The Complex Legacy of Henry Kissinger - Dr. Mackubin Owens

The Complex Legacy of Henry Kissinger - Dr. Mackubin Owens

The legacy of Henry Kissinger, who died at the age of 100 this past week, will be debated for a very long time. But there is no question that his contributions to US foreign policy, both as a practitioner and scholar, were outsized. He was a practitioner of realpolitik, the approach to international affairs that focuses on relative power rather than ideology. He was also a scholar of diplomacy and foreign affairs. In the classes I taught on US foreign policy, I always assigned his magisterial Diplomacy (1994), one of the many books he authored.

His dissertation at Harvard was on Klemens von Metternich, Austria’s foreign minister and chancellor as well as the architect of what has come to be known as the Concert of Europe, a system created after the defeat of Napoleon intended to maintain a balance of power among the five great powers of Europe—Prussia, Austria, Russia, France, and Great Britain—by resolving potential disputes and preventing or localizing conflicts.  The system was generally successful: a continent that had been riven by war for decades, most recently the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, entered into a 100 year period of relative peace that ended with the Great War.

The apex of Kissinger’s diplomatic career was achieved during the Nixon administration, during which time he served as national security advisor, and secretary of State. Although Nixon was intelligent and experienced, Kissinger played a major role in shaping and implementing the administration’s foreign policy.  He played a pivotal role in opening relations with China, paving the way for President Nixon’s famous visit in 1972 and achieving breakthrough arms-control talks with the Soviet Union, culminating in the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT1) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The following year, Kissinger engaged in “shuttle diplomacy,” traveling rapidly between Middle Eastern capitals after Egypt and Syria’s surprise invasion of Israel on Yom Kippur and eventually brokering a cease-fire.

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Kissinger was reviled by the left in this country as a war criminal, especially for his alleged role in the secret bombing of Cambodia as the United States worked to extricate itself from the Vietnam War. According to his critics, this bombing campaign, intended to neutralize North Vietnam’s use of Cambodia to launch attacks into South Vietnam and against U.S. forces with impunity, somehow destabilized Cambodia and radicalized the Khmer Rouge, leading them to commit genocide.

But the Khmer Rouge were already implementing their genocidal vision long before the bombing. Implementing a radical communist vision drawn from Mao and especially the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot and his comrades killed roughly a quarter of the country’s population through execution and starvation resulting from forced collectivization and population transfers.

But Kissinger was also vilified by the right. For example, my late friend and colleague, Angelo Codevilla, accused Kissinger of cowardice, treachery, and corrosive cynicism because of his support for arms control and detente with the Soviet Union and Nixon’s “opening to China.”  But Kissinger believed that, at the time, the United States, having lost its global dominance, was making the best deal that it could. Kissinger’s contribution to US security during those years was to buy time for the country to reestablish its global position, which it did under Reagan. In keeping with his preference for realpolitik, Kissinger’s reading of the Cold War’s power balance and of America’s capabilities was meliorist. Kissinger believed that he was doing the best in a bad world. This struck many conservatives as defeatist.

Nixon’s opening to China’s remains the centerpiece of Kissinger’s diplomatic legacy…and the most complicated. While it contributed to restoring American advantage in the Cold War, it was, like our alliance with Stalin in World War II, a move that generated long-term costs by creating a warped co-dependence on Beijing, from which Kissinger personally profited. He became a leading consultant for the Chinese Communist Party in the post–Cold War era. As such, he was a poster boy for the belief on the part of our elites that there is nothing wrong with doing well for themselves while advancing globalist goals that undermine American security.

As Barry Gewen writes in his excellent intellectual biography of Kissinger, “The Inevitability of Tragedy,” turmoil was Kissinger’s, and his generation’s, birthright. Studying it, managing it, trying to tamp it down, became his life’s work. Avoiding it he knew was an impossibility. In keeping with Otto von Bismarck’s observation that unda fert nec regiture — “One cannot make a wave, only ride it” —Kissinger can be said to have skillfully navigated a turbulent sea of events.