Great Contemporaries.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: The Realist - Henry Kissinger

When Henry Kissinger recently suggested at Davos that Russia and Ukraine should initiate peace negotiations and that "ideally, the dividing line should return the status quo ante," he created an international furor. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for example, complained,

Behind all these geopolitical speculations of those who advise Ukraine to give away something to Russia, "great geopoliticians" are always unwilling to see ordinary people. Millions of those who actually live in the territory they propose to exchange for the illusion of peace. You must always see people. The truth is that some variation of Zelenskyy's complaint has regularly been lodged at the exponents of realpolitik who are, more often than not, accused of seeing smaller nations as mere pawns on a global chessboard to be disposed of by the great powers, whether at the Berlin Conference in 1885 that carved up Africa or the Yalta Conference in 1945 that disposed of Poland.

In this instance, as Kissinger himself explained in an interview with the historian Andrew Roberts in the London Spectator, his remarks were being misconstrued. His aim was not to counsel appeasement, as his detractors claimed, but, rather, to suggest that Ukraine could be reconstituted along the lines that it resembled after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. This, in turn, would represent something of a victory for Ukraine in the form of a frozen conflict that could eventually be settled on Western terms, much as the Warsaw Pact ended up peacefully dissolving in 1989. What's more, the addition of Finland and Sweden to NATO, which recently strengthened the defense of the Baltic states, coupled with a successful Ukrainian rebuff of the Kremlin's attempt to create a Russian glacis, would demonstrate, Kissinger stated,

...that the fear that has hung over Europe since WorldWar II, of a Russian army descending--the conventional army descending into Europe across established borders--can be prevented by NATO conventional action. For the first time in recent history, Russia would have to face a need for coexistence with Europe as an entity, rather than America being the chief element in defending Europe with its nuclear forces. As Kissinger's splendid new book Leadership reminds us, he has always been a classical realist who believes in a balance of power and champions American ties with Europe. He may view the longstanding missionary impulse of American society with skepticism, if not apprehension, but he also shares little of the current vogue on some precincts of the American Right for...