Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Kissinger Dead at 100
Few diplomats have the kind of impact on their world that Henry Kissinger, who passed away yesteday at the age of 100, had in the last several decades. Metternich and Talleyrand spring to mind, perhaps Molotov is in that group. Dr. Kissinger was plucked from the relative obscurity of Harvard when Richard Nixon chose him as National Security Advisor. He muscled William Rogers out of the Secretary of State job early in the Nixon administration, and he remained a key actor in US foreign policy. Many thought he was brilliant, and about as many thought he was a war criminal. The truth is that he was a practitioner of the art of diplomacy at its highest level, and his life demonstrates just how little morality has to do with the anarchic society of global relations.
Stability lay at the foundation of his view of interrnational affairs. Stability was a goal in itself. For a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, he believed instability causes all human misery. That is an old idea going back before Plato, but it is valid to a degree. In practice, however, he was more than happy to engage is destabilization of some parts of the world if it served the perceived interests of the US.
The perfect example of this was the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile. General Pinochet got Dr. Kissinger\'s support early on, and the dirty war against the left that followed was, to Dr. K, just an inconvenience. Overthrowing a government is inherently destabilizing, but in this instance, the adminstration believed instability would help.
The operning to China, detente with the USSR and shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East were all major changes from the 1950s and 1960s. They were moves that served American interests at the time, but their long-term results have yet to be determined.
His role in extending the Vietnam War to help the re-election of Richard Nixon was demonstrably horrible. Extending the war into Cambodia and Laos. The Washington Post noted this morning:
From 1969 to 1973, as national security adviser and secretary of state under President Richard M. Nixon, Kissinger directed the carpet bombing of large swaths of Cambodia that U.S. officials at the time claimed were sanctuaries for communist insurgents from South Vietnam as well as North Vietnamese soldiers. Ben Kiernan, a historian at Yale University and a leading scholar of the U.S. legacy in Cambodia, has estimated that around 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs were dropped on Cambodia during this period and killed as many as 150,000 civilians.
He and Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the Paris Peace Treaty of 1973. Dr. Kissinger wasted a year and a half negotiating over the size and shape of the negotiating table. It was part of the plan to lengthen the war until the 1972 election, and then, he announced “peace is at hand.” Mr. Nixon won in a landslide.Upon hearing of the prize going to Kissinger, the comedian Tom Lehrer said “political satire is obsolete.”
The great failing of his outlook on stability was a failure to appreciate that stability comes in two flavors: rigid and flexible. Rigid stability looks powerful and orderly. When conditions change as they always do in global affairs, that rigidity prevents the necessary adaptations, and things fall apart. Flexible stability looks more chaotic, less stable, but it is a vastly more adaptable condition. This difference explains why the flexible US survived the Cold War and the rigid USSR did not.
In addition, he failed to stick to his own love of stability on occasion. He backed the war in Iraq under President Bush the Lesser, a massively destabilizing event that was based on lies.
When all is said and done, he had a massive impact on global affairs. It would almost certainly have been for the best had he remained at Harvard.
© Copyright 2023 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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