Kissinger: His legacy goes marching on
And bombing, and promoting coups, and flouting international law
The various news organizations have presumably been updating their draft obituaries for Henry Kissinger for the last three decades or more. So there is a lot of information out there already since his passing discussing who he was and at least some of them discussing why he was such a controversial figure. So I won’t try to recap much of that commentary here.
Here is a good, unsympathetic report from Democracy Now! 1
Those describing him as a war criminal are accurate. Those not so describing him are incomplete at best. To be fair, he was never arrested or charged for war crimes. But any obituary that is actually sympathetic to him is giving a very poor account of his legacy.
Kissinger wasn’t a part of the government since decades. But Aluf Benn reminds us how much we are living with Kissinger’s legacy:
More than any other person, Kissinger set Israel’s special status in America’s foreign policy, as a state exempt from abiding by norms the U.S. demands of others in two areas: possessing nuclear weapons and a prolonged occupation of territories accompanied by the denial of their residents’ rights.
Kissinger’s most important contribution to Israel was formulated in 1969, in his first months as national security advisor under Richard Nixon. He formulated, along with Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Yitzhak Rabin, the “nuclear understanding” agreed upon by Nixon and Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir at their meeting in September 1969.
This understanding established Israel’s policy of “vagueness” and gave it American backing. Meir promised that Israel would not declare that it possesses nuclear weapons and would not conduct nuclear tests, and Nixon agreed not to pressure Israel to join the international Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Their successors have respected that understanding to this day.2 [my emphasis]
Nick Turse gave this summary of why that label will always be attached to his name:
Kissinger helped prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin.
There were “few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger,” said veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.
A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Kissinger — perhaps the most powerful national security adviser in American history and the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia from 1969 to 1975 — was responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.3 [my emphasis]
Kissinger was a brilliant diplomat by virtually all accounts. His view of international affairs centered on balance of power considerations. And his version of that made him a cynically pragmatic practitioner of the dark arts of foreign policy. And that pragmatism made him willing and able to defy the Cold War ideology that made way too many politicians and officials indulge in unrealistic and often militaristic fantasies not only in their foreign policy but their attitudes as well.
As has been widely reported since his days as Nixon’s National Security Advisor, he played key roles in arranging the SALT 1 arms-control agreements with Russia and normalizing relations with China, including establishing the “One-China” policy that has been a stabilizing factor in US-China relationships to this day.
Kissinger is a big reason there is the familiar saying, “Only Nixon could go to China.”
Pete Millwood argues that the saying is actually misleading:
“Only a Republican, perhaps only a Nixon, could have made this break and gotten away with it.”
So commented Democratic Senator Mike Mansfield in a December 1971 interview that has gone on to form the basis of one of the most enduring myths in foreign policy analysis: that only Nixon could go to China.
Nixon’s unique suitability for pursuing rapprochement with Mao Zedong’s China has become the archetypal example for the accepted wisdom that bold foreign policy reconciliations require a hawkish architect …4
But Millwood recounts that Nixon’s normalization process with China was actually very popular. He doesn’t mention it in that article, but Nixon’s 1972 opponent, George McGovern, agreed with the Nixon’s and Kissinger’s general China policy in that campaign. The popularity of that and the historical SALT Treaty were big reasons why Nixon won with the margin that he did.
Fifty years after Nixon’s visit to China, we, too, should give credit to Nixon—but not on the terms that Mansfield used. Other American leaders—Democrats and Republicans both—had called for a rapprochement with China, and if Nixon had not gone to China, [Mike] Mansfield or another politician would have done. But Nixon did, and his shrewd reading of the changing bipartisan political consensus on US China policy allowed him to pull off one of the most consequential—and widely popular—foreign policy moves by a US president in history. [my emphasis]
The historian Henry Steele Commager noted pointedly in a 1975 book:
Why did the United States transfer the cold war from the Soviet Union to China? Events of 1972 demonstrate that there never was any logic-except domestic political logic-behind this; we could just as readily have accepted Communist China in 1952 as in 1972. Why did American statesmen ever suppose that we had either the right or the competence to be an Asian power? We would, after all, consider any Chinese statesman who thought that China should be an American power bereft of his senses.5
Abandoning a policy that was basically boneheaded in the first place is generally a good thing to do.
The safely Establishment Joseph Nye, Jr. at the ultra-Establishment Foreign Affairs website also gives Kissinger credit for the Nixon-era breakthroughs with the Soviet Union and China. Though he does work the phrase “war criminal” into his first paragraph! He goes on to criticize him for his considerable lists of highly dubious policies, to put it politely: the Vietnam war, the bombing of Cambodia, the Chile coup in 1973, and the Indian-Pakistan War of 1971.
In more recent decades, Kissinger was one prominent foreign policy figure who warned (sensibly) of the risks that NATO expansion posed for military confrontation with Russia.
Über-Realist Stephen Walt did a column on Kissinger this past June. Considering why Kissinger has had the reputation he did, Walt credits it largely to Kissinger’s networking skills:
Part of the answer, of course, is sheer longevity. …
I think the real reason is simple. No one has ever—EVER—worked harder or longer to gain and retain influence and prestige than Kissinger. I’ve known a fair number of incredibly driven, ambitious people in my time, and I’ve read about plenty of others. None of them come close. Even a casual reading of the many biographies of Kissinger (both the fawning and the hostile) reveal a man whose ambition is off the charts, who has remarkable focus and no serious hobbies, and who was perhaps the greatest networker the modern world has ever seen. He never burnt a bridge to anyone who might be helpful to him, never took a position that was clearly outside the acceptable consensus, never missed an opportunity to forge a new connection, never forgot a slight, and never concluded he had done enough. To put it plainly, Kissinger outworked, out-charmed, out-maneuvered, and outdid everyone else.6 [my emphasis]
Nathan Robinson in the distinctly left Current Affairs commented last year argued that the left “must be a little more Machiavellian—even if it means reading Henry Kissinger’s memoirs.”
Henry Kissinger and the Moral Bankruptcy of U.S. Elites. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 11/30/2023. (Accessed: 2023-29-11).
Benn, Aluf (2023): Kissinger's Power-over-progress Paradigm Found Attentive Ears in Israel. Haaretz 12/01/2023. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-01/ty-article/.premium/kissingers-power-over-progress-paradigm-found-attentive-ears-in-israel/0000018c-21c0-d21c-abae-77fca3810000> (Accessed: 2023-01-12).
Turse, Nick (2023): Top U.S. Diplomat Responsible for Millions of Deaths, Dies at 100. The Intercept 11/29/2023. <https://theintercept.com/2023/11/29/henry-kissinger-death/> (Accessed: 2023-29-11).
Millwood, Pete (2022): No, Not Only Nixon Could Go to China. Wilson Center 02/21/2022. <https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/no-not-only-nixon-could-go-china> (Accessed: 2023-29-11).
Commager, (Henry Steele (1975): The Defeat of America: Presidential Power and the National Character, 83. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Walt, Stephen (2023): Solving the Mystery of Henry Kissinger’s Reputation. Foreign Policy 06/09/2023. <https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/09/henry-kissinger-birthday-reputation-foreign-policy/?tpcc=recirc_trending062921> (Accessed: 2023-29-11).