The death of Dr Henry Kissinger at 100 marks the passing of a global era in general and an American one in particular. For the world, he personified the existential division of the earth into the realms of war and peace by the Cold War. For America, he was an icon at a difficult time when the challenge from the Soviet Union threatened the economic and political values that the US stood for. His controversial place in world history is rooted in American times.
What were those times? Kissinger served as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor in the administrations of President Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford between 1969 and 1977. Throughout the 1960s and well into the 1970s, the US was wracked by what was essentially a civil war. This was not just the internal war produced by the Civil Rights Movement that had begun in the late 1940s and had ended in the late 1960s, but also the anti-Vietnam War Movement of 1964 to 1973.
The hippie movement, an assertive youth subculture, turned the 1960s into an age of counter-culture defined by the quest for harmony with nature, communal living, artistic experimentation not least in music, sexual experimentation, and the widespread use of recreational drugs. While these ideas were ideologically disparate, they were given a degree of political credibility and respectability by their association with the peace movement.
Each of these movements possessed elements of legitimacy but, taken together, they constituted an internal revolt against the structures of governance and power in America. If America’s domestic authority were to be dissipated by a million mutinies within, its global agency would suffer. The Soviet Union would gain and, with it, authoritarianism would stand a realistic chance of being the world’s hegemonic system.
Of course America’s global power, too, sought to be hegemonic, but American capacity and will for global leadership were rooted in a political system at home that ensured that no president could take the people’s will hostage. The White House and Capitol Hill existed at the pleasure of the American people.
By contrast, the Soviet Union existed at the pleasure of the Kremlin. That was the difference between the two contending systems — a difference that Kissinger, a young emigre from the genocidal totalitarianism of Nazi Germany who went on to a distinguished academic career at Harvard, did not need to be taught.
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For all its faults, the US was an open society with enemies on both the Stalinist Left and the Hitlerian Right. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, the Soviet menace loomed large in Kissinger’s mind as he contemplated America’s place in the world and the world’s place in America.
A fractious democracy such as America could not be held together if the post-War international order that it had created (initially along with the Soviet Union) were to be subverted by communist expansionism. To secure America within, it had to be secured without.
Therein lay the nationalism of the realpolitik that Kissinger is associated with. He was an American patriot first and last. To him, what mattered was America’s integrity and coherence as a nation that could combine order within and power without. Take America away from the equation, and the will of one person, one party and one system would strangle and stifle the life of all nations and their peoples. Kissinger’s deep American nationalism predicated his acerbic realist internationalism.
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What else could or should he have done? I say this in the light of the tasteless criticism that has descended on the footsteps of his departed soul. The comfortably left-liberal Rolling Stone magazine bid him adieu in an article headlined: “Good Riddance: Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies.” I hope that it is not impertinent to wonder where Rolling Stone would have gathered ideological moss today had the Soviet Union destroyed the US.
This leads to the question of Kissinger’s interventions in an imperfect world, one which even Rolling Stone would acknowledge existed in the heyday of Kissinger’s ascendancy and continues to survive today. The imperfections of the world then were captured by the moral emergency of the Cold War. Like any other war, the Cold War produced Manichean choices, the fundamental choice lying between the US with all its public shortcomings and the Soviet Union with all its hidden lies.
The West had to prevail. The stakes had been described by the great American diplomat George Kennan in his famous telegram of 1946, which would lay the foundations of the United States’ containment policy of the Soviet Union. Kennan had written: “At (the) bottom of (the) Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is (the) traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was (the) insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on (a) vast exposed plain in (a) neighbourhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with (the) economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organised societies in that area.
“But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than (the) Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form (,) fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with (the) political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between (the) Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned (the) truth about (the) world without or if foreigners learned (the) truth about (the) world within. And they have learned to seek security only in (a) patient but deadly struggle for (the) total destruction of (the) rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it... Gauged against (the) Western World as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker force. Thus, their success will really depend on (the) degree of cohesion, firmness and vigour which (the) Western World can muster. And this is (a) factor which it is within our power to influence.”
Kennan’s keen reading of the psychological geography of the Soviet Union provided a basis for Kissinger’s countervailing Cold War morality. Yes, that morality could be brutal as well. Responsibility for the carpet bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and America’s support for murderous anti-communist military regimes in Latin America has to be laid at Kissinger’s door, as well as responsibility for the 1973 coup in Chile that replaced Salvador Allende with a dictator. Yet, it was the same Kissinger who won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for having ended American involvement in the Vietnam War.
China
Kissinger’s greatest triumph lay in negotiating the Sino-American rapprochement of the 1970s. It is not that he was in love with communist China’s political system, which was as abhorrent as that of the Soviet Union. If the gulag camps that incarcerated dissidents defined the “civilisation” of the Soviet Union, communist China was not far behind with its Great Leap Forward and its Cultural Revolution, which killed or destroyed the lives of millions.
However, Kissinger’s realpolitik genius lay in seizing that great moment of historical opportunity for world peace represented by the Sino-Soviet break of the 1960s in order to draw even communist China into peaceful coexistence with the US and the rest of the West, to the great disadvantage of the Soviet Union, which was pushed into the strategic defensive. That phase of the Soviet Union’s history ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the implosion of the Soviet state itself in 1991, to the great relief of nations believing in the freedom of their peoples through prosperity.
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The entry of China to the international system as a legitimate power in the 1970s strengthened both the country and the system immeasurably. Imagine the opposite: a Sino-Soviet rapprochement that would have put international communism on the offensive, subverted the global bases of American/Western power, and opened the doors perhaps to a World War III whose destructive nuclear gambit would have reduced human history to radioactive rubble.
True, China’s rise today as a rival of the US is also cause for concern, as is the unpredictability of American politics that can give the very presidency to a democratic dictator such as Donald Trump, but the world would have been far worse off had the Cold War ended with triumph for the Soviet Union.
We forget these truths at our peril. We denigrate Kissinger at our peril.
The writer is the founder and CEO of Pereira International, a Singapore-based political and strategic advisory consulting firm. He is also a Board of International Councillors member at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. The Board was chaired by Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary Of State and a Nobel Peace Prize Winner. The opinions expressed in this article reflect the writer’s personal views
