A master of Cold War realpolitik
Henry Kissinger’s death last week at 100 was a tragedy, said Ariel Dorfman in the Los Angeles Times, because now he will never “stand in a court of law and answer for his crimes.” As national security adviser and secretary of state for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger authorized some of the bloodiest atrocities in American history (see Obituaries, p.35). He approved the secret bombing of neutral Cambodia during the Vietnam War, a 1969–73 campaign that killed tens of thousands of civilians and fueled the rise of the Khmer Rouge, who killed 2 million more. In Vietnam, Kissinger prolonged—for three years—an unwinnable war to preserve American “credibility,” and he greenlit the 1971 massacre of perhaps 300,000 Bengalis by U.S. allied Pakistan. All this carnage, Kissinger insisted, was in defense of U.S. interests. But he showed his disdain for those most sacred interests—democracy and human rights—when he backed the 1973 overthrow of Chile’s rightfully elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, ushering in “the murderous regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.” As a young American soldier, Kissinger helped liberate the Nazi death camp where my grandfather was a prisoner, said Mark Joseph Stern in Slate. But he would later “unleash monstrosities himself,” all “in the name of American supremacy.”
That’s “cartoonishly simplistic,” said David Harsanyi in the New York Post. Far from being a bloodthirsty “supervillain,” Kissinger extricated the U.S. from Vietnam, and with rounds of “shuttle diplomacy” brokered a cease-fire between Israel and its Arab neighbors in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. And he did it while navigating the Cold War between nuclear-armed superpowers, said Joseph S. Nye Jr. in Foreign Affairs. Kissinger’s decision to pursue détente with Moscow while sending Nixon to China—thus stoking divisions between the two communist powers—“made the world safer.” Were there “hard trade-offs” along the way? Yes, but these were “amoral choices to prevent even greater catastrophes.” Human rights do not exist, he understood, among “those incinerated in a nuclear war.”
Kissinger excelled at “the international game of chess,” said George Packer in The Atlantic. But his “shocking indifference to human life,” and misunderstanding of human nature, often clouded his long-term vision. In his overtures to Beijing, Kissinger didn’t foresee that tying together the U.S. and China “could damage America’s manufacturing base and empower Chinese authoritarians.” The humiliating collapse of the Soviet Union, which he helped orchestrate as adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, created a “bitterly resentful” Russia that is “now once again threatening peace in Europe,” said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. At least Kissinger lived long enough to see his greatest “achievements” exposed as “fleeting mirages of détente.”
It’s easy to dismiss Kissinger as a cold-blooded exponent of realpolitik, said The Economist in an editorial. Yet his often cruel statecraft was “shot through with idealism.” His life’s work, Kissinger said, was devoted to preventing another world war. Such cataclysms can be avoided, he believed, if states “tolerate each other’s differences” and ignore “zealots and proselytizers who are quick to condemn and who demand change over a point of principle.” What Kissinger saw in the concentration camps helped him understand that the greatest threat to morality is “the anarchy and slaughter” of great-power conflict, said Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. It must remain our priority, as we enter the post-Kissingerian age, to protect “our increasingly fragile civilization from the ravages of war.”