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Article 5.
Newsweek
Dr. K’s Rx for China
Niall Ferguson

May 15, 2011 -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thinks the
Chinese government is “scared” of the Arab Spring. “They’re
worried,” she told Jeffrey Goldberg in the latest Atlantic, “and they
are trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand. They cannot do it.”
These are words—intemperate, undiplomatic, and very likely
counterproductive—that you cannot imagine being uttered by her
predecessor Henry Kissinger. It is now 40 years since Kissinger went
on his secret mission to China, to pave the way for President Richard
Nixon’s historic visit the following year. Since then he has visited the
country more than 50 times. And if there is one thing he has learned,
it is this: the real fool’s errand is to lean on the Chinese. Much has
changed in the world since Kissinger’s first trip to China. (In 1971,
who would have dared to predict that America’s public enemy No. 1
would be a Saudi-born Islamic fundamentalist skulking in a walled
compound in Pakistan?) But at least two things in American foreign
policy remain consistent: the relationship with mainland China,
revived by Kissinger after more than 20 years in the deep freeze, and
Kissinger himself, consulted formally or informally by every
president from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama. On China,
Kissinger’s new book, is a reminder of why our leaders still want to
pick his brains. Eighty-eight years old this month, he remains without
equal as a strategic thinker. The opening to China is a story
Kissinger has told before: how he and Nixon had discerned that
country could become a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union;
how he secretly flew to China after feigning illness in Pakistan; how
he and Premier Zhou Enlai hammered out the diplomatic basis for

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