Henry Kissinger was undoubtedly a brilliant man, but he made one critical mistake–assuming that Xi Jinping would continue the policies of his predecessors–Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zimin and Hu Jintao.
Even after Xi started consolidating power in 2012 and 2013, Kissinger believed that the United States and China had the power to essentially govern the world as a duopoly. I heard him give a speech at the Asia Society in New York in which he argued that the two countries had the scale and influence to co-manage the world. He assumed the two countries could share the same values.
But in what has come to be known as one of the worst foreign policy failures in U.S. history, Xi turned out to be part of a separate wing of the Chinese Communist Party. Unlike his predecessors, who tolerated the emergence of a private sector, allowed dissidents to have real lawyers, and allowed non-profits and other outside organizations to work inside China on social and environmental goals, Xi is a hard-line Marxist-Leninist who believes that his goal, shared by his “friend,” Vladimir Putin, is to undermine and destroy the world’s democratic and capitalistic societies. That’s what Xi meant when he said in Moscow that he and Putin were doing something that had not been done in 100 years–tearing down the established world order. It was roughly 100 years ago that the Bolsheviks drove out the czars in Russia and the Ching dynasty collapsed in China, giving rise to the birth of the Chinese Communist Party. Ideology is hugely important for Xi, which too few Americans understand.
So Kissinger’s legacy is to leave the United States locked in an embrace with an authoritarian regime bent on destroying it and to leave a foreign policy establishment that is confused about who Xi Jinping really is.
