Most teenage boys decorate their bedrooms with posters of favourite footballers or pin-ups of celebrity crushes. I had a picture of Henry Kissinger. I was seventeen, and fascinated by international relations. Idolising a man vilified as a criminal by the Left seemed like the closest a Tory Boy could get to parading in a Che Guevara t-shirt. Naturally, it came straight down as soon as a girlfriend complained that kissing by Kissinger was something of a passion killer.
Six years on, and my ardour for the arch-diplomat has cooled. But I did feel a profound sense of loss on hearing of his death yesterday. Whichever your side in the Kissinger wars, the West has lost one its most knowledgeable and consequential statesmen at a moment of profound geopolitical anxiety. For a hagiography, turn to Niall Ferguson, his immensely talented biographer. But if you want a condemnation, that Christopher Hitchens hatchet-job can still be found on AbeBooks.
Where to start with Kissinger? When once asked to identify his greatest success and failure, he replied: “I don’t quite understand your second point.” To former are obvious to fans of his realpolitik. Détente, the opening with China, swerving nuclear escalation during the Yom Kippur War. But to his detractors, his “crimes” are equally glaring. South Vietnam’s collapse after America’s long and bloody withdrawal. The bombing of Cambodia. East Timor, Chile, Bangladesh.
For me, the most obvious place to begin is Germany – the country of his birth, the origin of his inimitable accent, and home of his beloved SpVgg Greuther Fürth. He long wanted to write a book about Bismarck. A World Restored, his first, followed Metternich and Castlereagh reconstructing Europe after Napoleon. It was intended as the “beginning of a long series…on the construction and disintegration of the international order” of the 19th century, ending with the First World War.
As Angus Reilly has highlighted, Kissinger’s interest in Bismarck is understudied. The work he had completed on it before he fully entered politics ended only at the Crimean War, over a decade before Germany’s unification. Historians are divided as to whether he was a Bismarck fan or critic. Either way, Kissinger viewed the Prussian’s ignominious exit from office as a moment of unbalancing, a step towards Europe’s dissolution into a second Thirty-Years War.
It was a war of which Kissinger had personal experience. He was born in Bavaria in 1923, amidst Weimer Germany’s hyper-inflation crisis, and six months before Hitler’s attempted Beer Hall Putsch. As a teenager, he experienced the horrors of Nazi antisemitism firsthand through violence and exclusion. After his father lost his teaching job, his family fled as refugees to New York. Over a dozen close relatives of his would later die in the gas chambers or concentration camps.
Yet within a few years, Kissinger would return to Germany as an invader and occupier. Drafted into the US army, he was employed first as translator and driver after failing to become a doctor. A year younger than my age now, he found himself tracking down Nazis in counterintelligence, and then adminstrating over 20 towns. Bismarck, Nazism, and the reconstruction of order: in these, we see the origin of Kissinger’s realism.
Having seen the worst of humanity, Kissinger not only became pessimistic, but gained a profound appreciation for order. The moral compromises required in maintaining a balance of power are preferable to the anarchy unleashed by attempts to overturn it. The moralist’s self-righteousness can be as damaging as the zealot’s revolutionary fervour. Both court disaster in trying to reshape the world rather than handling it as it is. History cannot end. Statesmen can only try to manage it.
Returning to America, he pursued an academic career. His Harvard thesis – on the small topic of “The Meaning of History” – ran to an unprecedented 383 pages. He soon attracted widespread attention from Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which examined the feasibility of limited nuclear war. Courted by both Democrats and Republicans confused by the Cold War, he advised Nelson Rockefeller, before being unexpectedly appointed as Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor.
Tricky Dicky and Kissinger were an odd pairing: a moody, awkward Quaker and a refugee academic with a penchant for Hollywood starlets. Yet both were committed to restoring the global credibility of an America battered by the Vietnam quagmire and Soviet revanchism. As the President later sank into the Watergate morass, Kissinger gained an unprecedented freedom in foreign affairs. He became Secretary of State in 1973 and remained so under Gerald Ford.
Kissinger’s efforts in eight years as the diplomatic chief of the greatest imperial power the world had ever would both see him voted the most respected man of America and provide the charge sheet of his later infamy. Kissinger may have learnt his statecraft from Metternich, Castlereagh, and Bismarck. But he understood that foreign policy – and especially hard-headed realpolitik – could not be practiced in a democracy without courting controversy. Vilification was the price to pay for pursuing peace.
Kissinger would win the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a cease-fire in Vietnam, but later offered to return it after Saigon’s fall. His critics allege he perpetuated the conflict long after it became obvious that it was unwinnable, at the cost of thousands of Vietnamese and American lives. Yet he was conscious that there was no easy American withdrawal without losing face. Trapped between the Left’s doves and the Right’s hawks, he saw that both an immediate exit and a total victory were impossibilities.
Kissinger’s unwillingness to join his armchair critics in embracing the comfort of moral idealism meant he found himself unreasonably blamed for every crisis, coup, or civil war on his watch. His emphasis on ‘linkage’ meant he saw all global events through the ultimate need to prevent nuclear escalation between America and the Soviet Union. Morally dubious interventions in the developing world were justified to boost America’s standing, resist Communism, and preserve peace.
The alliance with Taiwan was of less importance than exploiting the Sino-Soviet split; détente with Moscow with infinitely preferable to courting nuclear war. Power may have been the greatest aphrodisiac, but it was to be exercised responsibly. Yet these compromises with reality would render Kissinger a hate figure for Manicheans of both Left and Right. America’s job was to stand up for its values. Détente was appeasement, supporting dictators abhorrent, Kissinger a criminal.
Such a worldview became popular in the post-Cold War world. The Soviet collapse and American unipolarity seemed to herald liberalism’s triumph and history end. Such a worldview now seems laughably naive. Moralists like Hitchens lost all credibility when their militancy dragged them into supporting the excesses of the War on Terror. Kissinger backed the Iraq war but pointed out the need for more troops and an exit strategy. If America will be an empire, it should do it properly.
A similar weltschmerz is currently being experienced over Russia and China by the Right’s remaining Cold Warriors. The West finds itself over-committed to both a proxy war in Ukraine that cannot be won on the battlefield and is courting a war with China over Taiwan that can only end in global catastrophe. Kissinger long warned of the perils of NATO expansion, the need to manage China’s emergence onto the world stage, and the paucity of Western strategy. Tragically, he has been vindicated.
Future historians will pick over Kissinger’s career with as much attention as he paid to those of Metternich, Castlereagh, and Bismarck. They will be right to do so. In his recent book on leadership, Kissinger lamented the declining quality of Western statesmanship amidst decaying deep literacy and crumbling civic values. One cannot help but feel he has left the West at just the point at which we need his wisdom most. Saint or sinner, genius or criminal: the world is a worse place without Henry Kissinger.