"War Criminal" and Role Model

Progressives have more in common with Henry Kissinger than they’d care to admit

Henry A. Kissinger, May 27, 1923-November 29, 2023

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The death of Henry Kissinger on November 29 of this year was made the excuse for a characteristically unseemly display by American progressives. They marked the occasion by dancing on his grave while chanting “war criminal” & etc.—a rite that’s become boringly familiar on the left side of the political spectrum. Everybody of whom progressivism disapproves is, it seems, a war criminal, a climate criminal, a White supremacist, a fascist, a misogynist, a transphobe, a settler-colonialist, and so on and so forth, in various combinations. But perhaps we’ve reached a point at which such righteous thundering has lost its mojo. From time to time, I find myself reviled along those lines; let’s just say that I lose no sleep over it.

The assault on Kissinger is, however, worthy of note, for it was rich in irony. According to the Rolling Stone article linked to above, it rests mainly on the catastrophe that engulfed Cambodia in the latter stages of the Second Indochina War, and secondarily on the US-encouraged coup that overthrew the leftist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in 1973. Thrown in for good measure are charges that Kissinger “greenlighted” both Indonesia’s bloody takeover of East Timor and Pakistan’s heavy-handed attempt to suppress unrest in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, “and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.”

There are quite a few Afghans who’d raise an eyebrow at that last charge.

One need not be a Kissinger fan to dismiss all this as claptrap, based on the notion that he was some kind of Svengali with magical powers over other people’s minds. The truth, as usual, is more complicated. The sequence of events that led to the Cambodian genocide began, not with the much-denounced American secret bombing campaign, but with North Vietnam’s blatant and continuing violation of Cambodian neutrality. As for the Chilean coup, the charge against Kissinger skips past a couple of inconvenient facts: (1) that Allende was not a democratically elected leader but a bad actor who was plotting to undermine the country’s existing political order and transform Chile into a Marxist-Leninist people’s republic; (2) that there was near unanimity in the Nixon Administration as to the necessity of getting rid of him.

Regarding Bangladesh and East Timor, it may well be asked: What did Bill Clinton ever do about the Rwandan genocide, and what did Barack Obama ever do about mass murder in Syria? As far as I recall, not much—if anything. But nobody’s calling them war criminals.

The Left’s umbrella charge—that Kissinger was a stone-hearted practitioner of Realpolitik who had no time for moral arguments regarding foreign policy—does of course contain a nugget of truth. And this charge has been levelled against him by the Right as well as the Left. The policy of détente was anathema to the neoconservatives of the Reagan era, who believed that the Cold War was there to be won. Kissinger demurred. In his view the bipolar world, dominated by two superpowers, lived in the shadow of an existential threat: thermonuclear war. The competition between the superpowers must therefore be managed; a balance must be preserved.

There are two aspects of Henry Kissinger’s career that illuminate his thinking. The first is his 1954 Ph.D. dissertation, later published as A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812–1822 (1957). The second is the fact that he entered government as President Nixon’s national security advisor at a time of crisis. The war in Vietnam had shattered America’s postwar foreign policy consensus and, as it seemed, threatened to undermine the bipolar status quo.

All that Kissinger did—the pursuit of détente with the USSR, the opening to China, the peace talks leading to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords on Vietnam—was designed to restore a measure of stability to an international order that seemed headed for collapse. In Kissinger’s view, America circa 1970 was in relative decline. He saw that the Vietnam War had undermined the country’s self-confidence and willingness to play a leading role on the world stage. He perceived that Europe’s emergence from its postwar travails introduced a new factor, that decolonization in Asia and Africa was potentially destabilizing, that the USSR had achieved strategic military parity with the United States—but that the breakdown in relations between the USSR and China presented America with an opportunity to “triangulate.” If, for example, the Soviets proved unhelpful on Vietnam, or European issues, the US might tilt toward China.

One’s overall impression of Kissinger at that period of his life is of a man holding a weak hand, playing it with panache.

In all this there was little room for considerations of morality, or so it seemed. Like Bismarck, who fretted that the ambitions of German imperialists might bring Germany into conflict with Britain over colonial issues, Kissinger preferred to overlook the plight of the USSR’s Eastern European satellites and its internal dissidents. Notoriously, when serving as Secretary State in 1975 he persuaded President Gerald Ford to forego a meeting with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn after that great Russian writer was expelled from the USSR following the publication in the West of his magus opus, The Gulag Archipelago. To Kissinger, it seemed pointless, perhaps even frivolous, to annoy the Kremlin by inviting Solzhenitsyn to the White House.

But with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Kissinger was wrong and his neoconservative critics were right. He viewed the USSR as an immutable fact of life, failing to foresee that its days were numbered. Like Metternich, he played a part in the temporary stabilization of an international order whose time was passing. Kissinger must have winced when Ronald Reagan described the USSR as an evil empire that was destined to fall. But the president saw farther and more clearly than the former secretary of state, for all the latter’s brilliance.

Still, it may be that as a man of his time, Kissinger did the best that could be done with the situation before him during his eight years of public service. It was, after all, a time of troubles in which things could easily have gone from bad to worse.

What passes today for foreign policy analysis in progressive circles purports to be a repudiation of all that Henry Kissinger, that Machiavellian practitioner of Realpolitik, stood for. But disregard their moral posturing and you’ll find that today’s progressives champion an approach to the world that’s much more cynical and much less supple than Kissinger’s ever was.

Take, for example, Joe Biden’s Afghanistan skedaddle. Surely Rolling Stone would agree that it was well within that “American tradition of using and then abandoning” foreign allies. Or perhaps not. Among the comrades there are not lacking apologists for Biden’s despicable behavior, but few indeed have been heard to protest against his consignment of former allies to the tender mercies of the Taliban. Afghanistan—the whole country—has been memory holed. Similarly, Barack Obama’s abandonment of Iraq has been allowed to fade from the collective memory of progressives. ISIS? That’s so fifteen minutes ago!  

And how about détente? As Kissinger sought to forge agreements with the USSR on matters of mutual concern, so the Obama and Biden administrations have tried, and tried, and tried to placate and appease the Islamic Republic of Iran. Kissinger’s policy is certainly open to criticism, but at least it was free of the contemptible belly crawling that first Obama and now Biden have exhibited. And it’s much the same with Israel. Kissinger, though himself a Jew and a refugee who came to America from Nazi Germany, was cool toward Israel, seeing relations with that country in terms of American interests as he understood them. Indeed, his attitude was not so different from that of Barack Obama—minus the latter’s petty personal animus.

Then there’s the Russo-Ukrainian War. To summarize Kissinger’s view at the time of his death, he believed (1) that Ukraine should be admitted to NATO and (2) that there should be a negotiated settlement, possibly leaving Crimea and some parts of eastern Ukraine in Russian hands. There can be no doubt that many people in Biden’s administration would second that policy or something like it.

Kissinger had scant opportunity before his death to comment on the current Mideast crisis, though he did say in an interview that “Of course, the first instinct is to bring back peace but you can't make concessions to people [Hamas] who have declared and demonstrated by their actions that they cannot make peace.” He also expressed concern that Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza might evolve into a larger conflict.

I come not to praise Henry Kissinger, but to bury him with such honor as I believe he merits: a fair measure. As for his epitaph, let it be noted that the people who revile him most have more in common with him than they’d care to admit. There is this difference, however: The late statesman possessed a sense of responsibility, informed by an historical sensibility, sharpened by a brilliant intellect. His progressive critics, on the other hand, exhibit nothing but willful ignorance and shallow sentimentalism, leavened by hypocrisy and founded on nihilistic relativism: Realpolitik in postmodern livery. The upsurge of crude and violent antisemitism on the Left, clad as it is in the most repulsive sanctimony, is proof enough of that.