Henry Kissinger didn’t press Donald Trump to work with Russia to ‘box in’ China, institute says
Media reports dismissing a Daily Beast report as ‘pure fabrication’ are accurate, says the director of the Wilson Centre’s Kissinger Institute on China and the US
Elder US statesman Henry Kissinger’s namesake think tank has denied a media report saying the former top diplomat urged US President Donald Trump to “box in” China by working with Russia.
Recent reports by China National Radio and the Chinese-language version of China Daily calling a July 25 report by the Daily Beast “pure fabrication” are accurate, Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Centre’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, told the South China Morning Post. China National Radio and China Daily are official state media outlets.
Citing five anonymous sources familiar with the matter, the Daily Beast said: “The former secretary of state – who famously engineered the tactic of establishing diplomatic relations with China in order to isolate the Soviet Union – pitched almost the inverse of that idea to Trump during a series of private meetings during the presidential transition.”
However, a transcript of a September 13 event commemorating the Wilson Centre’s 50th anniversary, provided by the think tank, shows Kissinger denying that he had made the comments.
“I wish I had been invited, on some occasion, to tell President Trump, in front of the audience described, about my strategic views of that relationship,” the transcript quotes Kissinger as saying. “That particular article was a great piece – of fiction.”