Geopolitical heavyweights Henry Kissinger and George Soros squared off at the Davos conference recently with opposing strategies as to how to end Putin’s war against Ukraine.
Kissinger, an old Cold Warrior, believes that Ukraine should reach a compromise and cede territory to Russia to avoid marginalizing Putin and causing a full-blown world war. Soros, a philanthropist and democracy activist, believes Ukraine must be supplied with all the weaponry it needs because “the best and only way to preserve our civilization is to defeat Putin as soon as possible.”
Their viewpoints represent extremes, but it’s up to Ukrainians as to whose views are best represented by Israel’s late Prime Minister Golda Meir, who was born in Kyiv.
Negotiation is impossible, she said, when a neighbor is bent on extermination: “We [Israel] intend to remain alive. Our neighbors want to see us dead. This is not a question that leaves much room for compromise.”
David Horsey, Seattle Times
In this light, Kissinger is just plain wrong because this is about national and ethnic genocide, not the territory. For decades, his realpolitik has been about placating superpowers. Soros, on the other hand, has been heavily involved in democratic and anti-corruption struggles, including Ukraine’s.
His Open Society Foundations played a role in helping Ukraine’s civil society grow and stand up against Russian-generated tyranny and corruption, dating back to its first street protest, the 2004 Orange Revolution then in 2014. He sees Putin’s war as a lawless, open-ended conquest that will spread until he’s vanquished.
This is also how Ukraine’s government sees it.
“Any concession to Russia is not a path to peace, but a war [for all of Europe] postponed for several years,” said Ukrainian Presidential advisor Mykhaylo Podolyak. Polls show that 82 percent of Ukrainians are not prepared to give up any land, including lands seized in 2014 by Russia, even if it means this hideous war drags on.
It’s also obvious — given the scale of war crimes and Russia’s targeting of civilians, schools, hospitals, residences, and cultural centers — that Putin is bent on destruction, not negotiations.
Therefore, conceding part of Ukraine to Russia would be like inviting a mass murderer who’s invaded your home to stay in a few rooms and keep some of your children because he’s promised to behave.
That’s not only stupid. It’s immoral and suicidal and before long he’ll take over the place and move on to the neighbors.
Tweet by Zelensky advisor Podolyak
When evaluating their two diametric positions, it’s helpful to contextualize both men. Henry Kissinger, 99 years old, was U.S. Secretary of State to President Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War. Many observers believe the two should have been charged with war crimes over the secretive, saturation bombing of civilians in Vietnam (and Cambodia and Laos) where an estimated two million civilians died.
In the past, Kissinger’s realpolitik has included military coups and assassinations in South America, and support for Pakistan’s genocidal war in Bangladesh, among other examples.
Kissinger is, in my opinion, not only wrong but also conflicted because of his ongoing relationship over the years, possibly financial, with Vladimir Putin.
This is why Kissinger takes the dictator’s side completely by saying that Ukraine should negotiate “before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome. Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante. Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine but a new war against Russia itself,” Kissinger said, adding that the United States and its European allies should not get lost “in the mood of the moment.”
But the “mood” is already “lost” and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Davos that the war is not only “a matter of Ukraine’s survival” or “an issue of European security” but also “a task for the entire global community.”
Kissinger also ignores that Putin never compromised after 2014, that the genie is already out of the bottle with Finland and Sweden asking to join NATO and that the alliance is shipping lethal weapons to arm Ukrainians even though this constitutes the crossing of Putin’s “red lines” about weaponry.
In essence, this is already a de facto war between Russia and NATO with Ukrainians doing all the dirty work.
Financial Times — demonization of Soros in Hungary
Soros, age 91, also understands Putin. A billionaire who has given billions to worthy causes, Soros has been demonized for years by Russia and in his homeland of Hungary by anti-semitic shock troops who support Putin’s puppet Viktor Orban.
In Davos, Soros also stated that Russia’s war might be the start of World War III, might cause a global depression, and prophesied that civilization itself is at stake because the war postpones work on priorities such as poverty, climate change, and pandemic management.
“Therefore, we must mobilize all our resources to bring the war to an early end. The best and perhaps the only way to preserve our civilization is to defeat Putin. That’s the bottom line,” he added. “The European Union was established to prevent such a thing from happening. Even when the fighting stops, as it eventually must, the situation will never revert to the status quo ante.”
Putin has also aimed to frighten away the West from helping Ukraine, driving more into the capitulation camp.
Last week, he deployed nuclear-capable missiles to the Belarusian border with Ukraine, an intimidating tactic he will deny just as he did while amassing troops last year along Ukraine’s border before the invasion. The fear that Putin may use nuclear weapons overhangs all strategic discussions as to how, or if, to end this war.
Kissinger is warning that Russia won’t be humiliated by defeat and will escalate (to nuclear attacks and to Europe), while Soros is pointing out correctly that these possibilities are precisely why Putin must be defeated.
Putin also calculates that Western support will wane, in the face of recessions and the threat to the world’s food supply he’s engineered by blockading Ukrainian ports.
But the overarching issue is not just Ukraine.
It is that Putin blew up the post-World War II order on February 24 and a new security infrastructure must be created to defeat and remove him.
Russia is no longer a player in the world order, but its predator, and there can be no peace in our time as long as Putin is in power.
Concessions and compromises didn’t work with Hitler and they won’t with this thug either.
Diane Francis Newsletter on America and the World
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National Post Editor-at-Large
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and not necessarily those of the Kyiv Post.
