Kissinger Sees Little Hope for Mideast Peace

March 16, 2013 8:37 pm

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger says there is little chance of any breakthrough in stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, as President Barack Obama visits Israel next week on his first trip there since taking office.

“I’m not optimistic” about reviving peace talks, in large part because of the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties in the region that aren’t inclined to support a “just outcome” with Israel, Kissinger said in an interview airing this weekend on Bloomberg TV’s “Conversations with Judy Woodruff.”

Kissinger said he doesn’t have a rosy view of the so-called Arab Spring that has been widely portrayed as popular uprisings with democratic aspirations. Most revolutions, he said, consist of “many groups hostile to the existing government, but not necessarily for the same reason.”The former national security adviser to President Richard Nixon, Kissinger, 89, is an elder statesman of American foreign policy who, among other things, negotiated the U.S. opening with China in 1971 and an Israeli-Egyptian disengagement following the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He was secretary of state in the administrations of Nixon and President Gerald Ford.

He cited the Syrian civil war as one conflict that has been widely misunderstood. “It’s not a fight of democracy against a dictator,” he said. “It’s a fight of various ethnic groups for preeminence.”