Henry Kissinger turns 100 today
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
It's easy. He never lost a war conclusively, like the other side captured/liberated Washington D.C. or something similar.
Yes, we have a law that says we’ll invade The Hague should the ICC ever attempt to try an American.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_...
He's poster boy of "deal making" who has no problem in playing the janitor or useful idiot role, I give him that.
I guess it's OK to speak ill of the mf since he's not dead yet.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2023/05/17/henry-kissinge... https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/05/20/henry-kissinge... https://www.economist.com/kissinger-transcript
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/25/henry-kis...
Why not? What can Russia do about it?
NATO weapons being used on Russian soil would be another new line being breached. At some point there will be a bigger reaction than what we've seen so far.
Why would China get involved?
Russia winning in Ukraine would continue Russia's colonial war in eastern Europe
>Russian command decides that they need to take over all of Ukraine in the long term and not just the Eastern half.
How? They tried already. They currently lack the ability and are going to need a multi year grind to accomplish that at which point sowing domestic discord in Russia degrades their ability.
They just conquered 10% of Ukraine, so they might do that 10 more times.
> Why would China get involved?
Biden has been quite explicit that he wants Putin gone. If NATO triggers a collapse of the Russian government that would be very bad for China. They want a stable Russia. At some point they'll get involved in this if it looks like NATO is going to keep escalating the situation.
> How? They tried already.
They walked in, were surprised by unexpected resistance, walked out and resorted to taking back the parts of Ukraine that prefer to speak Russian. There isn't much in the way of reliable information to decide if it was that they can't destroy Ukraine or they don't think it is useful to do so.
These are all hypothetical scenarios because it is a war and figuring out what is happening in a war is tricky because all the players start lying. But it is hard to see how keeping this war going will improve the situation. There are a lot of ways this could go even worse. Which is something Kissinger has been pointing out recently - even he can tell at 100 years old because it is that obvious.
How? Meatgrind the rest of the country? That's going to cause immense losses among Russian troops and sowing as much discord as possible in Russian civil society seems like a great strategy to prevent that.
>They want a stable Russia
They want a Russia that is economically advantageous to them. Too much Russian success will cause Europe to become even more reliant on the US and therefore antagonistic to China. China's and Russia's interests are not aligned.
>They walked in, were surprised by unexpected resistance, walked out and resorted to taking back the parts of Ukraine that prefer to speak Russian.
This is cope. Look at how much it took to take Bakhmut.
Look at the fact that they have taken Bakhmut. So maybe that is the limit of Russian ability or maybe if Ukraine can't stop them taking Bakhmut, there isn't a line where Ukraine can suddenly stop them.
Ukraine just lost 10% of its territory in 1 year, 25% of their population and their most economically prosperous region s [0] are now at risk of becoming a war zone. I don't like the prognosis for Ukraine if the Russian foreign policy takes a firm "no, we don't think they can exist as an independent country".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ukrainian_subdivisions...
Bakhmut was taken by Wagner, who perform much better than the regular Russian armed forces at least in this conflict.
And even then it still cost them 50k-100k causalities just for Bakhmut.
Wagner have left Ukraine entirely now. It remains to be seen if Russia can hold Bakhmut if it gets attacked.