A number of news reports pick up on Henry Kissinger’s very recent speech to the American think tank Council on Foreign Relations.
Kissinger urges, as he has done all his life, to look at international relations realistically. Diplomacy is needed with Russia because the prospect of nuclear weapons would radically change the world order and open the way to an unstoppable unleashing of forces.
We need to distinguish the objective we want to pursue from the people (Putin, in this case). The central issue is what will be the future of Russia’s international positioning: with Europe and the West or with Asia?
We well understand how the two perspectives entail completely different scenarios. But, today, nuclear weapons are the decisive issue.
War concerns men and is part of the human condition. In the globalisation we have constructed, every event – especially a war without limits like the one on Europe’s doorstep – generates de-generative consequences on a planetary level (that Europe, and the world, can no longer sustain). It is a choice between ‘never dealing with an autocrat’ and the reason of diplomacy and negotiation: according to Kissinger, and also in our opinion, the time has come for the latter.
