Kissinger managed, but did not win, the Cold War
The roster of this nation’s secretaries of state includes many giants of public attainment — Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, James Madison, George Shultz and James Baker. No one, however, wielded the office with more brio and flair than the first immigrant to occupy it.
Although Henry Kissinger ranks, with John Quincy Adams, John Hay and Dean Acheson, among America’s most intellectually sophisticated and culturally cosmopolitan secretaries of state, even in his 10th decade his love of this country had an almost childlike purity. This was fitting for one who had seen Hitler’s Germany through a child’s eyes.
Kissinger, who died on Wednesday at 100, made it his vocation to make America less American by inoculating it with a European sense of life’s irremediable tragic dimension. Nevertheless, he was, as immigrants often are, a romantic about the nation that took him in and allowed him to flourish. Kissinger leavened his romanticism with cynicism as he tutored this nation in realism. What critics called his elegant immorality, he considered the granite foundation of true morality — the facing of facts that are disagreeable and intractable. One such is the permanence of impermanence in the international system.
A corollary of this maxim is the inescapable imperative of a balance of power. Hence Kissinger’s greatest achievement, helping, as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, to bring China into the game of nations. Kissinger admired the Chinese as “scientists of equilibrium, artists of relativity.” He also admired Charles de Gaulle, “the son of a continent covered with ruins,” who understood that finality is a chimera: “History knows no resting places and no plateaus” because “the management of a balance of power is a permanent undertaking, not an exertion that has a foreseeable end.”
Kissinger became secretary in the most eventful year of the post-World War II era, which punctuated like a cymbal-crash the creative quarter-century of U.S. diplomacy that began with the 1948 Marshall Plan. In 1973, as the president’s authority evaporated and an ephemeral Vietnam “peace” was concluded, a revolution in energy prices was precipitated by the Yom Kippur War, second only to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis as the Cold War’s most dangerous moment.
Politics has its own physics, and Kissinger’s acquisitiveness regarding power, his sharp elbows as a bureaucratic infighter and his intermittent inability to suffer fools gladly all earned him enemies in Washington, which admires few for very long. But although he came from academia to be one planet orbiting the sun of presidential power, he stayed to become a sun. When Nixon, who launched Kissinger on a trajectory to glory, resigned, one of the first decisions by Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, was to reassure an anxious world that Kissinger’s hand would remain on the foreign policy tiller. By the time Kissinger left office, he ranked with George Marshall among America’s most history-making public officials who never served in elective or judicial office.
Kissinger coupled his strategic pessimism with tactical optimism. He thought he could, like a Confederate cavalry officer, make daring and nimbleness buy time for the West. The Soviet Union could, like Gulliver, be restrained by numerous tiny cords of political, arms-control and economic agreements. Kissinger’s pessimism about the West’s weariness arose from two miscalculations. He underestimated the staying power of the bourgeois societies of the West. One reason he was mistaken about these societies having the stamina to stay the Cold War’s course was that he overestimated the economic sinews of the Soviet system.
A decade after Kissinger left the State Department, communism, whose confidence flowed from Marxism’s economic determinism, absorbed a brutal, indeed fatal, lesson in the importance of economic factors. In 1976, Ronald Reagan challenged Ford for the Republican nomination by running against Kissingerism. And at the 1986 summit in Iceland, Reagan icily told Mikhail Gorbachev that if there were to be an intensified arms race, he, Reagan, could guarantee that America would win it. The statesman’s task, Kissinger believed, is “to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.” He helped manage the Cold War until the nation chose a president determined not to manage it but to win it.
What Andre Malraux said of de Gaulle can be said of Kissinger: Steeped in history, he was “a man of the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow.”