7 min readDec 1, 2023 09:24 AM IST
First published on: Nov 30, 2023 at 03:55 PM IST
Henry Kissinger’s eventful 100-year life has become, to use W H Auden’s phrase about Freud, a “whole climate of opinion”. He shaped the post World War II world in unprecedented ways. He is the most written about, most discussed, and most gossiped about public figure in recent memory. The sparkle of his own prose, running to thousands of pages, is itself a contribution to myth making. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once called him the miracle man. This is the kind of hagiography Kissinger could inspire. But, in a riposte to Meir, Pakistani writer and activist Eqbal Ahmad argued, Kissinger was not a miracle man. He was a confidence man. This phrase comes as close to summing him up as any.
The confidence man is not ordinary. He is immeasurably talented and charming. He has the ability to size up a situation, is hard to resist, even if you have the nagging feeling that he has a hollow moral core. The confidence man makes himself appear utterly indispensable. Kissinger made himself utterly indispensable to the power structure of the world for a career spanning close to 80 years. His 100th birthday gala was a who’s who of the world’s elite; just before his death, he could command more of President Xi’s attention than a serving Secretary of State. This ability to successfully pull off the appearance of indispensability made him larger than life, and overshadowed any assessment of his actions.
Kissinger was a Jewish refugee from Germany and his upbringing was marked by what Jeremi Suri called “the mix of Jewish privilege and exclusion”. He had an early career as an academic at Harvard, controversially advocating a limited use of nuclear weapons as part of an arsenal of deterrence, a position he later abandoned. He was at the peak of his power during the Nixon administration. After retirement, he went into consulting for almost 50 years, again pulling off a confidence trick of presenting the selling of services as statesmanship in disguise.
Kissinger is too tempting a subject not to psychoanalyse. But the one sense that his writing routinely conveys is that the most humiliating position to be in is a position of powerlessness. The lesson he seems to have drawn from the horrors of the European experience is not sympathy for the powerless, or compassion for the subordinated. It was quite the opposite: The only way to survive in the world was to never put yourself in a position where you did not have power. This applied to nations as much as to individuals, and came to mark his style of diplomacy. This might be dubbed as realism, against the idealism or moralism that he spent his career decrying. But it was more than realism. As he put it in an assessment of Konrad Adenauer, “There are two kinds of realists: Those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.” The confidence trick that he pulled was to present a will to power as realism. Realism is not moralistic but has a moral objective; a will to power thinks of power as its own measure of success.
It is this ruthlessness about power that marks the arc of his career. The list of crimes he explicitly or tacitly condoned is long: He was instrumental in delaying the Peace Agreement in Vietnam to help the Nixon campaign and the brutal bombing of Cambodia that continued till 1973 and paved the way for genocide. Against the judgement of diplomats on the ground, he ignored the impending genocide in East Pakistan. He gave the go-ahead for the brutal invasion of East Timor, the horrific repression by the Argentine junta, and the overthrow of Salvador Allende. The list could go on. The historian Greg Grandin estimates roughly four million deaths to these decisions.
But these were not misjudgements, to be stacked alongside accomplishments, as if they balance out. They emanate from the same world view, that same unerring instinct for power, and the contempt for the powerless that facilitated his successes. In almost all of the instances above, it is hard not to see, as Garry Bass demonstrated in The Blood Telegram (2013), tinges of racism. But the utter sidelining of any shred of moral standing about the people on whom violence was unleashed stemmed from the fact that they did not have the power. But where there was an opposing power, the stakes suddenly became different.
The working of détente with the USSR, the monumental opening of Sino-US relations that has transformed the world, and laying the groundwork for a rapprochement between Egypt and Israel are all significant accomplishments. And credit must go to Kissinger for pulling them off, particularly for seeing the advantage in linking security and economic matters. But as significant as these achievements are, they are also of a pattern. The logic that drove them was the logic of power: Russia and China were too big and too armed, and therefore became the objects of accommodation or partnership. But in all of these cases as well, the interests of smaller powers could continue to be collateral damage. In the name of these objectives, repression everywhere could continue. Cambodia was a demonstration of “purposiveness” to the USSR, as he put it.
As the war rages in Gaza, it is hard not to foreground this paragraph by Eqbal Ahmad in the essay “A World Restored Revisited: American Diplomacy in the Middle East” in 1976. “Neutralise Cambodia, cut off North Vietnam and the NLF will go away. Disengage Egypt, tranquilise Syria, restore a bit of King Hussein on the West Bank and the Palestinians will go away. It is a typically Kissingerian construct, logical and wrong”. But notice the pattern: Kissengerian diplomacy works by ruthlessly sacrificing the most expendable.
His current cautionary advice to the US, not to polarise relations with China, may not be entirely unwise. But again you wonder, how much of it is mere deference to power, and what collateral damage was he willing to allow in the process.
Of course, Kissinger, true to his philosophy, was sustained in this long career by incredible personal qualities — energy, charm and erudition. His epigrams and one liners are legendary. His line about Anwar Sadat, “Sadat bore with fortitude the loneliness inseparable from moving the world from familiar categories toward where it has never been,” is the kind of pithy portrait that reminds you of Keynes’ brilliant penmanship at Versailles. It has to be said that Kissinger did not move the world from familiar categories toward where it has never been. Despite his emphasis on creation, he was a prisoner of power. It is no accident that the powerful will mourn him, and victims will wonder how service to power becomes the ultimate confidence trick.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
Henry Kissinger was a Jewish refugee from Germany and his upbringing was marked by what Jeremi Suri called “the mix of Jewish privilege and exclusion”. (AP)
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