‘Kissinger is working from a paradigm that no longer applies’: Academic

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s warning that the trade war between the United States and China could lead to a global military conflict does not hold water, according to E Michael Jones, an American writer and former professor.

Kissinger on Thursday warned the US-China trade war could lead to a global military conflict if the two countries failed to resolve their commercial dispute.

"If conflict is permitted to run unconstrained, the outcome could be even worse than it was in Europe," he said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing.

"World War I broke out because of a relatively minor crisis ... and today the weapons are more powerful," the former top diplomat said.

The US and China have been engaged in a trade conflict for 18 months and have imposed billions of dollars of tariffs on each other’s goods.

Since early 2018, the administration of US President Donald Trump has pursued a deliberate policy of attempting to hurt China’s economy in response to concerns about the shifting balance of economic power and unfair trade practices.

The US and China are also engaged in a number of other disputes, including US naval operations in the South China Sea, and the US relationship with Taiwan, and US Congress support for protesters in Hong Kong.

US-China trade war could spark global military conflict: Kissinger

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger warned on Thursday that an armed conflict could break out between the US and China if they fail to resolve their trade war.

Jones, the current editor of Culture Wars magazine, said, “If we are talking about the past we could talk about the relationship between the United States and Japan, where that economic war led to World War II. So there’s something that could be said to what he is saying.”

“The problem here is that the state of warfare has changed. Kissinger is talking specifically about the confrontation between the United States and China in the South China Sea where United States sends its warship in to make sure that they can sail there,” he told Press TV on Saturday.

“The problem here is that this is once again an obsolete peripheral issue now. China has already consolidated the Eurasian landmass. The whole point of the British navy and now American navy is to deny China access to sea lanes,” he noted.

“China and Russia and the other Asian countries have already made the sea lanes unnecessary. There is rail link now between Shanghai and Rotterdam. Because of this rail link the sea lanes are no longer necessary. If the sea lanes are no longer necessary then the American navy cannot blockade the port as they did in the past,” the analyst said.

“China learned that lesson, learned the lessons of the opium war where the British gunships basically sailed up to the river and destroyed any resistance to their colonization as manifested in Hong Kong. But those days are over now. So it seems unlikely. It seems Kissinger is working from a paradigm that no longer applies,” he concluded.

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