IN BEIJING THEY have concluded that America will do anything to keep China down. In Washington they are adamant that China is scheming to supplant the United States as the world’s leading power. For a sobering analysis of this growing antagonism—and a plan to prevent it causing a superpower war—visit the 33rd floor of an Art Deco building in midtown Manhattan, the office of Henry Kissinger.
On May 27th Mr Kissinger will turn 100. Nobody alive has more experience of international affairs, first as a scholar of 19th-century diplomacy, later as America’s national security adviser and secretary of state, and for the past 46 years as a consultant and emissary to monarchs, presidents and prime ministers. Mr Kissinger is worried. “Both sides have convinced themselves that the other represents a strategic danger,” he says. “We are on the path to great-power confrontation.”
