Born in Germany in 1923, Heinz Kissinger moved with his family to the US in 1938 just in time to avoid Kristallnacht, the infamous pogrom against German Jews carried out as a prelude to the full horrors of the Holocaust. He would later become a US citizen, restyled as “Henry”, and in doing so become a convert to the American cause, displaying all the characteristics of the immigrant zealot determined to make his mark.
Arguably, the émigré with the Bavarian accent that marked him out all his life did more than anyone else in the late 20th century to project US power. He became the world’s most famous diplomat, but his speciality was not peace, as one might expect of a diplomat; it was the flexing of US muscle within the broader goal of promoting “freedom”, which he regarded as being at risk from the threat of communism.
Perhaps as important to him as his world-shaping activities was his seemingly limitless ability to promote himself, a passion he embraced with all the ardour of the immigrant hoping to make a name for himself in his adopted country.He called Richard Nixon, the US president sunk by the Watergate scandal, “the most dangerous of all the candidates”, but didn’t hesitate to accept Nixon’s offer to become his national security adviser and, later, secretary of state.
From such a lofty pedestal, Kissinger went on to give tangible form to what became known as the “American century”. This involved the projection of US power around the world and the adoption of a style of politics and diplomacy that promoted a version of peace on US terms alone.
He and Nixon were complicit in the illegal bombing of Kampuchea (then Cambodia), killing about 50,000 people in a neutral country, the flattening of which was somehow deemed essential to the goal of limiting communist influence in Asia. So fixated was he on becoming a master statesman that Kissinger is thought to have leaked details of a potential Vietnam peace deal which might have saved many lives. The leak sabotaged the agreement, robbing the Democrats of a potential war-ending landmark that quite possibly could have kept Nixon out of the White House.
In Chile in 1973, Kissinger is credited with toppling the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and ushering in the rule of the murderous military dictator Augusto Pinochet. He played a similar role in Pakistan
In Chile in 1973, Kissinger is credited with toppling the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and ushering in the rule of the murderous military dictator Augusto Pinochet. He played a similar role in Pakistan.
On a personal-political level, Kissinger shrugged off the views of those contemporaries in the academic world who were aghast at his joining Nixon. And he made certain he was a fixture on the Washington cocktail circuit, becoming a diminutive sex symbol whose exotic accent and cuddly demeanour helped win over a generation of socialites.
Abandoning his professional scepticism in favour of self-promotion, Kissinger agreed to an interview with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, in which he declared in answer to a question about his popularity: “The main point arises from the fact that I’ve always acted alone. Americans like that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else.”
Nixon, himself an exceedingly vain and paranoid man, was incensed by his secretary of state’s quixotic and self-glorifying depiction of himself, his grab at glory and his annoying habit of distancing himself emotionally and politically from the relatively uncouth and unsophisticated Americans he found himself working alongside.
As the world looks back on the life and times of Kissinger, who died this week aged 100, there will be many who criticise him. Much of the opprobrium will no doubt be warranted, yet much of the criticism arises from using today’s standards to measure the actions of those who lived in a past we no longer fully comprehend, or care to.
It was Kissinger who persuaded the US establishment that détente, rather than conflict with Russia, was key to cooling the soaring political temperatures that were a feature of the Cold War. He opened the diplomatic door to Moscow, engineered arms-limitations treaties and made the strange, the foreign and threatening seem like just another diplomatic nut to be cracked.
Arguably, his world view and its whiff of appeasement went out of fashion in the 1980s. Instead of the guttural tones of Kissinger urging co-operation and acceptance of one’s enemies’ point of view, the world witnessed instead the straight-talking bellicosity of Ronald Reagan, who famously challenged the Soviets: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
The idea of the US as a global policeman, a missionary force spreading democracy around the world, had taken hold, reaching its awful conclusion with George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which exposed Washington’s foreign policy and the extent to which it promoted US interests over the broken bodies of the people whose countries were targeted for “improvement”.
Despite the criticism Kissinger has faced, one remarkable feature of the world as we know it today has been the growing influence of his idea that nations promote their own interests and that it is impossible for outsiders to pass judgment on historical outcomes of which they were not a part.
A case in point is China, which has Kissinger to thank for bringing it into the global mainstream with his ice-breaking diplomacy in the 1970s and the meeting between Mao Zedong and Nixon. A power up until his final days, Kissinger was only recently received by Chinese President Xi Jinping, who lavished praise on him, much to the chagrin of the White House for whom a meeting between President Joe Biden and Xi remained just a dream until last month.
A big-picture thinker and schemer, Kissinger understood the role Soviet Russia played in the broader European story — and that the West was making a mistake by isolating Russia under the pretext of punishing it for its invasion of Ukraine. His ability to engineer a global balance of power that kept a lid on the Cold War is reflected in his statement, “Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities. Demonisation is not a policy, it is an alibi for the absence of one.”
Whereas he might have thought that bringing the Soviet Union in from the cold would lead to freedom and democracy in that country, quite the opposite has happened. In China, the same. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who praised him as a “wise and far-sighted statesman”, has become the latter-day embodiment of Joseph Stalin, while Xi after a period in which it was believed China would naturally transform into a democratic country has reversed, ideologically speaking. Xi has become the new Mao. He warned: “What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system.”He foresaw a world in which the US alone would not call all the shots, predicting the rise of China and the difficulties faced in finding a balance of power in Europe.Reactions to his death in the US have been mixed, which is hardly surprising in that he openly predicted a world that the US would not continue to monopolise.Blind to the sufferings of the little man, he was a product of the turbulent 20th century who correctly analysed the prospect of an even more dangerous 21st century.
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