On May 27th Mr Kissinger will turn 100. Nobody alive has more experience of international affairs, first as a scholar of 19thcentury diplomacy, later as America’s national security adviser and secretary of state, and for the past 46 years as a consultant and emissary to monarchs, presidents and prime ministers. Mr Kissinger is worried.
“Both sides have convinced themselves that the other represents a strategic danger,” he says. “We are on the path to great-power confrontation.”
At the end of April The Economist spoke to Mr Kissinger for over eight hours about how to prevent the contest between China and America from descending into war. These days he is stooped and walks with difficulty, but his mind is needle-sharp. As he contemplates his next two books, on artificial intelligence (AI) and the nature of alliances, he remains more interested in looking forward than raking over the past.
Mr Kissinger is alarmed by China’s and America’s intensifying competition for technological and economic pre-eminence. Even as Russia tumbles into China’s orbit and war overshadows Europe’s eastern flank, he fears that AI is about to supercharge the Sino-American rivalry. Around the world, the balance of power and the technological basis of warfare are shifting so fast and in so many ways that countries lack any settled principle on which they can establish order. If they cannot find one, they may resort to force.
“We're in the classic pre-world war one situation,” he says, “where neither side has much margin of political concession and in which any disturbance of the equilibrium can lead to catastrophic consequences.”