Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was asked at her July 20 press briefing about Henry Kissinger’s much-publicized trip to China, and his meeting with President Xi Jinping and other high level officials. Zakharova began by taking note of Kissinger’s decades of experience, and his pragmatism:
“First, let me remind you that Mr. Kissinger is not a public official, but an elder of international relations. He expressed an engaging point of view as an expert who has been in this field for a long time. He can change his opinion at will which is important. We have seen him do so on multiple occasions.”
She then recalled Kissinger’s decades-long approach to the “trilateral entanglement of contacts” among the U.S., Russia and China, noting that in some writings “he put it even more bluntly, saying that America’s relations with potential adversaries must be better than the adversaries’ relations with each other. There’s the answer to your question. Call it duplicity or American-style democracy embodied in their foreign policy.”
