Kissinger Warns Biden of U.S.-China Catastrophe on Scale of WWI

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said the incoming Biden administration should move quickly to restore lines of communication with China that frayed during the Trump years or risk a crisis that could escalate into military conflict.

“Unless there is some basis for some cooperative action, the world will slide into a catastrophe comparable to World War I,” Kissinger said during the opening session of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum. He said military technologies available today would make such a crisis “even more difficult to control” than those of earlier eras.

“America and China are now drifting increasingly toward confrontation, and they’re conducting their diplomacy in a confrontational way,” the 97-year-old Kissinger said in an interview with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. “The danger is that some crisis will occur that will go beyond rhetoric into actual military conflict.”

The diplomat who paved the way for President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to China said he hoped that the shared threat of the Covid-19 pandemic would provide an opening for political discussions between the two countries when Biden takes office on Jan. 20.

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“If you can look at Covid as a warning, in the sense that in practice it is dealt with by each country largely autonomously, but its long-term solution has to be on some global basis,” Kissinger said, “it should be dealt with as a lesson.”

U.S.-China relations are at their lowest in decades, despite the two sides reaching a “phase one” trade deal at the start of the year. Since then, the virus outbreak that began in Wuhan, China, has gone global, killing more than 1.3 million people and crushing economies around the world.

As President Donald Trump stepped up his criticism of China, blaming it for the spread of the virus and the death toll in the U.S., each side also has ramped up moves the other sees as hostile.

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