Kissinger: Final Thoughts and Views

“The debate within America has shifted to the extremes, so the difference between liberal Republicans and Democrats in the 70s and 80s was the degree of difference of participation in something they both shared. In the present period the debate has shifted to extremes. An extreme theory of America First applied on both sides but in a way that focuses too much on American interests, and not on global interests. This is a challenge.

“Anyone who wants to conduct a serious American foreign policy must balance the two, or America will become isolated. I think the Biden administration is trying to do a serious job, but is afraid of attacks on itself and doesn’t do itself justice. I think there still is a Center, but it doesn’t yet have full expression. I think there is a philosophy that has recently been magnified by artificial intelligence. Society is at the very beginning of a colossal transformation of human consciousness, which will have to be built into American foreign policy. It’s the essence of this future that I’m concerned about.

“We have opened the door to a dialog with objects and with machines, analogous to what happened after the printing press was invented. That dialog transformed human consciousness and set off what we now call the Enlightenment, which has been going now for 500 years.

“What is the essence of these new machines? We ask a question of them and then they are capable of encompassing all the knowledge we have taught them but that no single brain or single machine can contain. “Look at this knowledge,” we say to it. “Give us an answer and we will act on that,” we say. This is a new reality that will be studied for decades.

“The printing press was used to exchange information illegally. American policy will be driven to study the new version. The new reality is not a national, political thing. It’s a high tech thing.

“Therefore, the dialog between America and China will become more important, more crucial. It will change the way we interpret reality. High technology has found the key to a new aspect of reality which we didn’t know existed. The complexity that’s being introduced by high tech will make foreign policy very difficult and very painful. We must not turn our disputes into civil wars.”

Henry Kissinger, July 2023. Interviewed by John Mickelthwaite, Bloomberg