The US President Barack Obama made phone calls last week regarding Syria to the leaders of two key Middle East allies – Turkish President Recep Erdogan and the UAE Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The White House readouts on the two conversations carefully avoided making any criticism of the Russian military operations in Syria.

Interestingly, the readout on the conversation with Erdogan, makes no reference to Russia (although the Turkish version reported the two leaders discussed what could be done about the Russian military activities in Syria.)

On the other hand, the readout on Sheikh Zayed also, while making an inter alia reference to the Russian operations, avoided any critical tone as such – “They [Obama and Sheikh Zayed] agreed that Russia’s military operations in Syria should focus on IS – not moderate Syrian opposition groups – and reaffirmed the importance of establishing the conditions necessary for a political transition in Syria”.

Conceivably, Sheikh Zayed briefed Obama about his conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin two weeks ago in Sochi. Moscow has been paying great attention to build trust and mutual confidence in Russia’s relations with the UAE in particular and a ‘critical mass’ is indeed appearing in the relationship, enabling them to meaningfully engage on the regional issues such as Islamic State, Libya and so on. No doubt, Moscow sees this as a parallel track while a sustained dialogue is being developed with Saudi Arabia.

http://atimes.com/2015/10/diplomatic-leg-work-on-syria-gathers-momentum/

“Surely no statesman in modern times … has been as revered and then as reviled as Henry Kissinger.” So begins Niall Ferguson’s commissioned biography. But reverence and revulsion for Kissinger have never been sequential. Instead, for sixty years, Henry Kissinger has been a paragon of of America’s bipartisan ruling class, whose evolving identity he has reflected. Ordinary people, however, sensed that he cared less for them than for his own career and ideas, and that he has served America badly. In 1976, as Democratic and Republican Party elites were celebrating Secretary of State Kissinger’s 1972 deals with the Soviet Union, his 1973 “Paris Peace Accords” after which America’s naval bases in Vietnam became Soviet bases, and were looking none too closely at the substance of the newly established relationship with China, the insurgent faction of the Democratic Party that nominated Jimmy Carter made rejection of Kissinger the winning issue of that year’s presidential campaign. Meanwhile Ronald Reagan was doing the same thing on behalf of the Republican rank and file, and continued to do it through his landslide victory in 1980.

Kissinger is the only person, ever, who both of America’s political parties reviled at the same time, and whose rejection helped elect two presidents in a row. For two generations, no one had greater influence on US foreign policy than Kissinger. America’s ins and outs have regarded him so differently because their views of America and of its role in the world are so different.

Although Niall Ferguson’s massive, detail-filled biography contains a surfeit of material by which the inquisitive reader may draw his own conclusions, its introduction heralds an explicit attempt to counter mostly critical biographies — from right and left — as well as the general public’s negative perceptions. This first volume, with young Henry on the cover looking innocent to the point of dreaminess, argues that we should regard whatever personal features of his that one might find distasteful as consequent to his “idealism,” defined in terms of Immanuel Kant’s conflation of a secularized “golden rule” with the imperative to craft a “federation of free states” to maintain “perpetual peace.” Yet the book makes no attempt to show how this translates to Kissinger’s behavior. It also treats his character evasively. For example, it asks the reader to accept that his own cynical explanation for his “not so secret”swinging single life (“power is the greatest aphrodisiac”) was in jest, as were his other cynical explanations for his actions. Nevertheless, Ferguson gives chapter and verse on Kissinger’s un-endearing habit of tyrannizing subordinates while ingratiating and manipulating superiors.

The book does treat at some length the nexus between Kissinger’s personal character and his actions in public life, namely his relationship with Fritz Kraemer, who Walter Isaacson described as Henry’s “guide, mentor, father confessor and keeper of his conscience.” In 1943, Private Henry Kissinger had been assigned to the 84th Infantry division. Kraemer, also a German immigrant but already an accomplished scholar who was working for its commanding General, noticed Kissinger’s intelligence, befriended him, steered him into Military Intelligence, and later to Harvard. All the while, through the 1950s, and then decreasingly until Kissinger became Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Kraemer fed his protege’s mind and did his best to inspire in him his own nobility of spirit and devotion to righteousness over power and fame. Kraemer’s letters to Kissinger, some which Ferguson reproduces, show his increasing concern and then disappointment with Kissinger’s reversal of Kraemer’s priorities. Ferguson does not mention that Kissinger turned his back on Kraemer, or that he delivered an apologetic, tearful eulogy when Kraemer was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

http://atimes.com/2015/10/book-review-kissinger-revered-and-reviled/

Henry Kissinger’s luminous career was punctuated by one great disappointment, namely his failure to foresee the collapse of the Soviet system and the downfall of the foreign-policy system to which he devoted his life. That’s on par with the old joke: “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” Kissinger was more hedgehog than fox: The fox knows many things, said Archilochus, but the hedgehog knows one important thing. Kissinger knew one important thing, which had the sole defect of being wrong. Like the Bourbons, Dr. Kissinger has learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as he showed in an Oct. 16 essay for the Wall Street Journal entitled, “A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse.” Kissinger bewails “disintegration of the American role in stabilizing the Middle East order” and wishes to restore it.

As Angelo Codevilla argued on this site in his review of a new Kissinger biography, the great man took as dogmatic truth that the Cold War was unwinnable, and thus “’the goal of war can no longer be military victory,’ but rather to achieve ‘certain political conditions that are fully understood by the other side,’ and that to this end, the U.S would ‘present (the enemy) at every point with an opportunity for a settlement.'”

Ronald Reagan, by contrast, told the first meeting of his national security team, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose.” He and his advisors–Richard Allen, William Clark, William J. Casey, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and then-younger men like Angelo Codevilla, Herbert Meyer and Norman Bailey–saw a sea-change when it stared them in the face.

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To most of the world, and emphatically to Russia and China, ISIS looks like America’s Frankenstein monster. Many Russians are convinced that Washington helped create ISIS in order to destabilize Russia. “Paranoid Russian” may be a pleonasm, but the Russians do have enemies. It is hard to persuade our competitors that America fostered the emergence of ISIS out of pure stupidity rather than with malice aforethought. They will never believe we are that dumb.

http://atimes.com/2015/10/balance-of-power-the-board-game/