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"I don't think Kissinger will contribute anything substantive but, as a leading realist, he adds credibility to the effort to repair relations, which makes the ongoing contact valuable," Giraldi, a former CIA case officer and US Army intelligence officer, said on Tuesday.
Kissinger, the architect with President Richard Nixon of the US detente policy with the Soviet Union in the 1970s, now has a plan on how to reconcile Moscow and Washington that is of interest to Trump, the German newspaper Bild reported on Monday.
Bild said European intelligence agencies had concluded Trump would seek constructive cooperation with Russia and that he had already consulted Kissinger as an informal adviser on the issue.
Giraldi agreed with this assessment. "I do think Trump is serious about detente with Moscow," he said.
However, Giraldi also cautioned that Trump was certain to face intense domestic opposition to his detente plan from leading hawks such as senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham in his own Republican Party and from the US corporate media that parrots the neoconservative and globalist anti-Russian stance.
Trump "will be under intense pressure from the media and from some members of his own party (McCain, Graham) to take a hard line," he noted.
But Giraldi also predicted that Trump would remain determined to push ahead with his "neo-detente" policy and appeared prepared to defy whatever pressures were thrown at him.
"I believe he is strong enough to resist that pressure," Giraldi concluded.
Kissinger has reportedly met with Trump several times in the past couple of months and is rumored to be his informal foreign policy adviser.
Philip Giraldi is executive director of the Council for the National Interest, a group that advocates more even-handed US government policies in the Middle East.
Easing neoconservative manufactured tensions
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger will try to reduce US tensions with Russia as an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump and seek positive cooperation between the two nations, retired US Army Major and historian Todd Pierce told Sputnik.
"Compare Kissinger as an informal advisor and his 'constructive cooperation' with Hilary Clinton's 'informal advisor,' the neo-fascist leaning Robert Kagan and his wife [current Assistant Secretary of State] Victoria Nuland who did her best to provoke war with Russia over Ukraine," he stated on Tuesday.
Pierce recalled that throughout his life and career, Kissinger had consistently championed detente, removing tensions and seeking warm relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
"There is much to criticize Kissinger for in his long career, but trying to ratchet down neoconservative manufactured tensions with Russia is not one of them. Constructive cooperation with Russia is exactly what we, and the world, needs today, if we actually act in good faith," Pierce said.
"The world should let out a collective sigh of relief that Clinton and her militarists are not in charged on the highest priority issue of a US-triggered war with Russia, which all of our 'think tanks' have been working for," he said.
Pierce characterized Kissinger as being a constructive realist.
"The most important thing for him is international equilibrium, and there's no talk of human rights or democracy," he said.
Pierce argued this approach was vastly preferable to the focus by presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama as well as by Hillary Clinton on promoting human rights and democracy, but only as an excuse to topple governments and expand US influence and interests.
"The United States uses talk of 'human rights' and 'democracy' only for the purpose of justifying their wars of aggression with a domestic audience which demands to be fed lies about other countries whom we target for attack... even though our victims know better and once in a while, even fight back," he said.
Pierce also noted a report in the Germany newspaper Bild on Monday that its analysis of information, obtained by western European intelligence from Trump's transition team revealed Trump would seek a "constructive cooperation" with Russia.
"Kissinger has reportedly met with Trump several times in the past couple of months," he noted.
Playing Russia against China
"In Kissinger's day, he played China and the Soviet Union off each other, and Trump, also a foreign policy realist, would like to do the same," Independent Institute Center on Peace and Liberty Director Ivan Eland said on Tuesday.
Eland observed Trump's advisers may see Russia as a valuable counterweight to a rising China in addition to being an ally against Islamic extremism.
This policy would be "the opposite of Kissinger's opening to a then weaker and more radical China to offset the more powerful Soviet Union. It is the reverse of what Kissinger did, but times are different; the spirit of the policy is the same," he explained.
Eland suggested the Trump team is probably using Kissinger to give establishment legitimacy to a policy it already wants to pursue,
"Much of the Democratic and even the Republican hierarchies are appalled by a US move to improve relations with Vladimir Putin. But Kissinger's name leads respectability to detente with Russia," Eland added.
Balance of Power
University of Pittsburgh Professor of International Affairs Michael Brenner suggested that Trump chose Kissinger for advice because he shared the 93-year-old former secretary of state's pragmatism toward Russia and China.
"Kissinger is the classic balance-of-power realist. That is manifest is the stress that he places on dealings with foreign powers even if they are not friends. Iran is the exception — hence, he agrees with Trump on that. On Russia, and China, he will urge pragmatism," he said.
Trump may also want Kissinger's experience to make his policies toward Russia more coherent and detailed than the general principles he expounded on the campaign trail, Brenner added.
"Trump's expressed attitude toward Putin and Russia during the campaign was instinctive, not thought through. That is true of every position that he has taken. He is stuck with it, but is under enormous pressure to join the vehement hostile consensus [towards Russia]," he pointed out.
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