Henry kissinger

Monday

Cindy Yu

What does it take to be ‘an old friend of the Chinese people’?

38 min listen

The term ‘old friend of the Chinese people’ might seem a colloquial, almost sentimental, phrase to appear in official diplomatic language, but in the Chinese context, those words have a very specific meaning. Most often, they refer to high profile foreigners whose actions have helped the Chinese Communist Party in one way or another. The most famous of these is Henry Kissinger, who led the way for American rapprochement with China. That the CCP gives various foreigners this honour is revealing of China’s priorities over the decades, but also of its attempts to co-opt foreign forces to its cause. Think back to the United Front strategy, which we looked at

Friday

Michael Gove

Michael Gove, Mary Wakefield, Mitchell Reiss, Max Jeffery and Nicholas Farrell

32 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Michael Gove offers up some advice to Keir Starmer (1:33); Mary Wakefield examines the rise of the ‘divorce party’ (7:28); Mitchell Reiss looks at the promise and peril of AI as he reviews Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit, a collaboration between the former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, the former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft Craig Mundie, and the late US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (13:52); Max Jeffery listens to The Armie HammerTime Podcast as the actor attempts to reverse his spectacular downfall (20:45); and, Nicholas Farrell reveals the time he got drunk with the ghost of Mussolini (25:24).  Produced and presented by

Monday

Sergey Radchenko

The West is watching the war in Ukraine like it’s sport

Every time I hear a politician speak of Munich, I suspect that something is amiss. Last week, President Zelensky accused former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of living in the ‘deep past’, and demanding that ‘a part of Ukraine be given to Russia’. ‘It seems that Mr. Kissinger has 1938 on the calendar instead of 2022’, Zelensky said. He wasn’t alone: figures from the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to the former chess champion Garry Kasparov put themselves on the record timidly or violently disagreeing with Kissinger. I wasn’t at Davos, but I learned of Kissinger’s revelations through Twitter. A major newspaper had declared that he ‘came close to

Thursday

Taki

How to fight a good war

Serifos There’s no high life here, only family life, so I’ve been hitting the books about great Greeks of the past, and they sure make today’s bunch look puny. Philosophers, playwrights, statesmen, artists, poets, orators, sculptors; the ancients had them all. After 2,500 years, they’ve never been equalled. I was once walking around the Greek wing at the New York Met and I ran into Henry Kissinger, whom I knew slightly. He asked me what the population of ancient Athens was. ‘About 20 to 30,000 citizens,’ I answered. He shook his head in amazement. ‘And they produced all this,’ he said. When I first began learning about the Greeks —