The death this week of Henry Kissinger represents the demise of a genuinely significant figure in 20th-century geopolitics. Much as Kissinger promoted his own myth, through blockbuster memoirs, articles, lectures and memorable aphorisms, he was simply reinforcing an existing reality. In mid-20th-century diplomacy, particularly around the 1970s, if Kissinger was not in the room, it signalled that nothing of importance was being discussed.
Kissinger’s tortuous relationship with Richard Nixon was uncannily similar to that of Talleyrand with Napoleon. The suspicion, jealousy, ineffectual attempts to limit the power of a subordinate, only thereby to discover his indispensability, amounted to a re-run of the tumultuous relationship in the upper echelons of the French Empire in the first decade of the 19th century. In both cases, the apparently dysfunctional collaboration, though not invariably fruitful, worked to a surprising degree.
The Kissinger doctrine can be boiled down to one core principle, antedating Kissinger by centuries: Realpolitik. Kissinger did not do crusades, or ethical foreign policy, he judged things by one simple criterion: how is Uncle Sam going to come out on top? Or if, as was frequently the case (cf. Vietnam), other people had already created a situation in which damage limitation was the sole remaining recourse, how could he manufacture a scenario in which a defeated America looked less humiliated?
As the panicky departure of the last helicopter from the roof of the Saigon embassy illustrated, some humiliations were beyond the capacity of even the most skilful diplomatist to disguise. But Kissinger was resolved to take a hard-nosed approach to America’s enemies in Latin America, a determination dating from the Monroe Doctrine, challenged by the advance of Marxism in that region.
His obituaries in leftist publications are loaded with reproaches against his successful containment of Marxism in that region, notably by supporting Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile against Salvador Allende, who never had a majority in congress, ruled by presidential decree and whose secret police, or “Personal Groups of Friends”, were controlled by Cuban intelligence. Pinochet restored the Chilean economy to prosperity and his power was legitimised in 1980 by a referendum in which more than two-thirds of voters approved the new constitution. He similarly relinquished power voluntarily on losing a subsequent referendum.
Kissinger’s instinct that Cuba was a sufficient intrusion of Communism on America’s doorstep to tolerate and that no further advance should be permitted was right. But the disastrous “ethical” regime of Jimmy Carter, notably in undermining the Shah of Iran, created fresh challenges for US foreign policy that are still with us today.
Kissinger remained a player even at the age of 100: last July he went to Beijing at the invitation of Xi Jinping. Although he was only in office, as Security Advisor and Secretary of State, for eight years, half a century after demitting office he was still looked to for advice by world leaders. A serious critic will analyse the nature of that advice without reference to morality – something about which Kissinger was notably cavalier – and, by discarding the ethical blinkers that confine modish, politically correct assessments, come to a more accurate appreciation of Kissinger’s legacy.
It is no coincidence that, during the academic phase of his life, Henry Kissinger’s chief study was of Castlereagh and the Congress of Vienna. In an ideal Kissinger world, the Congress of Vienna would never have adjourned. He believed in an unashamedly elitist style of diplomacy, unfashionably deploring transparency since he believed that only in secrecy could effective accommodations be made. But there was one central weakness in Kissinger’s modus vivendi which ensured that, for all the weighty tomes of memoirs and geopolitical analysis, it cannot be adopted as a systematic model to be followed.
The problem is that Kissinger’s system, being undiluted Realpolitik, was frozen in one particular moment, when a planetary-style alignment in foreign affairs offered a window of opportunity, to be seized upon instantly and converted into diplomatic advantage. No identical configuration of events, personalities and economic or military circumstances would ever occur again, so the potential for using Kissinger’s essentially opportunist approach as a paradigm is extremely limited. He has often been compared to Metternich or Talleyrand, but au fond he was a Bismarck.
The apparent brilliance of Kissinger’s diplomacy has partly obscured the fact that already, when he was in his pomp, America was relatively speaking a declining power. Arguably, America has never recovered from Vietnam. It broke the spell of perceived US omnipotence. Militarily, even today, America has the most powerful weaponry in the world. Its nuclear arsenal is smaller than Russia’s, but the reality is that, after the first few putative exchanges of ICBMs, any further destruction becomes academic.
America is also the global leader in technology and wealth creation. Everything that the contemporary world defers to as symptomatic of power belongs to America. So, why is it that America now commands less respect or consideration in world affairs than it once did? The answer clearly is that it is domestically split into two nations, it has lost faith in its founding principles and even its foreign policy – now drifting and incoherent to the point of incomprehensibility – is being warped by militant domestic lobbyists representative only of micro-minorities.
Henry Kissinger lived to see that decline; but for him it must have seemed not a new development, but simply an aggravation of a situation that was already a factor during his years in office. The anti-Vietnam War movement in America, like les événements in France in 1968, provoked a disruption of national consensus that persists today. A nation so badly divided as America in 2023 lacks the moral cohesion to present a coherent foreign policy to the world and the political will to enforce it.
By a malign dispensation of history, this coincides with an opposing transformation whereby many populations that were once supine subjects of colonialism have become radicalised in movements such as Hamas, ISIS and the Taliban, giving them a focused and deadly purpose that contrasts with America and the West, indulging in bouts of masochism over imagined post-colonial “guilt” to a degree that vitiates their actual material superiority.
Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State (the contrast with Kissinger is itself a metric of decline), travelled to African countries and threatened to withhold US aid unless they accepted Western liberal preoccupations. She was given short shrift and it may easily be supposed that Russian and Chinese emissaries were very soon courting those same African governments, with no cultural conditions attached, undermining American influence in Africa. Kissinger would have thought such blatant neo-colonialism insane.
Kissinger was totally inconsistent too, but there was method in his unpredictability. He maintained that Ukraine should be guided to the negotiating table and compelled to make some territorial concessions to Russia. Thereafter, he favoured Ukraine’s immediate admission to NATO, slamming the door on further Russian encroachment. Given the stalemate, that may end up being the solution.
There are other areas where America could adopt such pragmatism. Some analysts recently have been pointing out that power should be balanced by reassurance and that this particularly applies to China.
If American hawks were to prevail, recognise Taiwan as a sovereign state and exchange ambassadors, such a provocation would remove the last hesitations in Beijing and lead to invasion of the island and war. America, while maintaining “constructive ambiguity” on its response to an attack, needs also to reassure Xi that it has no intention of seeking escalation.
A thoughtful piece in the Telegraph https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/30/china-pakistan-afghanistan-belt-road-initiative/ recently pointed out that China is already falling into the mistakes of past empires on the Pakistan border, where it has entered the Great Game with no more likelihood of emerging triumphant than its failed predecessors Britain, Russia and America. Meanwhile, the question of how to reach a pragmatic accommodation with China appears to baffle America.
A nation that is falling apart internally has no hope of constructing a successful foreign policy. America urgently needs to repair its national identity, since the evident decline in Western security is attributable to the distractions and delusions afflicting what is still the world’s sole – in material terms – superpower. A touch of Kissinger-style Realpolitik and intelligence would not go amiss.
