9 thoughts on Henry Kissinger
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The main genre of commentary on Henry Kissinger’s death consists of truly enormous obituaries - my phone tells me that the one in The New York Times is a 38 minute read! David Sanger is a great writer but if you don’t have 38 minutes to spare, here are some bite-sized thoughts:
I never entirely understood the place that Kissinger came to occupy in American popular culture over the last 20 years or so. I’m not sure he’s clearly in a different moral universe to many other prominent American policymakers of the past century, but he has a grip over the popular imagination that isn’t matched by say Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld. This is even true for young people who lived through - are still living through - the consequences of the decisions taken by these more recent figures.
I think one explanation for it is that Rumsfeld and Cheney were pretty universally reviled by the end of their tenure, but Kissinger has always had a cottage industry of supporters who fete him as a once-in-a-century genius. He has bedazzled writers and academics, even ones who are very critical of him, because he himself was a talented writer. He offered justifications and explanations for the things he did with a rhetorical skill and level of intellectual complexity that has never really been matched by any other similar American figure. That didn’t make him right. But it made him someone that other intellectuals loved to hate.
I’ve read hundreds of non-fiction books about Kissinger or in which Kissinger is one of the main protagonists. I also wrote one. But the one I would recommend reading the most is Henry Kissinger and the American Century by Jeremi Suri. You can’t understand Kissinger without understanding the world that made him who he was, the brutal chaos of life as a Jew in the Germany of the 1930s, and the way that he dedicated his life to trying to never feel that way again.
But Kissinger’s own peculiar way of trying to find safety by seeking personal and political stability and proximity to power reminds me of an admonition by one of his contemporaries, Ralph Ellison: “The mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived.” More on that later.
The idea that Kissinger is most remembered for is triangular diplomacy. The basic insight he and Richard Nixon had was that rather than treating world Communism as a monolithic bloc, it was more accurate and useful to see it as consisting of two major power centers, the Soviet Union and Communist China, which had competing interests. Once America realized this, they argued, it could play them off against the other - as well as encouraging them to squander their energies fighting one another. So America improved relations with the Soviet Union (a process known as detente) and Nixon famously went to China.
This basic insight was, in the context of its day, incredibly creative. It’s not like Kissinger and Nixon picked this idea up out of the zeitgeist. It spectacularly outflanked the Democratic Party, which had just spent close to a decade getting America bogged down in an unwinnable war in Vietnam, and it made the rest of the foreign policy discourse of the Republican Party look like child’s play. Only Nixon - who Kissinger initially dismissed as a knuckle-dragging McCarthyite, as indeed he had once been - could have pulled it off, because it was very hard to accuse Richard Nixon of being soft on communism. Some people tried, arguing that Kissinger and Nixon had forgotten the moral stakes of the Cold War. These people and their intellectual children became the neoconservatives.
Original as it was, insights like this only get you so far. Every geopolitical structure eventually becomes outdated and crumbles. His insights, although often framed as grand narratives about human nature and the sorrowful nature of international politics, were actually profoundly time-bound. There’s hardly anything that one can point to in American foreign policy today that is “Kissingerian”.
In recent years, Kissinger was best known as one of the foremost Western advocates of maintaining good relations with China. He was still playing the same tune weeks before he died, when he was feted in Beijing as the visionary genius who came from a better time. But that time was long ago, and there’s no going back to it. And Kissinger never understood economics very well; he even admitted it. This weakness may also have affected his views on China. He thought its economic miracle was destined to continue for ever. Instead, it already seems to be over.
Kissinger’s vision also profoundly limited him. He had a plan for living, but he had lost all conception of the chaos against which it was conceived. The victims in Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh and many other places were just that to him - elements of the background chaos, waste material sloughed away from his grand design. He had been the same thing once, in somebody else’s grand design, in the Bavaria of the 1930s. But that was long ago, and he seemed to have forgotten.