Kissinger's (Plagiarist? Un-copyedited?) Redux

Kissinger has an amazingly odd piece today in the Washington Post that contains huge chunks of the piece he wrote for the IHT on Thursday. Both pieces open and close the same, but in the middle they go into some strikingly different directions. (Both, oddly, contain the blatantly non-factual assertion that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon occurred in 1981, rather than 1982. Thanks to Praktike for noticing that on Thursday. It's sort of dumbfounding that the editors at both the IHT and the Post would miss such a thing though. I commented on Kissinger's outrageous analysis of Israel's motives when the first article came out.) The IHT version seems to focus much more on critiquing Bush's democratization policy. Most notable there - and most markedly absent from the Post version today - was the following quote:

Though advanced as a new doctrine, the regime-change prescription follows well-established precedent. It was the impetus behind the religious wars of the 17th century, the wars of the French Revolution in the 18th and early 19th centuries, the Holy Alliance, the Trotskyite version of Communism, and the contemporary Muslim jihad.

I think Kissinger hoped to play to different audiences: Europe with the IHT, and Washington with the Post. But Henry, everybody uses the internet these days, so I'm sure nobody in DC missed that hilarious comparison. It's removal from the Post piece only accentuates it.

But the new material in the Post version of the piece is worth looking at - if still abhorrent. Here's a taste:

Strategy must begin with the recognition that the freedom agenda does not make geopolitical analysis irrelevant. There are issues for which crusading strategies tend to be off the mark. The rise of China is, in essence, a geopolitical challenge, not a primarily ideological one.

U.S. relations with India are another case in point. During the Cold War, India saw no imperative to support the cause of democracy against communism. Its national interest was not involved in issues such as the freedom of Berlin. Now India is, in effect, a strategic partner, not because of compatible domestic structures but because of parallel security interests in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, and vis-a-vis radical Islam.

If India is a strategic partner not because of any shared democratic domestic structure, then isn't it just as reasonable that China could become a similar partner - with similar security interests vis-a-vis N. Korea and similarly worried about radical Islam due to Xinjiang? And couldn't India be considered a greater geopolitical challenge, as its population will surpass China's within my lifetime (though probably not within Kissinger's), and its economy may well do the same?

I'm not actually making those arguments, but when you look at the world through Kissinger's glazed realpolitik lenses, it all becomes a game, and joining China against India makes just as much sense as the reverse.