2023-11-30 04:59:50
Among the practitioners of American foreign policy, Henry Kissinger was one of the most dominant figures. No other foreign minister in Washington was ever as deeply influenced by European history as the refugee from Middle Franconia, who has now died at the age of 100.
Henry Kissinger (1923-2023) in a recording from 2011.
Stephen Voss / Redux / Laif
“Not a genius, but a great talent” – the phrase in the title above comes from a characterization that Friedrich von Gentz wrote regarding his mentor and patron Klemens von Metternich, the architect of Europe’s political order following Napoleon. Henry Kissinger quotes the characterization in his dissertation, which he wrote as a Harvard student in the late 1950s and later entitled “The Balance of the Great Powers. Metternich, Castlereagh and the Reorganization of Europe 1812–1822” was published as a book. The idea of power-political balance is one of the basic elements of Kissinger’s concept of a stable peace order.
Unusual career
But as a skeptic and connoisseur of history, he also knew that no political work can last indefinitely and be immune to failure. “On their deathbed,” he wrote in his dissertation, “Metternich and Castlereagh (the English Foreign Secretary) had to realize that they had not achieved their goals.” Metternich, the foreign policy eminence of the Austrian monarchy, had failed to “preserve the principle of legitimacy” and Castlereagh had failed to make Great Britain a “permanent member of the concert of the powers of Europe”. Likewise, Kissinger’s “structure of peace,” which he often invoked as American Secretary of State, has become a nebulous concept that inspires little confidence in the decades since his retirement as an active statesman.
Nevertheless, despite all the controversy, Henry Kissinger will remain widely remembered as a fascinating personality. His name and work are associated with one of the most outstanding foreign policy careers in America’s history of the 20th century. Kissinger came to New York in 1938 as a fifteen-year-old (he was still called Heinz at the time) fleeing the Nazi regime with his Jewish parents and brother from Fürth, Bavaria. Six years later he returned to Germany as a soldier. He stayed in destroyed and defeated Germany for three years, where he was deployed for reconnaissance and training tasks and was also confronted with the reality of concentration camps, which he described as “hell on earth”.
Determined to get to the White House
After returning to the USA, Kissinger began studying history at Harvard. At the renowned university he came into contact with important figures in the East Coast intellectual establishment, including the historian Arthur Schlesinger. Even as a young Harvard professor, Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson entrusted him with occasional consulting assignments. His biographer Niall Ferguson reports that Kissinger displayed highly developed ambition in this role and was not afraid to scheme once morest academic competitors when he had the impression that his advice was not being sufficiently taken into account in Washington.
With President Nixon’s appointment as security advisor in the White House in 1968, Kissinger’s appearance on the big stage of world politics began. Nixon was elected not least because he promised an end to the disastrous war in Vietnam that was acceptable to the United States. This was not achieved without loss of face, but the Nixon-Kissinger duo achieved new scope for action in the Cold War with the superpower rival Soviet Union by spectacularly opening up previously blocked relations with China. A highlight of this power-political chess game was Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing in June 1971.
President Nixon’s trip to Beijing in 1972 was a highlight of Kissinger’s career. The picture shows the then national security adviser to the far left of Nixon, meeting with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai.
Rolls Press/ / Popperfoto / Getty
While Nixon sank deeper and deeper into the quagmire of the Watergate affair despite such foreign policy successes, Kissinger formally took over the helm of the Washington State Department in 1973. After Nixon’s resignation, he also headed this office under his successor Gerald Ford until 1977. No successor in office, perhaps none of his predecessors, has ever exerted such a dominant influence on American foreign policy as Henry Kissinger. As an elder statesman, author of important political books, speaker and well-paid advisor, he maintained contacts with leading politicians and business tycoons all over the world through his company Kissinger Associates.
There has never been a lack of criticism of Kissinger’s thinking and, above all, of individual decisions during his term in the State Department. The role that Washington played during Allende’s left-wing government and its overthrow in Chile, or the secret bombing of Cambodia at the time of the Vietnam War, were particularly heavily criticized.
Abused power?
Walter Isaacson reports in his biography that in 1988, at a meeting of Nobel Prize winners in Paris, Kissinger was sharply attacked by the Argentine human rights activist Adolfo Pérez Esquivel in a closed-door session. He accused him of a one-sided power-centered policy that led to “genocide” and “collective massacres”.
The attacker replied that as a refugee from Europe, in whose family more than a dozen members died in the Holocaust, he knew a lot regarding the nature of genocide. It is easy for “human rights crusaders” and peace activists to insist on a perfect world. But the politician who has to deal with reality learns to strive for the best possible rather than the best that can be imagined. Those who have real responsibility for peace cannot afford pure idealism – unlike those on the sidelines. You would have to have the courage to deal with ambiguity and concessions. Neither side has a monopoly on morality.
Niall Ferguson tells Kissinger’s radical critics that they should explain in more detail what the concrete consequences would have been if the United States had consistently pursued a noble policy of non-intervention in all areas of conflict in the context of the Cold War with the expansionist Soviet power. In fact, one of the most important prerequisites for a well-founded assessment of decisions in a past era is to “know how it came regarding, to understand the process” (Herbert Lüthy) that led to such decisions.
This by no means means that all objections to Kissinger’s decisions and influences can be refuted. Washington’s initial siding with repressive Pakistan in Bangladesh’s war of independence in the early 1970s was undoubtedly a major mistake. Even as an occasional adviser to President George W. Bush, Kissinger, like many other foreign policy luminaries inside and outside Washington, did not foresee the devastating long-term consequences of the invasion of Iraq. There has also been no clear word from him regarding distancing himself from the headless coughing-and-huffing policy under President Trump.
There is no doubt that Kissinger was driven by high ambition in all his activities and by a lively appetite for public recognition. In this respect he was perhaps closer to Bismarck – another great European statesman, regarding whom he wrote an extensive but never completed study – than to the equilibrium apologist Metternich. Patriotism, Bismarck once wrote to a friend, was probably only the decisive motivation for a few statesmen. Much more common is the “ambition, the desire to command, be admired and famous.”
Henry Kissinger was able to enjoy the media hype surrounding him, here during a visit to the Elysée Palace in 1973.
Keystone / Hulton Archive / Getty
“The Soul of a Refugee”
However, it would be all too cheap to diagnose Kissinger’s ambition as nothing more than a desire for power and a superficial desire for fame. His personal experiences as a refugee and the difficult path to integration into American society probably also contributed to this robust hunger for success. Harvard colleague Arthur Schlesinger once described him as having “the soul of a refugee,” which undoubtedly provides a deeper insight into the multi-layered complexity of Kissinger’s personality.
“Confused by the parties’ favor and hatred, his character image fluctuates throughout history,” says the prologue to Schiller’s “Wallenstein,” regarding the Bohemian general in the Thirty Years’ War. It is not so certain whether this judgment will continue to apply to Henry Kissinger following his death and with a greater gap in time. He will hardly be remembered as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 (along with his North Vietnamese negotiating partner Le Duc Tho) – this award seems all too questionable in view of the developments in Southeast Asia that immediately followed.
Successful book author
But there are reasons to believe that in the longer term the lighter tones in Kissinger’s picture will be more likely to shine. His achievements as the author of very readable books on diplomatic and historical topics as well as his government experiences will also contribute to this.
Along with George F. Kennan, the former ambassador to Moscow and an important expert on Russia, Kissinger was the most intellectual head and the spirit most strongly influenced by European traditions of thought among the practitioners of American foreign policy following the Second World War. He had a decades-long friendship with the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. At the memorial service for his companion, who died in 2015, he gave a moving speech in German.
Henry Kissinger was a true conservative in the Burkean sense and, perhaps influenced by his family background, he therefore had an instinctive aversion to revolutionary, uncontrollable upheavals. “The ghost of Spengler walked on his side,” writes his biographer Walter Isaacson.
But unlike Oswald Spengler, the herald of the “decline of the West,” Kissinger was not a fundamental cultural pessimist. He did not believe in a regular cycle of rise and fall of certain forms of society. He saw himself as a representative of the realistic historical school, which always considers different development scenarios to be possible in politics. He was therefore convinced that the future would be significantly influenced by social decisions and the persuasiveness of the responsible politicians.
Henry Kissinger will also be remembered by posterity for his phenomenal spiritual and physical presence well into the biblical age of life. In several interviews on his centenary, he cheerfully explained that he was working on a new book regarding the social impact of artificial intelligence.
Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at the age of 100.
Reinhard Meier is a former foreign correspondent and editor for the NZZ and lived in Washington from 1989 to 1995.
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