#Xi Jinping diplomacy

[latestnews-now]

Explore the critical discussions between President Biden and Xi Jinping as they address North Korea's support for Russia, China’s geopolitical role, and what lies ahead for U.S.-China relations under Donald Trump. Stay tuned for detailed analysis and insights!

[ttpd-chair]

🐼

[dailybehbeh]

Behbeh

[kneedeepincynade]

A better future for humanity is not only possible,it must be achieved before our species is wiped out

The post is machine translated

Translation is at the bottom

The collective is on telegram

🥰 人类命运共同体 | COSTRUIRE INSIEME UN FUTURO CONDIVISO PER L'UMANITÀ

🇨🇳 Il 年1月9日, il Compagno Wang Yi - Direttore dell'Ufficio Generale della Commissione Centrale per gli Affari Esteri del Partito Comunista e Ministro degli Affari Esteri della Repubblica Popolare Cinese, ha evidenziato i 年中国外交六大亮点 - Sei Punti Salienti della Diplomazia Cinese nel 2023, durante il Simposio sulla Situazione Internazionale a Pechino 🐲

🌸 Chi segue Collettivo Shaoshan da tempo conosce molto bene il nobile concetto di 人类命运共同体 - Comunità dal Futuro Condiviso. Esso riconosce che Umanità (人类) ha un Destino Comune (命运共同), e che la Cooperazione è il corretto percorso per il raggiungimento della Prosperità Comune (共同富裕) 😍

🇨🇳 Nel 2023, di fronte ad una situazione internazionale sempre più caotica e turbolenta, con sconquassi geopolitici e tensioni in crescita, la Diplomazia Cinese, costruita sui 和平共处五项原则 - Cinque Principi per la Coesistenza Pacifica, ha promosso attivamente la Pace, il Dialogo e la Cooperazione 🤝

🤔 Ecco alcuni eventi avvenuti nel 2023, che dimostrano pienamente la Saggezza Cinese:

一 Il Terzo "Belt and Road International Cooperation Summit Forum", dal Tema 高质量共建‘一带一路’，携手实现共同发展繁荣 - ovvero: Costruire congiuntamente una Nuova Via della Seta di Alta Qualità (高质量), per raggiungere uno Sviluppo Comune (共同发展) e la Prosperità (繁荣) 🥰

二 獨木不成林單弦不成音 | Più alberi creano una foresta, Futuro Condiviso per i Paesi in Via di Sviluppo | Allargamento dei BRICS

三 Il Vertice Cina - Asia Centrale, dove il Presidente Xi Jinping ha presentato i Quattro Principi della Cina per la Costruzione di una Comunità dal Futuro Condiviso, nonché gli Otto Punti per la Cooperazione 🤝

四 Ultimo, ma non per importanza, la Mediazione Cinese nella Rinascita dei Rapporti tra il Regno dell'Arabia Saudita e la Repubblica Islamica dell'Iran 😍

🔍 Per chi volesse approfondire l'argomento, ecco qui tre post di Collettivo Shaoshan:

❤️ Evento storico grazie alla Mediazione Cinese: Arabia Saudita e Iran riprenderanno le Relazioni Diplomatiche 👏

❤️ Promuovere la Riconciliazione, ricostruire il proprio Destino 🇨🇳❤️🇮🇷🇸🇦❤️

千里之行，始于足下 Mille miglia iniziano con un solo passo, scrivere un Nuovo Capitolo nella Storia del Medio Oriente 😍

⭐️ Nel 2023, l'agenda del 领袖 è stata molto fitta. Il Presidente Xi Jinping ha effettuato importanti visite all'estero, e ha tenuto più di 100 incontri, dimostrando apertura mentale e interesse, e promuovendo sempre due Principi Cinesi:

一 相互尊重 - Rispetto Reciproco 🤝

二 合作共赢 - Cooperazione a Mutuo Vantaggio 🤝

🇨🇳 La Diplomazia Cinese è entrata in una Nuova Era. Il 2024, l'Anno del Drago, sarà estremamente importante per la Cina. A ottobre, si festeggerà il 75° Anniversario della Fondazione della Repubblica Popolare Cinese, e - inoltre, il 2024 sarà un anno cruciale per il raggiungimento degli obiettivi del 14° Piano Quinquennale ⭐️

🇨🇳 La Cina ha agito, agisce e agirà sempre come Paese responsabile:

💬 «Sosterremo sempre l'Equità e la Giustizia, chiederemo la costruzione di un Mondo Multipolare che sia equo e ordinato, praticheremo il 真正的多边主义 - Vero Multilateralismo e promuovere la Democrazia nelle Relazioni Internazionali. Tutti i Paesi, grandi o piccoli, sono uguali. Ogni Paese dovrebbe avere la propria posizione nel sistema multipolare internazionale» | Wang Yi 🇨🇳

🔍 Approfondimenti:

一 Quali sono, nel dettaglio, i Sei Punti Salienti? 🤔

二 Diplomazia Cinese: il concetto di Partenariato e i Cinque Principi della Coesistenza Pacifica 🐲

🌸 Iscriviti 👉 @collettivoshaoshan 😘

🥰 人类命运共同体 | BUILDING A SHARED FUTURE FOR HUMANITY TOGETHER

🇨🇳 On 年1月9日, Comrade Wang Yi - Director of the General Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, highlighted the 年中国外交六大亮点 - Six Highlights of Chinese Diplomacy in 2023, during the Symposium on the International Situation in Beijing 🐲

🌸 Those who have been following Shaoshan Collective for some time know very well the noble concept of 人类命运共同体 - Community with a Shared Future. It recognizes that Humanity (人类) has a Common Destiny (命运共同), and that Cooperation is the correct path to achieving Common Prosperity (共同富裕) 😍

🇨🇳 In 2023, faced with an increasingly chaotic and turbulent international situation, with geopolitical upheavals and growing tensions, Chinese Diplomacy, built on the 和平共处五项原则 - Five Principles for Peaceful Coexistence, actively promoted Peace, Dialogue and Cooperation 🤝

🤔 Here are some events that occurred in 2023, which fully demonstrate Chinese Wisdom:

一 The Third "Belt and Road International Cooperation Summit Forum", with the Theme 高质量共建'一带一路'，携手实现共同发展繁荣 - that is: Jointly Building a High-Quality New Silk Road (高质量), to achieve a Common Development (共同发展) and Prosperity (繁荣) 🥰

二 獨木不成林單弦不成音 | More trees create a forest, Shared Future for Developing Countries | BRICS enlargement

三 The China - Central Asia Summit, where President Xi Jinping presented China's Four Principles for Building a Community with a Shared Future, as well as the Eight Points for Cooperation 🤝

四 Last, but not least, Chinese Mediation in the Rebirth of Relations between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran 😍

🔍 For those who want to delve deeper into the topic, here are three posts from the Shaoshan Collective:

❤️ Historic event thanks to Chinese Mediation: Saudi Arabia and Iran will resume Diplomatic Relations 👏

❤️ Promote Reconciliation, rebuild your Destiny 🇨🇳❤️🇮🇷🇸🇦❤️

千里之行，始于足下 A thousand miles begin with a single step, writing a New Chapter in the History of the Middle East 😍

⭐️ In 2023, the 领袖 agenda was very busy. President Xi Jinping has made important visits abroad, and held more than 100 meetings, demonstrating open-mindedness and interest, and always promoting two Chinese Principles:

一相互尊重 - Mutual Respect 🤝

二 合作共赢 - Mutual Benefit Cooperation 🤝

🇨🇳 Chinese Diplomacy has entered a New Era. 2024, the Year of the Dragon, will be extremely important for China. In October, we will celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Founding of the People's Republic of China, and - furthermore, 2024 will be a crucial year for achieving the goals of the 14th Five-Year Plan ⭐️

🇨🇳 China has acted, acts and will always act as a responsible country:

💬 «We will always support Equity and Justice, we will ask for the construction of a Multipolar World that is fair and orderly, we will practice 真正的多边主义 - True Multilateralism and promote Democracy in International Relations. All countries, large or small, are the same. Each country should have its own position in the international multipolar system" | Wang Yi 🇨🇳

🔍 Further information:

一 What are the six highlights in detail? 🤔

二 Chinese Diplomacy: the Concept of Partnership and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence 🐲

🌸 Subscribe 👉 @collectivoshaoshan 😘

[dandelionsresilience]

Good News - August 8-14

Like these weekly* compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my new(ly repurposed) Patreon! (*sorry this one’s a day late, I had a family emergency)

1. Rio’s grassroots agroforestry sustains birds, bees & communities

“[Community-created and -maintained] agroforests have reshaped the urban landscape and now attract an array of fauna, from birds to bees and even fireflies, drawn by the diversity of plant life thriving on improved soils. Perhaps most importantly, the agroforests offer free food and medicines to residents in need, plus shade and educational opportunities for the whole community[….]”

2. First giant pandas from China in decades make their public debut in San Diego

(image source) “Tensions between the U.S. and China had temporarily paused the program known as "panda diplomacy" in which China loans its native animals to zoos around the world […] as a show of goodwill[….] But the presence of [the two pandas in San Diego] appears to show a mending of the diplomatic relationship, which Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to work toward in a meeting with President Biden last year. [… Gov. Newsom] called the giant pandas an example of how strong worldly partnerships can protect wildlife and their habitats[….]”

3. Good news for Europe's top economies as disposable income rises

“Poland experienced the largest increase in disposable income per capita, rising by 10.2% compared with a decrease of 2.7% in the last quarter of 2023. According to the OECD, this growth was "mainly driven by increases in employee compensation, social benefits other than in-kind transfers, and property income". […] In Germany, [household income per capita] rose by 1.4%, compared to just 0.1% in the previous quarter, partly driven by an increase in employee compensation.”

4. FDA approves nasal spray as first needle-free treatment for anaphylaxis

“The spray, which will be sold under the brand name Neffy, is seen as an alternative to EpiPen and other autoinjectors. […] “Some people, particularly children, may delay or avoid treatment due to fear of injections,” said Kelly Stone, an associate director at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, adding that the availability of the nasal spray may reduce barriers to rapid treatment.”

5. [Colin Farrell] is launching a foundation to support adult[s] who have an intellectual disability

““We want to take a good look at residential potential for families with young adults who are ready to go out into the world and have a greater sense of community and connection,” says the actor. […] "It’s really important for James and for all of our kids to feel like they are wanted, to feel like they’re part of the community. Not just out of charitable endeavors or being nice and doing the right thing, but out of a sincere desire to engage and learn about each other."”

6. The Berlin Zoo is hoping for more German-born giant pandas as scans confirm a pregnancy

“Giant pandas have difficulty breeding and births are particularly welcomed. There are about 1,800 pandas living in the wild in China and a few hundred in captivity worldwide. […] The zoo noted that female pandas are only capable of reproducing for about 72 hours per year.”

7. Arizona school district highlights the benefits of free lunch

“A study by the University of Washington found free meals at school help reduce hunger, reduce the stigma tied to free lunch, and can help reduce childhood obesity. [… A cafeteria worker] said since the school district began offering free lunch, they have seen a positive shift in the cafeteria culture, and students seem happier. […] In September of 2023, the USDA […] loosened up its application threshold for applicants, allowing an estimated 3,000 more school districts in high-need areas to participate in the [CEP] program.”

8. Gigantic millipede lost to science for 126 years rediscovered in remote Madagascan jungle

“A further 20 species 'lost' to science were rediscovered during the expedition, including three iridescent species of fish and several species of ant-like flower beetles.”

9. The climate law’s $8.8B in home energy rebates are starting to roll out

“New York and Wisconsin are the first to launch their long-awaited Inflation Reduction Act programs meant to deploy everything from heat pumps to insulation. […] Once deployed, the DOE estimates, the home energy rebates will help save consumers up to $1 billion in annual energy costs and support an estimated 50,000 U.S. jobs in construction, manufacturing, and other sectors. They’ll also help clean up buildings, one of the biggest sources of carbon pollution in the country.”

10. Advance in stem cell therapy: New technique for manipulating stem cells opens door to novel treatments

“Recently, a team of McGill researchers discovered that by stretching, bending and flattening the nuclei of stem cells to differing degrees, they could generate precisely targeted cells that they could direct to become either bone or fat cells. […] The first applications of this discovery are likely to involve bone regeneration, possibly relating to dental or cranio-facial repair[….]”

August 1-7 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[justbeingnamaste]

When a strong leader is elected, the whole world takes notice—and for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Chinese Communist Party’s Xi Jinping, the return of Donald Trump to the White House is a daunting reality that can’t be ignored. They know Trump doesn’t play games.

World leaders are already preparing for a new era of diplomacy and mutual respect, with the potential for peace felt across every corner of the globe, just as during Trump’s first term in office.

In his first public remarks on Trump’s second term win, Putin praised the Republican president-elect’s stance on foreign relations, especially his commitment to mending strained ties with Russia and addressing the Ukrainian crisis.

“I would like to take this opportunity to offer my congratulations on his election as President of the United States. As I said before, we are going to work with any head of state that is going to garner the trust of the American people, and this is what’s going to happen in practice,” Putin said during a speech at the Valdai forum in the southern Russian city of Sochi.

[nostalgebraist]

The weakest of the group was “Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy” (习近平外交思想), which dropped one level to Tier 6.

[beardedmrbean]

Three imprisoned Americans have been released after years of detention in China, the White House said Wednesday. 

Mark Swidan, Kai Li, and John Leung have been released, a spokesperson for the National Security Council said, and they will soon "return and be reunited with their families for the first time in many years." 

The Biden administration has repeatedly raised the issue of wrongfully detained Americans with Chinese officials. President Biden spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping about the issue on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Lima, Peru earlier in November.  

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan spoke to foreign minister Wang Yi about the release of wrongfully detained Americans during multiple meetings in recent months. 

"Thanks to this Administration's efforts and diplomacy with the PRC, all of the wrongfully detained Americans in the PRC are home," the National Security Council spokesperson said. 

Swidan, a 48-year-old Texas businessman, was on death row in China. He had been behind bars since 2012 after being charged with narcotics trafficking. Swidan has denied the charges, which the U.S. says are trumped-up. The State Department categorized him as wrongly detained, and has previously raised concerns about his health. His family said earlier this year they feared Swidan might take his own life while detained. 

Li, 60, has been held in a Chinese prison since September 2016. He had a stroke in prison, according to John Kamm, executive director of Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group that pushes for the release of those detained in China.

Leung, 78, was arrested in 2021 and sentenced to life in prison for espionage in May 2023. Few details have been shared about the case. 

In a statement addressing Li's release, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer credited Mr. Biden's "personal engagement with President Xi" with securing the release of the three men. 

"For the families of those Americans newly freed by the Chinese government, this Thanksgiving there is so much to be thankful for," Schumer said. 

David Lin, a 68-year-old American pastor imprisoned on fraud charges for 18 years, was released by China in September.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Lula says China and Brazil advocate for 'peace and dialogue'; Xi Jinping urges international community to do more for Gaza

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva highlighted the Ukraine war, asserting that Brazil and China prioritize "peace and dialogue" in their international relations. This statement followed a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, during which trade agreements were also signed. Xi noted that "the world is not at peace," advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza and acknowledging the complexity of the Eastern European conflict.

— In a world plagued by armed conflicts and geopolitical tensions, China and Brazil place peace, diplomacy, and dialogue first — said Lula. — The 'Common Understandings between Brazil and China for a Political Resolution to the Ukraine Crisis' exemplify our shared vision on international security. We will never overcome the scourge of hunger amidst the folly of wars," Lula added, advocating for global governance reform.

The Chinese president stated that only when the world embraces common security will it pursue a path of universal security:

— Regarding the Ukraine crisis, there is no simple solution to such a complex issue. China and Brazil have issued common understandings on a political resolution to the Ukraine crisis and created the group of peace friends with other Global South allies to facilitate a solution. We must gather more voices advocating for peace.

Continue reading.

[mariacallous]

VSquare SPICY SCOOPS  

There is always a lot of information that we hear and find interesting and newsworthy but don’t publish as part of our investigative reporting — and share instead in this newsletter.  

ORBÁN’S KEY EU PRESIDENCY EVENT FACES UNCERTAINTY

Remember when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán kicked off Hungary's EU presidency with that "peace mission" tour, visiting Putin, Xi Jinping, and Donald Trump? And that he plotted his Kremlin visit behind his allies’ back? Well, Hungary’s EU allies haven’t forgotten, and they're not exactly thrilled. Many have already responded by boycotting high-level EU meetings hosted by Budapest. Leading the snub squad are the Nordic and Baltic countries, which have recently decided to jointly skip these events on a political level – no ministers or prime ministers allowed. But for Orbán, the only important events in Budapest are the European Political Community (EPC) summit and the informal EU summit focused on the Western Balkans, which will be held on November 7-8. As I previously reported, Orbán originally had high hopes that Donald Trump himself would show up (at least virtually).  However, since July, not only are Trump’s election chances in jeopardy, but so is the full participation of EU leaders at the Budapest EPC/EU summits. According to multiple diplomats I’ve talked to, EU capitals are watching Orbán’s next move before making a decision about whether they’ll participate. While the coordination between Nordic and Baltic countries suggests that they’re the most likely to pull out, there’s also speculation that Poland and even the Czech Republic may boycott at least the informal EU summit. It will mostly come down to what Orbán does next with his controversial Ukraine-Russia policy, one source said, noting that this is the key issue uniting the aforementioned countries. “But, for example, if Orbán continues his “peace mission” by visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it might only anger a few of them,” the source continued, adding that there’s still time for these countries’ leaders to make their decision.  

HUNGARIAN EU PRESIDENCY BUREAUCRATS QUIETLY FRUSTRATED AND WORRIED

In addition to keeping EU countries in the dark about his visit to Putin, it turns out Orbán also left his own EU presidency team in the lurch. Several foreign officials told me that Hungarian bureaucrats were just as blindsided as their EU counterparts were, with many initially assuring these foreign officials that Hungary's EU presidency would be non-controversial and professional. These Hungarian bureaucrats, who regularly interact with EU officials, are now feeling the brunt of Orbán's unpredictable diplomacy – and feeling quite embarrassed. A Hungarian government-connected source acknowledged “quiet but real frustration” over how Orbán's erratic diplomatic moves have undermined the hard work of his own loyal staff tasked with managing the Hungarian EU presidency, adding that “many worry what’s coming next.” However, according to a different source connected to the Hungarian government, while high-level Russian-Hungarian intergovernmental meetings are indeed expected in the coming weeks, these will focus on less explosive – economic and financial – issues unrelated to Ukraine.  

PATRIOTS FOR EUROPE’S FIRST RIFT – OVER HUNGARY AND VENEZUELA

Orbán was recently directly warned by his own people about the fallout of his pro-Russian foreign policy, according to a well-connected Hungarian political insider. In late July, Hungary blocked an EU statement condemning Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a Putin ally, for election fraud. This move not only angered EU governments but also shocked Orbán’s closest allies within the far-right Patriots for Europe group. According to the political insider, senior Hungarian MEP Enikő Győri immediately informed Orbán that Hungary’s stance caused a significant rift within the group, potentially risking its unity and future. Sheltering a far-left socialist strongman seemed utterly absurd to the group's predominantly anti-Communist, right-wing members, such as Spain's Vox delegation. However, the insider couldn't confirm if this led to Orbán’s subsequent U-turn, in which Foreign Minister Péter Szijj��rtó even reached out to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado to express Hungary's support. (Orbán’s spokesperson didn’t respond to my request for comment. Enikő Győri directed me to a press officer who didn’t get back to me yet.)

GEERT WILDERS ENJOYING VACATIONS IN HUNGARY – AND FULL SECURITY PROTECTION

There’s one ally from the Patriots for Europe gang who’s extremely unlikely to turn against Orbán: Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders. Kasper Goethals, a great journalist from the Belgian newspaper De Standaard, helped me out with this scoop by sharing information about Wilders’ frequent trips to Hungary based on a source close to the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) leader. Wilders’s fondness for Hungary – his wife’s ancestral home – is well known, but it’s not clear how he manages to travel there so frequently. Wilders requires serious Dutch security protection because of death threats, meaning much about his travel plans is kept under wraps. But according to Kasper’s source, while multiple other countries refuse to provide Wilders with the necessary protection, making it difficult for him to travel as he can’t bring armed or sufficient security to ensure his safety, Hungary always guarantees full security. This means that Wilders not only frequents Hungary because it’s his dream destination, but also because it’s the rare place where he can feel both protected and respected.  For example, when Wilders visited a rally of Tommy Robinson’s supporters in the UK, his Dutch security detail was not allowed to carry their weapons. Not so in Hungary, and according to Kasper’s source, the red carpet treatment means that Wilders is tied closely to Orbán, and he usually can't visit Hungary without the Hungarian Prime Minister insisting on a friendly one-on-one meeting. According to a different source – this time an official involved in Dutch-Hungarian relations – the security cooperation between the countries on Wilders’s protection is excellent, a confirmation that Hungarian authorities provide their Dutch colleagues with whatever they need. It is unclear, however, how much Wilders’s trips and vacations cost Hungarian taxpayers. Meanwhile, a former high-ranking Hungarian law enforcement officer told me that such security arrangements are reciprocal, meaning Hungarian dignitaries, including Orbán, also benefit from Dutch security services when visiting the Netherlands. When I asked if Wilders' security detail in Hungary includes Hungarian officers, the source bluntly stated that “this information is classified”. (Hungary’s government didn’t react to my request for comment.)  

CONSERVATIVE INFLUENCE NETWORK CASTS ITS WEB ON ALBANIA

When discussing trendy new holiday spots, Albania is hard to overlook – especially with Trump’s daughter and son-in-law building a luxury resort there. The country isn’t just a hotspot for dubious real estate projects but has also caught the eye of international far-right and conservative influence networks (read our earlier article on Ordo Iuris and their allies). According to a draft agenda I obtained, the right-wing Albanian Policy Center will host a significant international conference in Tirana on September 10 titled “Forum on the Future of Albania – The Conservative Way Forward,” featuring key foreign partners like The Heritage Foundation (US), Nazione Futura (Italy), Center for Fundamental Rights (Hungary) and Ordo Iuris (Poland). “After more than two decades of Soros-dominated US foreign policy on this part of the world, it is time for Conservatives in South-Eastern Europe to move out of their comfort zone and take up the challenge of presenting themselves and their ideas to the world,” the draft agenda reads. Viktor Orbán is expected to send a video greeting, while anti-Muslim and ultra-Catholic figures from Poland’s Ordo Iuris are likely to find an eye-opening networking opportunity with Albania’s local conservatives in the predominantly Muslim country. What’s even more intriguing is that the organizers are also expecting a representative from the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung – the foundation of Germany’s moderate right-wing CDU party – to participate in the George Soros-bashing.

[latestnews-now]

Discover how China’s President Xi Jinping addressed the U.S. at the APEC summit, warning against crossing the "red line" on Taiwan while proposing a cooperative approach with president-elect Donald Trump. Get insights into key issues like Taiwan, the South China Sea, Ukraine, and future U.S.-China relations.

[the-psudo]

National Security Leaders Endorse Harris

September 22, 2024

To the American People,

We are former public servants who swore an oath to the Constitution. Many of us risked our lives for it. We are retired generals, admirals, senior noncommissioned officers, ambassadors, and senior civilian national security leaders. We are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. We are loyal to the ideals of our nation—like freedom, democracy, and the rule of law—not to any one individual or party.

We do not agree on everything, but we all adhere to two fundamental principles. First, we believe America’s national security requires a serious and capable Commander-in-Chief. Second, we believe American democracy is invaluable. Each generation has a responsibility to defend it. That is why we, the undersigned, proudly endorse Kamala Harris to be the next President of the United States.

This election is a choice between serious leadership and vengeful impulsiveness. It is a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. Vice President Harris defends America’s democratic ideals, while former President Donald Trump endangers them.

We do not make such an assessment lightly. We are trained to make sober, rational decisions. That is how we know Vice President Harris would make an excellent Commander-in-Chief, while Mr. Trump has proven he is not up to the job. As leaders, we know effective leadership requires in-depth knowledge, careful deliberation, understanding of your adversaries, and empathy for those you lead. It requires listening to those with expertise and not firing them when they disagree with you.

Vice President Harris has proven she is an effective leader able to advance American national security interests. Her relentless diplomacy with allies around the globe preserved a united front in support of Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression. She grasps the reality of American military deterrence, promising to preserve the American military’s status as the most “lethal” force in the world.

The contrast with Mr. Trump is clear: where Vice President Harris is prepared and strategic, he is impulsive and ill-informed. He has heaped praise on adversarial dictators like China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, as well as the terrorist leaders of Hezbollah. Conversely, he has publicly and privately excoriated the leaders of our most steadfast allies, including the United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, Canada, and Germany. He abandoned our Kurdish allies while ceding influence in the Middle East to Russia, Iran, and China.

Further, Mr. Trump denigrates our great country and does not believe in the American ideal that our leaders should reflect the will of the people. While Vice President Harris follows the democratic norms we expect of any political leader—including promising to abide by the outcome of the pending election and respecting the rule of law—Mr. Trump is the first president in American history to actively undermine the peaceful transfer of power, the bedrock of American democracy.

Mr. Trump threatens our democratic system; he has said so himself. He has called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution. He said he wants to be a “dictator,” and his clarification that he would only be a dictator for a day is not reassuring. He has undermined faith in our elections by repeating lies, without evidence, of “millions” of fraudulent votes.

He has shown no remorse for trying to overturn the 2020 election on January 6th, promises to pardon the convicted perpetrators, and has made clear he will not respect the results of the 2024 election should he lose again.

That alone proves Mr. Trump is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.

We believe, as President Ronald Reagan said, that “America is a shining city on a hill.” Yet in this election, one of President Reagan’s more ominous warnings is equally relevant. “Freedom,” he said, “is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Our endorsement of Vice President Harris is an endorsement of freedom and an act of patriotism. It is an endorsement of democratic ideals, of competence, and of relentless optimism in America’s future. We hope you will join us in voting for her.

Sincerely,

President of National Security Leaders for America:

[see the list of 740+ signatories, including 230 'generals and flag officers']

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Davies :: Strange love

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 20, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 21, 2024

Yesterday, in North Korea, Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed a security partnership between their countries that said they would “provide mutual assistance in case of aggression.��� The two authoritarian leaders essentially resurrected a 1961 agreement between North Korea and the Soviet Union. According to the North Korean News Agency, the agreement also calls for the two countries to work together toward a “just and multipolar new world order.”

The United States and other western allies have been concerned for two years about the strengthening ties between the two countries. Putin needs weapons for the war in Ukraine, and in exchange, he might provide not only the economic support Kim Jong Un needs—North Korea is one of the poorest countries in Asia—but also transfer the technology North Korea needs to develop nuclear weapons. 

In the New York Times today, David Sanger pointed out that Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping have partnered against the West in the past decade but have always agreed that North Korea must not be able to develop a nuclear weapon. Now, it appears, Putin is desperate enough for munitions that he is willing to provide the technologies North Korea needs to obtain one, along with missiles to deliver it. 

Meanwhile, Joby Warrick reported yesterday in the Washington Post that Iran has launched big expansions of two key nuclear enrichment plants, and leaders of the country’s nuclear program have begun to say they could build a nuclear weapon quickly if asked to do so. On X, security analyst Jon Wolfsthal recalled the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that successfully limited Iran’s nuclear program and that Trump abandoned with vows to produce something better. Wolfsthal noted that diplomacy worked when “wars and ‘promises’ of a better deal could not.”   

Still, the meeting between Putin and Kim Jong Un is a sign of weakness, not strength. As The Telegraph pointed out, just ten years ago, Putin was welcomed to the G8 (now the G7) by the leaders of the richest countries in the world. “Now he has to go cap in hand to the pariah state of North Korea,” it pointed out. National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby added that “Russia is absolutely isolated on the world stage. They’ve been forced to rely, again, on countries like North Korea and Iran. Meanwhile…, Ukraine just organized a successful peace summit in Switzerland that had more than 100 countries and organizations sign up to support President Zelenskyy’s vision for a just peace.” 

In that same press conference, Kirby noted that the U.S. is delaying planned deliveries of foreign military sales to other countries, particularly of air defense missiles, sending the weapons to Ukraine instead. Also today, the U.S. emphasized that Ukraine can use American-supplied weapons to hit Russian forces in Russia. This is at least partly in response to recent reports that Russia is pulverizing Ukrainian front-line cities to force inhabitants to abandon them. Ukraine can slow the barrage by hitting the Russian airstrips from which the planes are coming.

China, which declared a “no limits” partnership with Russia in February 2022 just before Russia invaded Ukraine, kept distant from the new agreement between Russia and North Korea. Tong Zhao of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told Laurie Chen and Josh Smith of Reuters: "China is…careful not to create the perception of a de facto alliance among Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang, as this will not be helpful for China to maintain practical cooperation with key Western countries.”

Greg Torode, Gerry Doyle, and Laurie Chen published an exclusive story in Reuters tonight, reporting that in March, for the first time in five years, delegates from the U.S. and China resumed semi-official talks about nuclear arms, although official talks have stalled.

The office of president of the Republic of Korea (ROK), Yoon Suk Yeol, condemned the agreement. “It’s absurd that two parties with a history of launching wars of invasion—the Korean War and the war in Ukraine—are now vowing mutual military cooperation on the premise of a preemptive attack by the international community that will never happen,” it said. An ROK national security official added that the government, which has provided humanitarian aid to Ukraine, will now consider supplying weapons. This is no small threat: ROK is one of the world’s top ten arms exporters.  

In the U.S., John Kirby told reporters that while cooperation between Russia and North Korea is a concern, the U.S. has been strengthening and bolstering alliances and partnerships throughout the Indo-Pacific region since President Joe Biden took office. It brokered the historic trilateral agreement between the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the United States; launched AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.; and expanded cooperation with the Philippines. 

On Tuesday, at a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in Washington, D.C., NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg explained the cooperation between Russia and North Korea like this. “Russia’s war in Ukraine is…propped up by China, North Korea, and Iran,” he said. “They want to see the United States fail. They want to see NATO fail. If they succeed in Ukraine, it will make us more vulnerable and the world more dangerous. 

To that, The Bulwark today added journalist Anne Applebaum’s comments about the determination of those countries to disrupt liberal democracies. Dictators, she said, “are betting that Trump will be the person who destroys the United States, whether he makes it ungovernable, whether he assaults the institutions so that they no longer function, whether he creates so much division and chaos that the U.S. can’t have a foreign policy anymore. That’s what they want, and that’s what they’re hoping he will do.”

Trump himself is a more and more problematic candidate. This week, author Ramin Setoodeh, who has a new book coming out soon about Trump’s transformation from failed businessman to reality TV star on the way to the presidency, has told reporters that Trump has “severe memory issues” adding that “he couldn’t remember things, he couldn’t even remember me.”

Trump is supposed to participate in a debate with President Biden on June 27, and while Biden is preparing as candidates traditionally do, with policy reviews and practice, Trump’s team has been downplaying Trump’s need for preparation, saying that his rallies and interviews with friendly media are enough. 

With new polls showing Biden overtaking the lead in the presidential contest, right-wing media has been pushing so-called cheap fakes: videos that don’t use AI but misrepresent what happened by deceptively cutting the film or the shot. 

Social media has been flooded with images of Biden appearing to bend over for no apparent reason at a D-Day commemoration; the clip cuts off both the chair behind him and that everyone else was sitting down, too. Another, from the recent G7 summit, appears to show the president wandering away from a group of leaders during a skydiving demonstration; in fact, he was walking toward and speaking to a parachute jumper who had just landed but was off camera. A third appears to show Biden unable to say the name of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; in fact, he was teasing Mayorkas, and the film cuts off just before Biden says his name.  

On Monday, June 17, Judd Legum of Popular information produced a deep report on how the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group has been flooding its local media websites with these and other stories suggesting that President Biden is “mentally unfit for office.” Legum noted that these stories appeared simultaneously on at least 86 local news websites Sinclair owns.

Finally, today, in the New York Times, Charlie Savage and Alan Feuer reported that two of Judge Aileen Cannon’s more experienced colleagues on Florida’s federal bench—including the chief judge, a George W. Bush appointee—urged her to hand off the case of Trump’s retention of classified documents to someone else when it was assigned to her. They noted that she was inexperienced, having been appointed by Trump only very late in his term, and that taking the case would look bad since she had previously been rebuked by a conservative appeals court after helping Trump in the criminal investigation that led to the indictment. 

She refused to pass the assignment to someone else.  

Trump’s lawyers’ approach to the case has been to try to delay it until after the election. Judge Cannon’s decisions appear to have made that strategy succeed.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[kneedeepincynade]

Where is the west? Throwing 120 billion to their favourite puppet state in Eastern Europe of course, too busy sending the people of the Ukraine to die than spare a single cent or even just lift sections against earthquake-stricken Syria

⚠️ CINA, ALTRI PAESI ORIENTALI E ARABI INVIANO AIUTI ALLA SIRIA DISASTRATA DAL TERREMOTO - L'OCCIDENTE DOV'È? ⚠️

💕 La Cina, insieme altri paesi solitamente "bombardati" dalla propaganda occidentale, si è subito attivata per organizzare gli aiuti, insieme a Pakistan, Iraq, Egitto e agli altri Paesi Arabi, alla Repubblica Araba di Siria, duramente colpita dai terremoti 😔

🤔 Chi manca? Sul serio, chi manca? Dov'è l'intero Occidente? Dove sono tutti quei paesi i cui politici si arrogano, ogni due per te, una "superiorità morale" sui paesi asiatici, africani, latinoamericani e mediorientali?

🤬 Nel mentre i veri paesi solidali aiutano la Siria, "la Repubblica" posta un articolo rivolante e raccapricciante, commentato perfettamente da Francesco Dall'Aglio sul suo canale War Room, a cui consiglio di iscriversi: I, II, III.

🇨🇳 La Cina, come scritto ieri, ha subito iniziato a fornire aiuti umanitari e ad organizzare aiuti monetari alla Turchia e alla Siria, inviando squadre di soccorso e mediche nelle aree colpite 🫂

🇨🇳 Inoltre, oggi - 8 febbraio - Mao Ning, Portavoce del Ministero degli Affari Esteri della Repubblica Popolare Cinese, ha affermato che la Cina manderà ancora più aiuti, fornendo assistenza umanitaria, medica e di emergenza per un valore di 30 milioni di Yuan, e che le Autorità Cinesi coopereranno strettamente con il Governo Siriano di Bashar al-Assad per garantire che l'assistenza sia fornita tempestivamente 💕

🌸 Iscriviti 👉 @collettivoshaoshan

⚠️ CHINA, OTHER EASTERN AND ARAB COUNTRIES SEND AID TO EARTHQUAKE DISASTRATED SYRIA - WHERE IS THE WEST? ⚠️

💕 China, together with other countries usually "bombarded" by Western propaganda, immediately took action to organize aid, together with Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt and other Arab countries, to the Arab Republic of Syria, severely hit by earthquakes 😔

🤔 Who is missing? Seriously, who's missing? Where is the whole West? Where are all those countries whose politicians claim, every two for you, a "moral superiority" over Asian, African, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries?

🤬 While the real solidarity countries help Syria, "la Repubblica" posts a creepy and revolting article, perfectly commented by Francesco Dall'Aglio on his War Room channel, which I suggest you subscribe to: I, II, III.

(In normal circumstances I would have removed this as it refers to an Italian journal and as such not very relevant to our international audience but on this occasion, I believe everyone should see how horrid some "journalists" can be)

🇨🇳 China, as written yesterday, immediately started providing humanitarian aid and organizing monetary aid to Turkey and Syria, sending rescue and medical teams to the affected areas 🫂

🇨🇳 Also, today - February 8 - Mao Ning, Spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, said that China will send even more aid, providing humanitarian, medical and emergency assistance worth 30 million Yuan, and that the Chinese authorities will cooperate closely with the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad to ensure that assistance is provided in a timely manner 💕

🌸 Subscribe 👉 @collettivoshaoshan

[nicklloydnow]

Heaven gained a Nobel Peace Prize winning angel yesterday

“Henry A. Kissinger, the scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States’ opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so, died on Wednesday at his home in Kent, Conn. He was 100.

(…)

Few diplomats have been both celebrated and reviled with such passion as Mr. Kissinger. Considered the most powerful secretary of state in the post-World War II era, he was by turns hailed as an ultrarealist who reshaped diplomacy to reflect American interests and denounced as having abandoned American values, particularly in the arena of human rights, if he thought it served the nation’s purposes.

He advised 12 presidents — more than a quarter of those who have held the office — from John F. Kennedy to Joseph R. Biden Jr. With a scholar’s understanding of diplomatic history, a German-Jewish refugee’s drive to succeed in his adopted land, a deep well of insecurity and a lifelong Bavarian accent that sometimes added an indecipherable element to his pronouncements, he transformed almost every global relationship he touched.

(…)

Mr. Kissinger’s secret negotiations with what was then still called Red China led to Nixon’s most famous foreign policy accomplishment. Intended as a decisive Cold War move to isolate the Soviet Union, it carved a pathway for the most complex relationship on the globe, between countries that at Mr. Kissinger’s death were the world’s largest (the United States) and second-largest economies, completely intertwined and yet constantly at odds as a new Cold War loomed.

For decades he remained the country’s most important voice on managing China’s rise, and the economic, military and technological challenges it posed. He was the only American to deal with every Chinese leader from Mao to Xi Jinping. In July, at age 100, he met Mr. Xi and other Chinese leaders in Beijing, where he was treated like visiting royalty even as relations with Washington had turned adversarial.

He drew the Soviet Union into a dialogue that became known as détente, leading to the first major nuclear arms control treaties between the two nations. With his shuttle diplomacy, he edged Moscow out of its standing as a major power in the Middle East, but failed to broker a broader peace in that region.

Over years of meetings in Paris, he negotiated the peace accords that ended the American involvement in the Vietnam War, an achievement for which he shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. He called it “peace with honor,” but the war proved far from over, and critics argued that he could have made the same deal years earlier, saving thousands of lives.

(…)

As was the case with Vietnam, history has judged some of his Cold War realism in a harsher light than it was generally portrayed at the time. With an eye fixed on the great power rivalry, he was often willing to be crudely Machiavellian, especially when dealing with smaller nations that he often regarded as pawns in the greater battle.

He was the architect of the Nixon administration’s efforts to topple Chile’s democratically elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende.

He has been accused of breaking international law by authorizing the secret carpet-bombing of Cambodia in 1969-70, an undeclared war on an ostensibly neutral nation.

His objective was to root out the pro-Communist Vietcong forces that were operating from bases across the border in Cambodia, but the bombing was indiscriminate: Mr. Kissinger told the military to strike “anything that flies or anything that moves.” At least 50,000 civilians were killed.

When Pakistan’s U.S.-backed military was waging a genocidal war in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971, he and Nixon not only ignored pleas from the American consulate in East Pakistan to stop the massacre, but they approved weapons shipments to Pakistan, including the apparently illegal transfer of 10 fighter-bombers from Jordan.

Mr. Kissinger and Nixon had other priorities: supporting Pakistan’s president, who was serving as a conduit for Kissinger’s then-secret overtures to China. Again, the human cost was horrific: At least 300,000 people were killed in East Pakistan and 10 million refugees were driven into India.

In 1975, Mr. Kissinger and President Ford secretly approved the invasion of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor by Indonesia’s U.S.-backed military. After the loss of Vietnam, there were fears that East Timor’s leftist government could also go Communist.

Mr. Kissinger told Indonesia’s president that the operation needed to succeed quickly and that “it would be better if it were done after we returned” to the United States, according to declassified documents from Mr. Ford’s presidential library. More than 100,000 East Timorese were killed or starved to death.

Mr. Kissinger dismissed critics of these moves by saying that they did not face the world of bad choices he did. But his efforts to snuff out criticism with sarcastic one-liners only inflamed it.

“The illegal we do immediately,” he quipped more than once. “The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

On at least one potentially catastrophic stance Mr. Kissinger later reversed himself.

Starting in the mid-1950s as a young Harvard professor, he argued for the concept of limited nuclear war — a nuclear exchange that could be contained to a specific region. In office, he worked extensively on nuclear deterrence — convincing an adversary, for instance, that there was no way to launch a nuclear strike without paying an unacceptably high price.

(…)

“We dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016, “and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell.”

(…)

Few figures in modern American history remained so relevant for so long as Mr. Kissinger. Well into his 90s he kept speaking and writing, and charging astronomical fees to clients seeking his geopolitical analysis.

While the protesters at his talks dwindled, the very mention of his name could trigger bitter arguments. To his admirers, he was the brilliant architect of Pax Americana, the chess grandmaster who was willing to upend the board and inject a measure of unpredictability into American diplomacy.

To his detractors — and even some friends and former employees — he was vain, conspiratorial, arrogant and short-tempered, a man capable of praising a top aide as indispensable while ordering the F.B.I. to illegally tap his home phones to see if he was leaking to the press.

(…)

To read Mr. Kissinger’s laudatory 1957 book analyzing the world order created by Prince Klemens von Metternich of Austria, who led the Austrian empire in the post-Napoleonic era, is also to read something of a self-description, particularly when it came to the ability of a single leader to bend nations to his will.

“He excelled at manipulation, not construction,” Mr. Kissinger said of Metternich. “He preferred the subtle maneuver to the frontal attack.”

(…)

In the spring of 1969, soon after taking office, he was so enraged by the leaks behind a Times report on the Cambodia bombing campaign that he ordered the F.B.I. to tap the phones of more than a dozen White House aides, including members of his own staff. The recordings never turned up a culprit.

He was similarly infuriated by the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The Times and The Washington Post in 1971. The classified documents chronicled the government’s war policies and planning in Vietnam, and leaking them, in his view, jeopardized his secret face-to-face diplomacy. His complaints helped inspire the creation of the White House burglary team, the leak-plugging Plumbers unit that would later break into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate building.

(…)

Aides described his insights as brilliant and his temper ferocious. They told stories of Mr. Kissinger throwing books across his office in towering rages, and of a manipulative streak that led even his most devoted associates to distrust him.

“In dealing with other people he would forge alliances and conspiratorial bonds by manipulating their antagonisms,” Walter Isaacson wrote in his comprehensive 1992 biography, “Kissinger,” a book its subject despised.

“Drawn to his adversaries with a compulsive attraction, he would seek their approval through flattery, cajolery and playing them off against others,” Mr. Isaacson observed. “He was particularly comfortable dealing with powerful men whose minds he could engage. As a child of the Holocaust and a scholar of Napoleonic-era statecraft, he sensed that great men as well as great forces were what shaped the world, and he knew that personality and policy could never be fully divorced. Secrecy came naturally to him as a tool of control. And he had an instinctive feel for power relationships and balances, both psychological and geostrategic.”

(…)

There was something fundamentally simple, if terrifying, in the superpower conflicts he navigated. He never had to deal with terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, or a world in which nations use social media to manipulate public opinion and cyberattacks to undermine power grids and communications.

“The Cold War was more dangerous,” Mr. Kissinger said in a 2016 appearance at the New-York Historical Society. “Both sides were willing to go to general nuclear war.” But, he added, “today is more complex.”

The great-power conflict had changed dramatically from the cold peace he had tried to engineer. No longer ideological, it was purely about power. And what worried him most, he said, was the prospect of conflict with “the rising power” of China as it challenged the might of the United States.

(…)

Mr. Kissinger took some satisfaction in the fact that Russia was a lesser threat. After all, he had concluded the first strategic arms agreement with Moscow and steered the United States toward accepting the Helsinki Accords, the 1975 compact on European security that obtained some rights of expression for Soviet bloc dissidents. In retrospect, it was one of the droplets that turned into the river that swept away Soviet Communism.

(…)

“It’s almost impossible to imagine what the American relationship with the world’s most important rising power would look like today without Henry,” Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who once worked for Mr. Kissinger, said in an interview in 2016.

Other Kissinger efforts yielded mixed results. Through tireless shuttle diplomacy at the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Mr. Kissinger was able to persuade Egypt to begin direct talks with Israel, an opening wedge to the later peace agreement between the two nations.

But perhaps the most important diplomatic contribution Mr. Kissinger made was his sidelining of Moscow in the Middle East for four decades, until Mr. Putin ordered his air force to enter the Syrian civil war in 2015.

(…)

“For the formative years of his youth, he faced the horror of his world coming apart, of the father he loved being turned into a helpless mouse,” said Fritz Kraemer, a non-Jewish German immigrant who was to become Mr. Kissinger’s first intellectual mentor. “It made him seek order, and it led him to hunger for acceptance, even if it meant trying to please those he considered his intellectual inferiors.”

Some have argued that Mr. Kissinger’s rejection of a moralistic approach to diplomacy in favor of realpolitik arose because he had borne witness to a civilized Germany embracing Hitler. Mr. Kissinger often cited an aphorism of Goethe’s, saying that if he were given the choice of order or justice, he, like the novelist and poet, would prefer order.

(…)

Heinz became Henry in high school. He switched to night school when he took a job at a company making shaving brushes. In 1940, he enrolled in City College — tuition was virtually free — and racked up A’s in almost all his courses. He seemed headed to becoming an accountant.

Then, in 1943, he was drafted into the Army and assigned to Camp Claiborne in Louisiana.

It was there that Mr. Kraemer, a patrician intellectual and Prussian refugee, arrived one day to give a talk about the “moral and political stakes of the war,” as Mr. Kissinger recalled. The private returned to his barracks and wrote Mr. Kraemer a note: “I heard you speak yesterday. This is how it should be done. Can I help you in any way?”

The letter changed the direction of his life. Taking him under his wing, Mr. Kraemer arranged for Private Kissinger to be reassigned to Germany to serve as a translator. As German cities and towns fell in the last months of the war, Mr. Kissinger was among the first on the scene, interrogating captured Gestapo officers and reading their mail.

In April 1945, with Allied victory in sight, he and his fellow soldiers led raids on the homes of Gestapo members who were suspected of planning sabotage campaigns against the approaching American forces. For his efforts he received a Bronze Star.

But before returning to the United States he visited Fürth, his hometown, and found that only 37 Jews remained. In a letter discovered by Niall Ferguson, his biographer, Mr. Kissinger wrote at 23 that his encounters with concentration camp survivors had taught him a key lesson about human nature.

“The intellectuals, the idealists, the men of high morals had no chance,” the letter said. The survivors he met “had learned that looking back meant sorrow, that sorrow was weakness, and weakness synonymous with death.”

Mr. Kissinger stayed in Germany after the war — fearful, he said later, that the United States would succumb to a democracy’s temptation to withdraw its weary forces too fast and lose the chance to cement victory.

He took a job as a civilian instructor teaching American officers how to uncover former Nazi officers, work that allowed him to crisscross the country. He became alarmed by what he saw as Communist subversion of Germany and warned that the United States needed to monitor German phone conversations and letters. It was his first taste of a Cold War that he would come to shape.

(…)

But the outsider now had direction, and he found another mentor in William Yandell Elliott, who headed the government department. Professor Elliott guided Mr. Kissinger toward political theory, even as he wrote privately that his student’s mind “lacks grace and is Teutonic in its systematic thoroughness.”

Under Professor Elliott, Mr. Kissinger wrote a senior thesis, “The Meaning of History,” focusing on Immanuel Kant, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. At a hefty 383 pages, it gave rise to what became informally known at Harvard as “the Kissinger rule,” which limits the length of a senior thesis.

(…)

Returning to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D., he and Professor Elliott started the Harvard International Seminar, a project that brought young foreign political figures, civil servants, journalists and an occasional poet to the university.

The seminar placed Mr. Kissinger at the center of a network that would produce a number of leaders in world affairs, among them Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who would become president of France; Yasuhiro Nakasone, a future prime minister of Japan; Bulent Ecevit, later the longtime prime minister of Turkey; and Mahathir Mohamad, the future father of modern Malaysia.

With Ford Foundation support, the seminar kept his family eating as Mr. Kissinger worked on his dissertation on the diplomacy of Metternich of Austria and Robert Stewart Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, after the Napoleonic wars. The dissertation, which became his first book, both shaped and reflected his view of the modern world.

The book, “A World Restored,” can be read as a guide to Mr. Kissinger’s later fascination with the balancing of power among states and his suspicion of revolutions. Metternich and Mr. Castlereagh sought stability in Europe and largely achieved it by containing an aggressive revolutionary France through an equilibrium of forces.

Mr. Kissinger saw parallels in the great struggle of his time: containing Stalin’s Soviet Union.

“His was a quest for a realpolitik devoid of moral homilies,” Stanley Hoffmann, a Harvard colleague who later split with Mr. Kissinger, said in 2015.

Mr. Kissinger received his Ph.D. in 1954 but received no offer of an assistant professorship. Some on the Harvard faculty complained that he had not poured himself into his work as a teaching fellow. They regarded him as too engaged in worldly issues. In fact, he was simply ahead of his time: The Boston-to-Washington corridor would soon become jammed with academics consulting with the government or lobbyists.

The Harvard rejection embittered Mr. Kissinger. The Nixon tapes later caught him telling the president that the problem with academia was that “you are entirely dependent on the personal recommendation of some egomaniac.”

With the help of McGeorge Bundy, a Harvard colleague, Mr. Kissinger was placed in an elite study group at the Council on Foreign Relations, at the time a stuffy, all-male enclave in New York. Its mission was to study the impact of nuclear weapons on foreign policy.

Mr. Kissinger arrived in New York with a lot of attitude. He thought that the Eisenhower administration was wrongly reluctant to rethink American strategic policy in light of Moscow’s imminent ability to strike the United States with overwhelming nuclear force.

“Henry managed to convey that no one had thought intelligently about nuclear weapons and foreign policy until he came along to do it himself,” Paul Nitze, perhaps the country’s leading nuclear strategist at the time, later told Strobe Talbott, who was deputy secretary of state under President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Kissinger seized on a question that Mr. Nitze had begun discussing: whether America’s threat to go to general nuclear war against the Soviet Union was no longer credible given the commonly held view that any such conflict would invite only “mutually assured destruction.” Mr. Nitze asked whether it would be wiser to develop weapons to conduct a limited, regional nuclear war.

Mr. Kissinger decided that “limited nuclear war represents our most effective strategy.”

What was supposed to be a council publication became instead a Kissinger book, and his first best seller: “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.” Its timing, 1957, was perfect: It played into a national fear of growing Soviet power.

And its message fit the moment: If an American president was paralyzed by fear of escalation, Mr. Kissinger argued, the concept of nuclear deterrence would fail. If the United States could not credibly threaten to use small, tactical weapons, he said, it “would amount to giving the Soviet rulers a blank check.” In short, professing a willingness to conduct a small nuclear war was better than risking a big one.

To his critics, this was Mr. Kissinger at his Cold War worst, weaving an argument that a nuclear exchange could be won. Many scholars panned the book, believing its 34-year-old author had overestimated the nation’s ability to keep limited war limited. But to the public it was a breakthrough in nuclear thinking. To this day it is considered a seminal work, one that scholars now refer to in looking for lessons to apply to cyberwarfare.

(…)

David Riesman, the sociologist and co-author of a seminal work on the American character, “The Lonely Crowd,” suggested that dinner with Mr. Kissinger was a chore. “He would not spend time chatting at the table,” Mr. Riesman said. “He presided.”

Leslie H. Gelb, then a doctoral student and later a Pentagon official and columnist for The Times, called him “devious with his peers, domineering with his subordinates, obsequious to his superiors.”

(…)

At Harvard, he began organizing meetings on the emerging crisis of the day, Vietnam. He explored the link between military actions on the ground and the chances of success through diplomacy, seemingly convinced, even then, that the war could be ended only through negotiations.

After a long trip to Saigon and the front lines, he wrote that the American task was to “build a nation in a divided society in the middle of a civil war,” defining a problem that would haunt Washington not only in Southeast Asia but also in Afghanistan and Iraq.

(…)

With Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House engaged in peace talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris, Mr. Kissinger was said to have used his contacts on his own trips to Paris to funnel inside information back to Nixon. “Henry was the only person outside the government we were authorized to discuss the negotiation with,” Richard C. Holbrooke, who went on to key positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations, told Mr. Isaacson for his Kissinger biography. “We trusted him. It is not stretching the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the United States negotiating team.”

Nixon himself referred in his memoirs to his “highly unusual channel” of information. To many who have since accepted that account, the back-channel tactic was evidence of Mr. Kissinger’s drive to obtain power if Nixon was elected. While there is no evidence that he supplied classified information to the Nixon campaign, there have long been allegations that Nixon used precisely that to give back-channel assurances to the South Vietnamese that they would get a better deal from him than from Johnson, and that they should agree to nothing until after the election.

Mr. Ferguson and other historians have rebutted that claim, though one of Nixon’s biographers found notes from H.R. Haldeman, one of Nixon’s closest aides, in which the presidential candidate ordered his staff to “monkey wrench” peace talks.

Whatever the truth, Mr. Kissinger was on Nixon’s radar. And after the election, a new president who had often expressed his disdain for Jews and Harvard academics chose, as his national security adviser, a man who was both.

Nixon directed Mr. Kissinger to run national security affairs covertly from the White House, cutting out the State Department and Nixon’s secretary of state, William P. Rogers. Nixon had found his man — a “prized possession,” he later called Mr. Kissinger.

While the post of national security adviser had grown in importance since Harry S. Truman established the role, Mr. Kissinger took it to new heights. He recruited bright young academics to his staff, which he nearly doubled. He effectively sidelined Mr. Rogers and battled the pugnacious defense secretary, Melvin R. Laird, moving more decision-making into the White House.

(…)

Staff turnover was high, but many of those who stayed came to admire him for his intellect and his growing list of achievements. Still, they were stunned by his secretiveness. “He was able to give a conspiratorial air to even the most minor of things,” Mr. Eagleburger, who admired him, said before his death in 2011.

Poking fun at himself in a way that some saw as disingenuous, he often told visiting diplomats that “I have not faced such a distinguished audience since dining alone in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.”

Nixon had built much of his campaign around the promise to end the war on honorable terms. It was Mr. Kissinger’s task to turn that promise into a reality, and he made clear in a Foreign Affairs article, published as Nixon was preparing to take office, that the United States would not win the war “within a period or with force levels politically acceptable to the American people.”

In the 2018 interview, he said the United States had misunderstood the struggle from the start as “an extension of the Cold War in Europe.”

“I made the same mistake,” he said. “The Cold War was really about saving democratic countries from invasion.” Vietnam was different, a civil war. “What we did not understand at the beginning of the war in Vietnam,” he went on, “is how hard it is to end these civil wars, and how hard it is to get a conclusive agreement in which everyone shares the objective.”

(…)

Mr. Kissinger’s pursuit of two goals that were seen as at odds with each other — winding down the war and maintaining American prestige — led him down roads that made him a hypocrite to some and a war criminal to others. He had come to office hoping for a fast breakthrough: “Give us six months,” he told a Quaker group, “and if we haven’t ended the war by then, you can come back and tear down the White House fence.”

But six months later, there were already signs that the strategy for ending the war would both expand and lengthen it. He was convinced that the North Vietnamese would enter serious negotiations only under military pressure. So while he restarted secret peace talks in Paris, he and Nixon escalated and widened the war.

“I can’t believe that a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point,” Mr. Kissinger told his staff.

Mr. Kissinger called it “war for peace.” Yet the result was carnage. Mr. Kissinger had an opportunity to end the war in peace talks early in Nixon’s presidency on terms as good as those he ultimately settled for later. Yet he turned it down, and thousands of Americans died because he was convinced he could do better.

As Mr. Kissinger sat with his big yellow legal pads in his White House office, scribbling notes that have now been largely declassified, he designed a three-part plan. It consisted of a cease-fire that would also embrace Laos and Cambodia, which had been sucked into the fighting; simultaneous American and North Vietnamese withdrawals from South Vietnam; and a peace treaty that returned all prisoners of war.

His notes and taped conversations with Nixon are riddled with self-assured declarations that the next escalation of bombing, and a secret incursion into Cambodia, would break the North Vietnamese and force them into real negotiations. But he was also reacting, he later wrote, to a Vietcong and North Vietnamese offensive early in Nixon’s presidency that had killed almost 2,000 Americans and “humiliated the new president.”

Mr. Kissinger later constructed a narrative emphasizing the wisdom of the strategy, but the notes and phone conversations suggest that he had routinely overestimated his negotiating skills and underestimated his opponents’ capacity to wait the Americans out.

It was the bombing campaign in Cambodia — code-named “Operation Menu,” with phases named “Breakfast,” “Lunch” and “Dinner” — that outraged Mr. Kissinger’s critics and fueled books, documentaries and symposiums exploring whether the United States had violated international law by expanding the conflict into a country that was not party to the war. Mr. Kissinger’s rationale was that the North had created supply lines through Cambodia to fuel the war in the South.

(…)

It took until January 1973 for Mr. Kissinger to reach a deal, assuring the South Vietnamese that the United States would return if the North violated the accord and invaded. Privately, Mr. Kissinger was all but certain that the South could not hold up under the pressure. He told John D. Erlichman, a top White House aide, that “if they are lucky, they can hold out for a year and a half.”

That proved prescient: Saigon fell in April 1975, with the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam. Fifty-eight thousand Americans and more than three million North and South Vietnamese had died, and eight million tons of bombs had been dropped by the United States. But to Mr. Kissinger, getting it over with was the key to moving on to bigger, and more successful, ventures.

When Mr. Kissinger was writing campaign speeches for Nelson Rockefeller in 1968, he included a passage in which he envisioned “a subtle triangle with Communist China and the Soviet Union.” The strategy, he wrote, would allow the United States to “improve our relations with each as we test the will for peace of both.”

He got a chance to test that thesis the next year. Chinese and Soviet forces had clashed in a border dispute, and in a meeting with Mr. Kissinger, Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, spoke candidly of the importance of “containing” the Chinese. Nixon directed Mr. Kissinger to make an overture, secretly, to Beijing.

It was a remarkable shift for Nixon. A staunch anti-Communist, he had long had close ties to the so-called China lobby, which opposed the Communist government led by Mao Zedong in Beijing. He also believed that North Vietnam was acting largely as a Chinese satellite in its war against South Vietnam and its American allies.

Nixon and Mr. Kissinger secretly approached Pakistan’s leader, Yahya Khan, to act as a go-between. In December 1970, Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington delivered a message to Mr. Kissinger that had been carried from Islamabad by courier. It was from the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai: A special envoy from President Nixon would be welcome in Beijing.

(…)

Over the next two months, messages were exchanged concerning a possible presidential visit. Then, on June 2, 1971, Mr. Kissinger received one more communication through the Pakistani connection, this one inviting him to Beijing to prepare for a Nixon visit. Mr. Kissinger pulled Nixon aside from a White House dinner to declare: “This is the most important communication that has come to an American president since the end of World War II.”

(…)

In Beijing he made a presentation to Mr. Zhou, ending with the observation that as Americans “we find ourselves here in what to us is a land of mystery,” he recalled in a 2014 interview for the Harvard Secretaries of State project. Mr. Zhou interrupted. “There are 900 million of us,” he said, “and it’s not mysterious to us.”

It took three days to work out the details, and after Mr. Kissinger cabled the code word “eureka” to Nixon, the president, without any advance warning, appeared on television to announce what Mr. Kissinger had arranged. His enemies — the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, the Democrats, his liberal critics — were staggered. On Feb. 21, 1972, he became the first American president to visit mainland China.

The Chinese were a little stunned, too. Mao sidelined Mr. Zhou within a month. After that, no Chinese ever mentioned Zhou Enlai again, Mr. Kissinger told the Harvard project. He speculated that Mao had feared that his No. 2 “was getting personally too friendly with me.”

(…)

“That China and the United States would find a way to come together was inevitable given the necessities of the time,” he wrote in “On China,” referring to domestic strife in both countries and a common interest in resisting Soviet advances. But he also insisted that he had not been seeking to isolate Russia as much as to conduct a grand experiment in balance-of-power politics. “Our view,” he wrote, “was that the existence of the triangular relations was in itself a form of pressure on each of them.”

Historians still debate whether that worked. But there is no debating that it made Mr. Kissinger an international celebrity. It also proved vital for reasons that never factored into Mr. Kissinger’s calculus five decades ago — that China would rise as the only true economic, technological and military competitor to the United States.

Nixon’s announcement that he would go to China startled Moscow. Days later, Mr. Dobrynin called on Mr. Kissinger and invited Nixon to meet the Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev, in the Kremlin. The date was set for May 1972, just three months after the China trip. “To have two Communist powers competing for good relations with us could only benefit the cause of peace,” Mr. Kissinger noted later. “It was the essence of triangular strategy.”

To prepare for the summit, he flew to Moscow, again in secret. Nixon had agreed to let him go on the condition that Mr. Kissinger spend most of his time insisting that the Soviets restrain their North Vietnamese allies, who were mounting an offensive.

By then, however, Mr. Kissinger had changed his mind about how much control the Soviets had over the North Vietnamese, writing to his deputy, Alexander M. Haig, “I do not believe that Moscow is in direct collusion with Hanoi.”

Instead, he sought to reinvigorate negotiations, which had been stumbling along since late 1969, with the aim of limiting the number of ground-based and submarine-launched nuclear missiles that the two countries were pointing at each other and curbing the development of antiballistic missile systems. Mr. Kissinger achieved a breakthrough, writing to Nixon, “You will be able to sign the most important arms control agreement ever concluded.”

That may have been overstatement, but Mr. Brezhnev and Nixon signed what became the SALT I treaty in May 1972. It opened decades of arms-control agreements — SALT, START, New START — that greatly reduced the number of nuclear weapons in the world. The era known as détente had begun. It unraveled only late in Mr. Kissinger’s life. While Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden renewed New START in 2021, once the war in Ukraine started the Russian leader suspended compliance with many parts of the treaty.

To Mr. Kissinger, there were superpowers and there was everything else, and it was the everything else that got him into trouble.

He never stopped facing questions about the overthrow and death of Mr. Allende in Chile in September 1973 and the rise of Augusto Pinochet, the general who had seized power.

Over the next three decades, as General Pinochet came to be accused — first in Europe, then in Chile — of abductions, murder and human rights violations, Mr. Kissinger was repeatedly linked to clandestine activities that had undermined Mr. Allende, a Marxist, and his democratically elected government. The revelations emerged in declassified documents, lawsuit depositions and journalistic indictments, like Christopher Hitchens’s book “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” (2001), which was made into a documentary film.

(…)

Nixon, too, was alarmed, according to a White House tape that Peter Kornbluh, of the National Security Archive, cited in his book “The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.” It quotes Nixon as ordering the U.S. ambassador in Santiago “to do anything short of a Dominican-type action” to keep Mr. Allende from winning the election. The reference was to the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965.

Mr. Kissinger insisted, in a memoir and in testimony to Congress, that the United States “had nothing to do” with the military coup that overthrew Mr. Allende. However according to phone records that were declassified in 2004, Mr. Kissinger bragged that “we helped them” by creating the conditions for the coup.

That help included backing a plot to kidnap the commander in chief of Chile’s army, Gen. René Schneider, who had refused C.I.A. entreaties to mount a coup. The general was killed in the attempt. His car was ambushed, and he was fatally shot at point-blank range.

(…)

In 2001, General Schneider’s two sons filed a civil suit in the United States accusing Mr. Kissinger of helping to orchestrate covert activities in Chile that led to their father’s death. A U.S. federal court, without ruling on Mr. Kissinger’s culpability, dismissed the case, saying that foreign policy was up to the government, not the courts.

Mr. Kissinger, in his defense, said his actions had to be viewed within the context of the Cold War. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” he said, adding half-jokingly: “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

Chile was hardly the only place Mr. Kissinger was accused of treating as a minor chess piece in his grand strategies. He and President Ford approved Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in December 1975, leading to a disastrous 24-year occupation by a U.S.-backed military.

Declassified documents released in 2001 by the National Security Archive indicate that Ford and Mr. Kissinger knew of the invasion plans months in advance and were aware that the use of American arms would violate U.S. law.

“I know what the law is,” Mr. Kissinger was quoted as telling a staff meeting when he got back to Washington. He then asked how it could be in “U.S. national interest” for Americans to “kick the Indonesians in the teeth?”

The columnist Anthony Lewis wrote in The Times, “That was Kissingerian realism: the view that the United States should overlook brutalities by friendly authoritarian regimes because they provided ‘stability.’”

It was a familiar complaint. In 1971, the slaughter in East Pakistan that Nixon and Mr. Kissinger had ignored in deference to Pakistan expanded into a war between Pakistan and India, a nation loathed by both China and the Nixon White House.

“At this point, the recklessness of Nixon and Kissinger only got worse,” Dexter Filkins, of The New Yorker, wrote in discussing Professor Bass’s account in The New York Times Book Review in 2013. “They dispatched ships from the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal, and even encouraged China to move troops to the Indian border, possibly for an attack — a maneuver that could have provoked the Soviet Union. Fortunately, the leaders of the two Communist countries proved more sober than those in the White House. The war ended quickly, when India crushed the Pakistani Army and East Pakistan declared independence,” becoming the new nation of Bangladesh.

(…)

Still more declassified documents revealed how Mr. Kissinger had used his historic 1971 meeting with Mr. Zhou in China to lay out a radical shift in American policy toward Taiwan. Under the plan, the United States would have essentially abandoned its support for the anticommunist Nationalists in Taiwan in exchange for China’s help in ending the war in Vietnam. The account contradicted one he had included in his published memoirs.

The emerging material also revealed the price of an American-interests-first realism. In tapes released by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2010, Mr. Kissinger is heard telling Nixon in 1973 that helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a totalitarian regime was “not an objective of American foreign policy.”

“And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,” he added, “it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

The American Jewish Committee described the remarks as “truly chilling,” but suggested that antisemitism in the Nixon White House may have partly been to blame.

“Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question as to where his loyalties lay,” David Harris, the committee’s executive director, said.

(…)

Mr. Kissinger was aware of his contentious place in American history, and he may have had his own standing in mind when, in 2006, he wrote about Dean Acheson, secretary of state under Truman, in The Times Book Review, calling him “perhaps the most vilified secretary of state in modern American history.”

“History has treated Acheson more kindly,” Mr. Kissinger wrote. “Accolades for him have become bipartisan.”

Thirty-five years after his death, he said, Acheson had “achieved iconic status.”

(…)

One student asked him about his legacy. “You know, when I was young, I used to think of people of my age as a different species,” he said to laughter. “And I thought my grandparents had been put into the world at the age at which I experienced them.”

“Now that I’ve reached beyond their age,” he added, “I’m not worried about my legacy. And I don’t give really any thought to it, because things are so changeable. You can only do the best you’re able to do, and that’s more what I judge myself by — whether I’ve lived up to my values, whatever their quality, and to my opportunities.””

[memecucker]

Generally, there are three categories [of factions within the KMT]. The first group, led by chairperson Eric Chu, argues that engaging with the United States while maintaining a good relationship with China will make Taiwan safe. The difference between this KMT faction and President Tsai Ing-wen’s cross-strait policy is that Chu and believe sticking to the “1992 Consensus” is the “key” to communicating with Beijing – regardless of the fact that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has declared that the 1992 Consensus means “both sides of the Taiwan Straits belong to one China and will work together toward national reunification.”

This stance on the cross-strait relationship is not acceptable to the bulk of voters from both the KMT and Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). KMT and other pan-Blue voters are of the opinion that Chu’s China policy is too similar to the DPP’s, while pro-Green supporters regard Chu and others as “giving up Taiwan’s sovereignty.” Thus, these leaders have received little support in almost every poll.

The second group in the KMT has a more pro-mainland stance, asserting that the KMT should keep its distance from the United States in order to not frustrate the Chinese Communist Party. They believe that diplomacy, rather than deterrence, is the way to keep the Taiwan Strait safe. To achieve that goal, proponents like former President Ma Ying-jeou insist the Taiwanese government should explicitly state that it agrees with the 1992 Consensus as the foundation for further communications and cooperation.

This community within the KMT has more popularity than all the others, as it claims to offer another way to achieve peace, while proclaiming that it can perform better than the DPP in terms of economic welfare since they are capable of establishing better economic ties with China.

The last group within the KMT mainly consists of veterans and their descendants and is the least popular subgroup within the party. After having retreated from the mainland in 1949, this group of KMT members are die-hard supporters of reunification with China, as they still regard China as their home.

Given the “median voter theorem,” we might expect the KMT’s China policy will ultimately shift toward somewhere between the first and the second group. Yet the situation has not unfolded as the theory supposed, due to the structures and mechanisms within the KMT.

After retreating from China, the KMT veteran community established branches of the Huang Fu-hsing, a highly united group that loyally backed the political leaders who came over with them from China. Huang Fu-hsing members still firmly believe that ultimate reunification is the best option. Although their stance on cross-strait affairs is extreme compared to Taiwan’s general public, Huang Fu-hsing branches represent roughly 25 percent of the party member vote, and reportedly have a meticulous mechanism to allocate all their votes to serve various political aims. As a result, the organization became a comparatively strong power within the KMT.

Found this article that talks about internal KMT politics when it comes to relations with China and i find it interesting how it’s basically goes from “Appease both the US and China” to “Appease China even if at the expense of relations with the US” and then “Chinese nationalists whose priority is unification with the PRC“. And the third faction is basically veterans and the military (who you might naively assume would be the most pro-US but actually the opposite is the case) who are pretty unpopular but internal KMT politics are arranged in such a way that they have massively disproportionate sway and always vote as a unified bloc.