In his commencement address to the 2014 graduating class of the U.S. Military Academy, President Obama said the United States remained the “indispensable nation.” In 1998, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright defended forceful diplomacy in Iraq by asserting that America was the one “indispensable nation” able to thwart Saddam Hussein’s weapons development program. But 40 years before that West Point speech, and 24 years before Albright's pronouncement, Time magazine labeled Henry Kissinger the “world’s indispensable man.”
Judging by the volume of books and commentary, condemnations and expressions of admiration in the past couple of years, Kissinger may indeed have a claim to the title of “most indispensable among all indispensables.” In a 2014 review of his book, "World Order," Hillary Clinton suggested that his analysis of security threats across the Middle East and Asia mirrored the Obama administration’s foreign policy priorities. Clinton also noted their shared belief in the “indispensability” of American leadership abroad.
In contrast to official biographer Niall Ferguson’s admiring treatment of the world’s most indispensable man with “Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist,” historian and author Greg Grandin takes a more probing, investigative approach in “Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman.” Important questions are raised about the origins of Kissinger’s alleged idealism, the extent of his political influence and why it’s important to finally "move beyond Kissinger." Below is an edited transcript of RealClearBooks’ recent conversation with Greg Grandin.
Q: Why write about Henry Kissinger?
Henry Kissinger’s time in the White House corresponded to perhaps the most consequential period in American history. He became Nixon’s National Security Adviser in 1969 just as the old Cold War national security state (based on elite planning, bi-partisanship, and public support) was coming undone. Kissinger wasn’t the cause of its coming undone. But he and Nixon put into place policies -- in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and, of course, at home, with the events surrounding Daniel Ellsberg and Watergate -- that hastened the crack-up. Yet even as the long post-WWII consensus when it came to foreign policy was unraveling, Kissinger was helping with its reconstruction in a new form, a restored imperial presidency capable of moving forward into a post-Vietnam world. This new, or restored, national security state was based on ever more intense secrecy, ever more spectacular displays of violence, and an increasing use of war and militarism to leverage domestic dissent and polarization for political advantage.
Let me say that I don’t think that Kissinger is uniquely responsible for the mess the U.S. finds itself in today, either abroad or at home. My argument is that his long career -- first as an influential hawkish defense intellectual in the 1950s and early 1960s, as a policy maker, and then returning to his role as an influential opinion maker -- illuminates the larger context and longer history of that mess. That said, there is something unique about Kissinger: All other prominent post-war policies makers, be they conservative or liberal -- such as George Kennan and Arthur Schlesinger -- at some point became critical, some extremely so, of American militarism. By 1957, Kennan was arguing for “disengagement” from the Cold War and by 1982 he was describing the Reagan administration as “ignorant.” Not Kissinger. At every single one of America’s post-war, right-wing turning points, Kissinger turned with it. He made his peace with Nixon, whom he first thought was unhinged; then with Ronald Reagan; and then with George W. Bush’s neocons (despite the fact that they all rose to power attacking Kissinger), being, after 9/11, a very early proponent of attacking not just Iraq but Yemen, Somalia, and beyond.
Q: How do you define political realism as it applies to foreign policy, and did Henry Kissinger’s belief system conform to this definition?
Kissinger is inevitably called a “realist,” which is true if realism is defined as holding a pessimistic view of human nature and a belief that power is needed to impose order on anarchic social relations. But if realism is taken as a view of the world that holds that reality is transparent, that the “truth” of facts can be arrived at from simply observing those facts, then Kissinger was decidedly not a realist. Rather, Kissinger, as a young scholar, declared himself in favor of what today the Right denounces as radical relativism: There is no such thing as absolute truth, he argued, no truth at all other than what could be deduced from one’s own solitary perspective. “Meaning represents the emanation of a metaphysical context,” he wrote; “every man in a certain sense creates his picture of the world.”
By the way, I think his authorized biographer, Niall Ferguson, is correct to identify Kissinger as influenced by the idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant. But he misses how Kissinger revised Kant to embrace a relative, rather than an absolute, morality. The point is made in a story from Kissinger’s graduate schools days at Harvard that didn’t make it into Ferguson’s lengthy book. Kissinger’s adviser, William Elliott, often urged his protégé to live his life by Kant’s famous ethical imperative: “treat every human being, including yourself, as an end and never a means.” During one seminar in 1953, Elliott pushed Kissinger to acknowledge that “reality,” and hence ethics, must exist. “Well, now wait a minute, Henry,” Elliott said, in reaction to Kissinger’s argument that there was no such thing as truth; “There must be a metaphysical structure of reality which is the true structure.” Kissinger’s responded by quoting Kant’s moral imperative back to Elliott, with an addendum: “what one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one’s system, and on the concept one has of one’s self and one’s relationship to the universe.” This is a complete perversion of Kant, a standing of Kant on his head!
The larger point is that Kissinger, as a subjectivist, believed there was no inherent “truth” in history. Humans create their truth, they come to understand their “purpose” (a very Kissingerian concept) though action. “Kissinger’s Shadow” shows how this played out in policy terms: For instance, Kissinger’s five-year, illegal bombing of Cambodia (which, by credible estimates, killed 100,000 civilians), along with his “savage” (his word) bombing of North Vietnam, was motivated by the opposite of realism: to try to bring about a world Kissinger believed he ought to live in -- one in which he could, by the force of military power, bend peasant-poor countries like Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam to their will -- rather than reflect the real world they did live in: one in which, try as he might, he was unable to terrorize weaker nations into submission. “I refused to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point,” Kissinger once complained.
For a brief moment, after the first Gulf War, it seemed as if Kissinger’s ideal world had come into being, with Iraq easily driven out of Kuwait. “I think it’s gone well,” Kissinger said to Dan Rather on the first night of the bombing. But then, of course, reality has reasserted itself, as evidenced by today’s cascading disasters.
Q: Henry Kissinger advocated for an aggressive American grand strategy that touched such disparate countries as Chile, Cambodia and Angola, among many others. Has there been another secretary of state or senior policy adviser to have such a sweeping effect on America’s grand strategy?
No. As discussed above, Kissinger’s influence has to do with his tenure in office straddling two distinct periods: the crack-up of the postwar consensus and its post-Vietnam reconstruction. That reconstruction had many different dimensions, but a key part of it was not just détente with Moscow but a new regional strategy, in Latin America, Asia, and, importantly, in the Middle East.
Q: You remark that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 presented President George W. Bush’s administration with a timely opportunity to “marry strategy and sentiment” in a second Gulf War, which was in some way a continuation of Kissinger’s vision for the region. Might this be an over-simplification of events and, certainly, too strong a casting of Kissinger’s “shadow” over contemporary American foreign policy?
Well, I do think that Kissinger’s consistency in pushing for the militarization of the Gulf -- from the first Gulf War through Clinton’s bombing of Iraq and then after 9/11 to today -- has been consequential. And I do think that, when he was in office, his policy toward the Middle East -- massive arms sales to Iran (before the Revolution), tying Washington to Saudi Arabia, and support for Pakistan and its ISI as it moved into Afghanistan -- was, as the veteran diplomat George Ball once put it (speaking specifically of Kissinger’s Iran policy) an “act of folly.”
That said, the point of my book is to use Kissinger to move beyond Kissinger. That is, to move beyond thinking about the current catastrophe as the result of any one misguided man, be it Kissinger or his neoconservative adepts, such as Dick Cheney. A reviewer in the New York Times called “Kissinger’s Shadow” an “innovative attack” on Kissinger. But it’s not an attack. It’s an attempt to understand, to use Kissinger to open to the bigger picture.
I’ll confess that I wrote this book almost as a reaction to perhaps the most well known Kissinger polemic, Christopher Hitchens’ “The Trial of Henry Kissinger.” That book is what the great historian Charles Beard, in 1936, dismissed as a “devil theory of war,” which blames militarism on a single, isolatable cause: a “wicked man.” To really understand the sources of conflict, Beard said, you had to look at the big picture, to consider the way “war is our own work,” emerging out of “the total military and economic situation.” In making the case that Kissinger should be tried – and convicted – for war crimes, Hitchens didn’t look at the big picture. Instead he focused obsessively on the morality of one man, his devil: Henry Kissinger. It must have been a fun book to write, giving the author the satisfaction of playing the people’s prosecutor. Yet aside from assembling the docket and gathering the accused’s wrongdoing in one place, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” is not very useful and is actually counterproductive. Righteous indignation doesn’t provide much room for thinking. Hitchens’ book provides no insights into the “total situation” in which Kissinger operated, makes no effort to explain the power of his ideas, or how those ideas tapped into deeper intellectual currents within American history. That book dumbs down critical thought.
Q: How do you think future generations of American should remember Henry Kissinger?
As a quintessential American.
