The U.S. and China represent the greatest dangers to peace right now if their animosities escalate to a military confrontation, Kissinger said in an interview with The Economist published Wednesday. The two countries are heading toward a major confrontation, he said, as both nations have convinced themselves that the other represents a strategic danger.

Tensions over Taiwan are likely to be a major flashpoint for future conflict, as President Joe Biden has signaled the U.S. would aid the island nation if China invades to reconquer what it considers a breakaway state. But much like with nuclear weapons during the Cold War, the world is now perfecting a new technologyA.I.that may be too dangerous to even consider deploying militarily.

[China and America] are two powers of the type where, historically, a military confrontation was inevitable. But this is not a normal circumstance, because of mutually assured destruction and artificial intelligence, Kissinger said.

Delicate state of affairs

U.S.-China relations are now at a low point. They started declining after the Trump administration imposed strict trade tariffs on China that have continued under the Biden administration. More recently, the two sides have clashed over Chinas intellectual property theft from U.S. companies, Chinese President Xi Jinpings close relationship with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, and the rising risk of China invading Taiwan.  

Were in the classic pre-World War I situation, where neither side has much margin of political concession and in which any disturbance of the equilibrium can lead to catastrophic consequences, Kissinger said.

The world, in general, is becoming more dangerous, Kissinger said. He reluctantly supports Ukraine joining the military alliance NATO once the war ends, after years spent pushing back on the idea. India is another rising power, and Kissinger advocated strengthening its military in case occasional border skirmishes with China escalate to an all-out invasion. 

Meanwhile, Taiwan isnt the only East Asian country concerned about Chinas rise, as Japanese officials have long warned that China poses an existential threat to the region. Last year, Japan announced a $320 billion military build-up plan, ending decades of pacifism. The plan includes missiles capable of reaching China, but the build-up could go even further, as Kissinger predicted that Japan is heading towards becoming a nuclear power in five years.

A.I.s magnifying threat

Just as superpowers settled into an unspoken detente from mutual destruction during the Cold War, A.I. might be weaponized with similar implications. 

We are at the very beginning of a capability where machines could impose global pestilence or other pandemicsnot just nuclear, but any field of human destruction, Kissinger said. The circumstances require responsible leaders, who at least make an attempt to avoid conflict.

Current A.I. systems like OpenAIs ChatGPT have threatened economic disruption and widespread layoffs by making certain jobs obsolete, but some computer science experts have warned that the technology could still be in its infancy, and keeping up with it will likely get a lot harder in the future.

The U.S. and China are racing to dominate A.I. because of its potential economic importance, although former Google CEO Eric Schmidtwho earlier this year compared A.I.s impact on warfare to that of nuclear weaponswarned this week that the U.S. is only slightly ahead of China on A.I.

Some A.I. experts have cautioned that the world is simply not ready for A.I. being refined to a more sophisticated level known as artificial general intelligence. AGI, as its also called, when the technology can match human capabilities and reasoning, may be achieved in only a few years. If computers become capable that level of intelligence, humans might lose control and the technology could threaten the world, Kissinger said.

We may well wind up destroying ourselves. And a point is now quite reachable where the machines can refuse to be shut off. I mean once the machines recognized this possibility, they can build it into their advice prior to the contingency. Many genius scientists believe thatand they know more than I do.

Kissinger called for restraint in developing new technologies with civilization-ending potential, adding that as the world returns to being a more dangerous place, its essential that responsible governance prevails over hot heads.

When were in an adversarial world with mutually assured destruction, you owe it morally to your society to avoid it, he said.

Certainly, in all the research I did in putting together my book Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie, I never came across any comment Woody Guthrie made about the debt ceiling.

But he lived through the Great Depression and its aftermath. He also stood witness to legislators struggling to correct the direction that the nation was headed in during the 1930s and early 40s.

He had a lot to say about Congress in general and how it handled the national debt in particular.

He once made a folksy joke that suggests his feelings about this supposedly august body.

The Housewives of the country are always afraid at nite, afraid theys a Robber in the House. Nope, Milady most of em is in the Senate, he wrote in his regular column for The Peoples Daily, called Woody Sez.

Guthrie constantly railed against politicians, both Republican and Democrat, who he thought represented their own selfish interests rather than those of deserving working men and women.

What if he could survey todays America? Would his comments on the state of the nation in the past suggest that he would have something to say in 2023?

In fact, some of his observations sound as if they were written about this political moment rather than his own.

Hearin the hens a cacklin

When Guthrie visited Washington, D.C., in 1940, he managed to hear some Senate debates and provided his thoughts on their effectiveness.

I gawthered the Reactionary Republicans was in love with the Reactionary Republicans; also that the Liberal Democrats was in love with th Liberal Demacrats. Each presented a brief case of statistics proving that the other brief cases of statistics, was mistaken, misread, misquoted, mislabeled, and mis-spoken, he wrote in his column.

And just what were politicians arguing over then? The national debt.

Bipartisan legislative efforts raised the debt ceiling three times under President Donald Trump. Now, House Republicans are balking unless certain conditions are met, while the Democrats are demanding a clean bill with no restrictions.

Guthrie witnessed much the same situation in his era. During his visit to Washington, D.C., he listened to senators a making speeches on every conceivable subject under the sun, an though the manner in which they brought forth their arguments, their polished wit, and subtle maneuvers, were all very entertaining, I come out of it as empty handed as I went in, he wrote in Woody Sez.

He then compared their debates to hearin the hens a cacklin and a runnin out to th barn. Despite the scenes being loud, noisy, and plenty entertaining, the result was no eggs.

Theres a lot of noise coming from Congress today also but no results.

What could happen if the two sides cannot agree? A telling example occurred in 2011, when the bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling came so late that Standard & Poors downgraded the countrys credit rating which hiked the interest that needed to be paid on the U.S. debt.

But if an agreement does not happen, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that such a crisis would bring on economic and financial catastrophe on a national and global scale.

Guthrie would find this kind of brinkmanship troubling. Not because he was a political operative, with merely an intellectual understanding of the risks. Instead, he was driven by a personal knowledge of the day-to-day hardships, the human toll of such momentous political decisions. His family had fallen from middle-class safety into abject poverty even before the onset of the Great Depression.

Because of falling agricultural prices in the aftermath of World War I and his fathers real estate speculation in some small farms surrounding their hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma, the Guthries could not keep up with their mortgages. They were forced into foreclosure.

Guthrie joked that his father was the only man in the world that lost a farm a day for thirty days.

Foreclosures would likely be just one of the ruinous effects of default now, along with interest rates hikes, slashing of social programs, unemployment spikes and decimation of pension plans. All are negative results, but they are certain to hit the poor and working class the hardest.

Those are the people whom Woody Guthrie advocated for throughout his career. Those are the people whose hardships he lamented in such songs as I Aint Got No Home and Dust Bowl Refugee.

But he also expressed optimism about the power of those same people to make a positive change, such as in Union Maid and Better World A-Comin. Individual and collective action was necessary, according to Guthrie, and he celebrated both. The union maid would always get her way when she asked for better pay, and in Better World he sings, well all be union and well all be free.

Perhaps his best-known comments about the nation appear in This Land Is Your Land, with the popular version praising the American landscape. But in his early version of that song, he ended it with his narrator surveying a line of hungry people lined up by the relief office and then asked, Was this land made for you and me?

That question could rise again in 2023: If congressional leaders debating over the debt ceiling fail to find common ground for the nations greater good, perhaps someone will challenge them and ask if the politicians are in office for the American people, or for themselves just as Woody Guthrie would have.

Few of them know it.

And because of a dispute between federal safety regulators and an airbag parts manufacturer, they arent likely to find out anytime soon.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is demanding that the manufacturer, ARC Automotive of Knoxville, Tennessee, recall 67 million inflators that could explode with such force as to blow apart a metal canister and expel shrapnel. But ARC is refusing to do so, setting up a possible court fight with the agency.

NHTSA argues that the recall is justified because two people have been killed in the United States and Canada and at least seven others have been injured by ARCs inflators. The explosions, which first occurred in 2009, have continued as recently as this year.

NHTSA tentatively concluded, after an investigation that has lasted for eight years, that the inflators are defective. The agencys documents show that the inflators date from at least the 2002 model year to January 2018, when ARC installed equipment on its manufacturing lines that could detect potential safety problems.

One of those who died was Marlene Beaudoin, a 40-year-old mother of 10 from Michigans Upper Peninsula who was struck by metal fragments when her 2015 Chevrolet Traverse SUV was involved in a minor crash in 2021. She and four of her sons had been on their way to get ice cream. The sons were not hurt.

ARC maintains that no safety defect exists, that NHTSAs demand is based on a hypothesis rather than technical conclusions and that the agency has no authority to order a parts manufacturer to carry out recalls, which ARC contends are the responsibility of automakers.

In a letter to NHTSA, ARC said no automaker has found a defect common to all 67 million inflators, and no root cause has been identified in the inflator ruptures.

ARC believes they resulted from random one-off manufacturing anomalies that were properly addressed by vehicle manufacturers through lot-specific recalls, the letter said.

In a statement, NHTSA indicated that both ARC and automakers are responsible for recalls and that it can seek a recall from a parts maker that supplies multiple automakers.

The next step is for NHTSA to issue a final ruling on whether the inflators are defective, then hold a public hearing. It potentially could take ARC to court to seek a recall order. NHTSA would not say when or whether any of this will happen.

In the meantime, owners of vehicles made by at least a dozen automakers Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Ford, Toyota, Stellantis, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Porsche, Hyundai and Kia are left to wonder anxiously whether their vehicles contain driver or front passenger inflators made by ARC. (Some vehicles have ARC inflators on both sides.)

Because ARC supplies inflators that are included in other manufacturers airbags, theres no easy way for vehicle owners to determine whether their inflators are made by ARC. Neither NHTSA nor ARC nor the automakers have released a full list of affected models.

The standoff with ARC has sent automakers struggling to find out just how many of their vehicles contain the inflators. The auto manufacturers are also asking NHTSA whether they must start doing recalls. Automakers know many of the models affected. But many say theyre still gathering information from later model years to determine which vehicles contain the affected inflators.

We are still investigating, said Maria Buczkowski, a spokeswoman for Ford. We have not had any ARC airbag inflators rupture in the field.

James Bell, a Kia spokesman, said, We do not have a final count on vehicles that were built with ARC inflators, but the team is collecting the data.

Toyota confirmed that some of its vehicles have ARC inflators but wouldnt comment further.

Other automakers said they were trying to find a cause and were working with the government or didnt respond to requests from The Associated Press for information.

NHTSA contends that byproducts from welding during manufacturing can clog a vent inside the inflator canister thats designed to let gas escape to fill air bags quickly in a crash. Pressure can build to the point where the canister is blown apart.

Michael Brooks, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Auto Safety, called on NHTSA and the automakers to release a list of affected models.

Customers, I think, have a right to know if theres a potential defect in their car, particularly if its sitting a few inches from their chest and can explode, Brooks said.

The situation, he said, is reminiscent of the early stages of the Takata air bag inflator recalls in 2001. It took years for all the affected vehicle models to be announced.

Both ARC and Takata used ammonium nitrate to inflate air bags. Takatas situation was more dangerous, Brooks said, because in its inflators, the chemical could deteriorate over time when exposed to high heat and humidity. Unlike Takata, ARC uses ammonium nitrate only as a secondary chemical to inflate air bags. ARCs problem appears to derive instead from a manufacturing defect.

From 2017 to 2022, the ARC problems triggered seven small recalls from automakers. On Friday, the same day NHTSA announced its action against ARC, General Motors announced the recall of nearly 1 million more.

The company said its recalling certain 2014 through 2017 GMC Acadia, Chevy Traverse and Buick Enclave SUVs because the ARC inflators can explode. The recall came after GM was told this year that the drivers air bag ruptured in a 2017 Traverse. GM, which says it doesnt know what caused the inflator to explode, has hired an engineering firm to help investigate.

We disagree with NHTSAs new sweeping request when extensive field testing has found no inherent defect, ARC said in a statement.

While the recall demand is being sorted out, Brooks of the Center for Auto Safety recommends that owners of vehicles from the 12 affected brands insist that dealers disclose whether their particular vehicle contains an ARC inflator.

The more customers who complain, the more pressure that puts on the manufacturers, he said.