Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said today that President George W. Bush should reject calls to boycott the Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony in China, despite increasing pressure to do just that in light of China’s crackdown on Tibetian protestors.
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“It would achieve nothing,” Kissinger told Bloomberg’s Al Hunt. “And it probably would hurt the people of Tibet in the long run.”
“If we look at the long-term foreign policy, the relationship with China is going to be a crucial long-term element of American foreign policy. In fact, I would think that the relationship of these two countries may determine the prospects of benign internationalenvironment. So I think it’s important for us to avoid humiliating the Chinese and to avoid creating the feeling that something that they had intended as a national coming-out party, as something that shows their relationship to the rest of the world, instead becomes something in which the rest of the world seems to turn its back, even though I understand the concerns that people have.”
Both British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will not attend the ceremony, and Sen. Hillary Clinton and Rep. Nancy Pelosi have encouraged the president to do the same.
