Kissinger Calls for Dialogue with Russia, Keep Ukraine Out of NATO

Oct. 2, 2022 (EIRNS)—Speaking in a Council on Foreign Relations’ “Lessons from History Series: Conversation with Henry Kissinger” on Sept. 30, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned that the U.S. found itself “at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created.” He also urged politicians not to bring Ukraine into NATO.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the whole region was open to restructuring, he said. “From the Russian point of view, the United States then attempted to integrate this whole region, without exception, into an American-led strategic system,” he said, adding that the development removed Russia’s historic “safety belt,” according to the report by RT.

Kissinger considers that Russia has “already lost the war,” but stressed that the West must keep contact with Russia in some way. “Some dialogue, maybe on an unofficial level, maybe in an exploratory way is very important,” he told the CFR, emphasizing that “in the nuclear environment” such an outcome is preferable to a “battlefield decision.”

RT further pointed out that, in an Aug. 12 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Kissinger had warned that the U.S. had found itself “at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created,” and argued that Washington had rejected traditional diplomacy, as it has been “seeking to convert or condemn their interlocutors rather than to penetrate their thinking.”