Death of a realist

They say the good die young. Certainly, many of the others have been granted incredibly long lives.

Roy Medvedev, on Vyacheslav Molotov, who lived to 96.

Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, Nobel laureate and probably the most famous villain of American foreign policy in the last century, died yesterday at home and at liberty, at the age of 100.

It would be an understatement to say that Kissinger was a polarising figure. His critics were vociferous and numerous; they are well represented in this morning’s media. But the respect and even affection that he continued to inspire among the American political class and others overseas (including many ostensibly on the left) was, for someone with his record, truly remarkable.

In some ways Kissinger was an incongruous hate figure for the left. He was not, in the ordinary sense, an anti-communist; the internal workings of other countries were of no interest to him. He was happy with dictators of all stripes as long as they pursued policies friendly to the United States (or to whatever other client Kissinger happened to be working for). Conversely, if some geopolitical enemy overthrew its tyrant and became a liberal democracy, it did not, from his point of view, cease to be an enemy.

In other words, he was a “realist”; a believer in power, not ideology. That made for an odd relationship with Richard Nixon, whose anti-communism was more ideological in inspiration. For Nixon, Kissinger represented everything that was wrong with the American establishment: intellectual, foreign-born, Jewish, committed to diplomacy rather than confrontation.

Yet they worked together well. They had a common bond in their dishonesty and lack of principle; Kissinger broke the law to help Nixon win the 1968 election by sabotaging Vietnam peace negotiations (although the notion that the war otherwise would have ended then is somewhat fanciful), and once in office they both committed numerous crimes against domestic and international law.

As a believer in the supreme importance of power, it’s no surprise that Kissinger found he loved it when given the opportunity to exercise it personally. In return he happily threw overboard whatever other principles he might have been thought to possess. But Nixon showed himself to be the better diplomat: his ideological underpinnings allowed him to be flexible in practice, and it was he who drove the American rapprochement with Mao Zedong’s China, with Kissinger trailing along behind.

Kissinger, though, was the one who survived the disaster of Watergate, continuing as secretary of state under the hapless Gerald Ford and going on to further crimes, including greenlighting the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. He never held public office again after Ford’s defeat in 1976 – Ronald Reagan in 1980 considered but ultimately refused giving Ford a prominent role for fear it would mean the return of Kissinger – but he was regularly consulted by a succession of presidents as well as foreign governments and other private clients.

His reputation should never have survived the revolutions of 1989, when the people of eastern Europe, whose existence Kissinger had ignored, took a hand in their own destiny, and the Soviet empire, which he had assured everyone was a permanent feature of the landscape, crumbled almost overnight. But Kissinger’s enemies on the left were disinclined to highlight that criticism, and in any case their attacks were so relentless (such as Christopher Hitchens’s 2001 The Trial of Henry Kissinger) that they sometimes prompted sympathy for their target.

So Kissinger prospered, feted with honors at home and abroad, although there were countries that he avoided travel to for fear of zealous war crimes prosecutors. Sheer longevity helped; witnesses who could contradict his versions of events gradually died off and trails of evidence grew cold. But there was also something about his insouciance that disarmed critics – it was hard to argue with someone who was so embedded in the institutions of the liberal world order while being so openly hostile to its basic assumptions.

Now, finally, he has passed on, and we are left with his legacy. The world we live in is in part his creation: Vladimir Putin (one of his many confidants) is his spiritual heir. We have seen where the blind worship of power and the demonisation of democracy and human rights lead to. It is our choice whether that is where we want to go.

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PS: I’ve now read Ben Rhodes’s obituary for Kissinger in the New York Times; it’s excellent (thanks to Sol Salbe for drawing it to my attention). He reaches much the same conclusion as I had: “Now history has come full circle. Around the world, we see a resurgence of autocracy and ethnonationalism, most acutely in Russia’s war against Ukraine. … This is where cynicism can lead. Because when there is no higher aspiration, no story to give meaning to our actions, politics and geopolitics become merely a zero-sum game. In that kind of world, might makes right.”