Kissinger’s ‘realism’ matches Biden’s policy, but not Putin’s reality

Henry KIssinger is returning to his intellectual and geostrategic roots. In a Spectator article last week, entitled “How to avoid another world war,” he recounts the origins of World War I, which was a key chapter in his early academic work at Harvard.

He repeats a point that he and many others have made over the years — that, had the governments of the warring countries known at the time what the consequences of their decisions would be, they would have decided differently: “Europe’s leaders sleepwalked … into a conflict which none of them would have entered had they foreseen the world at war’s end in 1918.”

Of course, that also could be said of World War II and other conflicts throughout history, especially from the perspective of the losing parties. And there is the reverse lesson that WWII also taught — and that the Korean War taught — about the consequences of leaders’ failure to act and to make their intentions clear to potential adversaries.

Here in Madrid, viewing Pablo Picasso’s ghastly 1937 depiction of the carnage at Guernica recalls historian Paul Preston’s statement that, had the British and other countries responded more forcefully at the time, “[T]here probably wouldn’t have been a Second World War.”

Kissinger refers to the technological advances that made World War I so bloody. In the transition to WW II, the Nazi-Fascist powers had sought the cooperation of Spain’s Generalissimo Franco in testing aerial bombardment of civilian populations and the use of propaganda as the latest advances in modern warfare. Nazi military leader Herman Goring said, “It was an opportunity to test under fire whether [war] material had been adequately developed.”  

Kissinger seems bent on conjuring the horrors of the first Great War as a cautionary tale for today’s Western leaders too vigorously supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression.

But, lest anyone be tempted to accuse him of undue softness toward Vladimir Putin, he cites his earlier endorsement of U.S. and NATO arms support for Ukraine: “I have repeatedly expressed my support for the allied military effort to thwart Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. But the time is approaching to … achiev[e] peace through negotiation.”

That is also the Biden administration’s policy, but only after Russian forces are pushed back to where they were on Feb. 24 and not out of Ukraine altogether. As far as helping President Volodymyr Zelensky achieve his stated objective of a Ukraine whole and free, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said America’s commitment is to a more limited goal: “Our focus is on continuing to do what we’ve been doing, which is to make sure that Ukraine has in its hands what it needs to defend itself, what it needs to push back against the Russian aggression, to take back territory that’s been seized from it since Feb. 24.”

Blinken said any further pushback of Russia — from Donbas and Crimea — would be for Ukraine to achieve in negotiations with Moscow later, but he offered no commitment for additional U.S. arms to pursue that goal. The obvious warning to Ukraine: Start preparing for negotiations sooner rather than later.

Kissinger would place an even more unpalatable constraint on Zelensky’s government: Sue for peace now without trying to push Russian forces any farther back to the pre-Feb. 24 border. He reminds us of his earlier proposed peace plan: “Last May, I recommended establishing a ceasefire line along the borders existing where the war started on 24 February. Russia would disgorge its conquests thence, but not the territory it occupied nearly a decade ago, including Crimea. That territory could be the subject of a negotiation after a ceasefire.”

But, at the same time, Kissinger offers this truism that, under present circumstances, makes even that more modest objective likely unattainable: “The quest for peace and order has two components that are sometimes treated as contradictory, the pursuit of elements of security and the requirement for acts of reconciliation. If we cannot achieve both, we will not be able to reach either.” 

Kissinger does not offer an inducement for Putin to “disgorge” Ukrainian territory it has seized since February. He offers no alternative to Zelensky’s strategy of promising military defeat for the Russian leader who almost daily inflicts the equivalent of a new Guernica on Ukraine. He fails to mention the multiple war crimes committed by Russia at Putin’s direction, starting with the launching of aggressive war, the first war crime described by the Nuremberg Tribunal. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine “reconciliation” with a leader who continues to perpetrate monstrous acts and who Biden has said “should not remain in power.”  

Kissinger’s perspective seems to be that Kyiv and the West should just let all that go in the interest of ending the fighting. In the context of lessons from past wars, it would be as if the Allies agreed in 1942 to let Adolf Hitler keep half his conquests and remain in power with no accountability for the Nazi regime’s genocide and other crimes against humanity.

For his part, Putin sees a new path to Russian victory: keep escalating his tactics to crush the Ukrainian population’s will to resist while warning the West against escalating its support for Ukraine’s self-defense. He deters the most effective U.S. and NATO response merely by threatening even more crimes and more evil consequences, such as the use of nuclear weapons.  

So far, Ukrainian resolve is not withering in the face of Putin’s targeting of the civilian population by systematically destroying the energy infrastructure essential to keep them from starving and freezing during the harsh Slavic winter. But the same cannot be said for the West’s will to continue supporting Ukraine through its ordeal, as the Kissinger article and the Biden administration’s parallel posture indicate.  

Blinken’s assertion that Washington is ensuring “that Ukraine has in its hands what it needs to defend itself” is demonstrably inaccurate. Putin’s latest strategy — and latest war crime — is being significantly facilitated by Washlngton’s unwillingness to provide Ukraine with critically needed air defense systems.

Washington should end what seems increasingly like a Western stalemate strategy that will prolong Ukraine’s agony and encourage Putin to continue his aggression.

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.