Henry Kissinger, the not-so-great figure of 20th century politics
- Historians will long debate whether the terrible things the US secretary of state did far outweighed the goods he delivered on the world stage
Historical great men were mostly uncomplicated creatures, obsessed with one big idea. Henry Kissinger, who has died aged 100, was far too complex to be one.
Depending on whether you are a European or African, an Arab or an Israeli Jew, a Sinhalese, an Indian or a Pakistani, whether you are from Chile, Argentina or Brazil, or if you are Vietnamese or Cambodian, Japanese or Korean, assessments of the man would range from being a diplomatic giant of Bismarckian proportions to a war criminal who belonged in The Hague.
The Chinese, of course, loved him, and visits to Beijing were always good for an ego boost. But you never saw him trotting to Taiwan, understandably. Long after he was out of office, whenever he travelled overseas, he needed to check if there was any outstanding arrest warrant for some alleged war crime or another.
It would be most unpleasant being detained like Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998, someone he helped install in power after the violent overthrow of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile.
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The late British journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote a whole book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, in the form of a prosecutorial document, “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offences against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture.” To be fair, Kissinger wouldn’t be the only top American official to whom those charges seem appropriate.
Winston Churchill once quipped that history would remember him kindly because he himself intended to write it.
Kissinger wrote plenty of it. The late Stanley Hoffmann, a former colleague at Harvard, once calculated that the lengths of his memoirs meant that the ratio of their pages to the total number of days he was in office was something like four pages for each day.
But history remembers independently. Almost as soon as he finished publishing his series of memoirs, Seymour Hersh wrote what has been dubbed the Kissinger anti-memoir, in which he tried to debunk his supposed diplomatic achievements and expose every iniquity and atrocity for which the secretary of state was responsible.
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But Hitchens, Hoffmann and Hersh were the exceptions. Mostly, academics were intimidated by Kissinger; public intellectuals and pundits were fascinated because they harboured an envious and not-so-hidden will to power; and journalists were easily flattered just by being offered occasional titbits as scoops. Kissinger was celebrated by a sycophantic intelligentsia to whom the crimes of America meant nothing.
Before he became the world’s most famous diplomat, he made his name as an academic with Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. It was considered dated after the Cold War, but thanks to Putin’s occasional nuclear threats and the China-US rivalry, both nuclear-armed, and to his death, it might attract new curious readers.
I much prefer his first book, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812 – 1822.
It was originally his PhD thesis. When he first submitted it to Harvard’s government (political science) department, a thesis examiner, while acknowledging its brilliance, asked whether it shouldn’t have been a history project instead.
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The book was a highly conceptualised history, which ought not to work, but it did. Throughout, he contrasted “legitimacy” and “revolution” as opposing concepts and argued how Metternich used legitimacy as the cornerstone of post-Napoleonic peace. Most historians would argue the Austrian foreign minister was just a dour arch-conservative, finally got rid of in 1848.
Raymond Aron, a sceptical older friend, wrote in the chapter titled “Kissinger and the end of American hegemony” in his memoirs, that Kissinger conceived of the Soviet Union as both “revolutionary”, which upset the applecart and needed to be contained, and a great power with “legitimate” interests that had to be acknowledged.
Ironically, detente may be where Washington is slowly and painfully moving towards, with China.
