Make It Worse originally appeared on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
