Kissinger
Henry A. Kissinger, the architect of U.S. foreign policy at the apex of the Cold War and a towering intellectual force in world affairs for more than half a century, has died at his Connecticut home.
Kissinger died Wednesday, according to his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates. He was 100.
As national security advisor and secretary of State in the administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, Kissinger dominated international relations from 1969 to 1977 with charisma, intellect and a wry cynicism.
Although his tenure in the Nixon and Ford administrations marked his only senior government position, he had an impact on policy both before and after his years in office. From 1956, when he was study director of an influential panel on nuclear policy, until well into the 21st century, Kissinger advised presidents of both parties.
“Any student of American foreign policy will need to be familiar with his philosophy of realism,” said Peter Rodman, the late Pentagon official and scholar who served as an aide to Kissinger. “He suggests there is a diplomatic approach to everything.”
In November 1968, when Nixon surprisingly picked Kissinger to be his national security advisor, the two men hardly knew each other — and what they knew, they did not much like. Nixon loathed the Eastern Establishment typified by Harvard men and protégés of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger’s first patron. The president-elect also exhibited a recurrent antisemitism, sometimes in Kissinger’s presence. And before taking the job, Kissinger made no secret of his suspicions of Nixon’s intellect.
But in their enigmatic relationship, Kissinger and Nixon shared an overarching objective to concentrate the government’s foreign policy power in the White House to an extent not seen before. Toward that end, they emasculated the authority of Secretary of State William P. Rogers and imposed an unusually heavy-handed supervision on the Pentagon, CIA and other foreign policy centers.
In 1973, Kissinger replaced Rogers as secretary of State and became the only person to hold the posts of national security advisor and head of the State Department simultaneously. Kissinger established the standard by which all subsequent foreign policy advisors have been judged. Ford, Nixon’s successor, eventually stripped Kissinger of the NSA role saying, years later, that it was a conflict of interest for him to hold both positions.
As the architect of U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger had a crowded agenda, much of it consumed by the Vietnam War.
He and North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for hammering out a plan intended to end the war, but the agreement, announced in January 1973, failed to stop the fighting and the war dragged on for more than two more years until Saigon finally fell. Kissinger accepted the honor, although he did not attend the ceremony, blaming the pressure of official duties. Tho refused the prize, explaining that he considered the negotiations to have been a failure.
In addition to Vietnam, Kissinger played a key role in reopening U.S. relations with China after more than 20 years of isolation. He was the author of a policy of détente toward the Soviet Union that eased Cold War tensions and opened the way for historic nuclear arms control agreements. And he generated a new approach to the Middle East that cast the United States as a broker between Arabs and Israelis, a role that subsequent administrations continued to play, while expanding Washington’s military assistance to Israel.
Kissinger established a delicate triangular diplomacy among the world’s three most dangerous nuclear forces: the United States, the Soviet Union and China. For Washington, it was a balancing act with the Communist powers, in which, as Kissinger said later, “We attempted to be closer to each of them than they were to each other.”
To some, the three-way relationship was a bargain with the devil, in fact, two devils. At the time, China and the Soviet Union had appalling human rights records and neither had much in common with the United States.
“Human rights issues in China and the Soviet Union were not ignored, but they were shoved aside because of the strategic imperatives,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a top aide to Kissinger at the State Department and National Security Council and, like Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.
Kissinger once told an interviewer that the debate over the morality of U.S. foreign policy — secret bombings, wiretaps, covert intelligence operations and the like — had paralyzed the nation and kept it from pursuing the “most moral” goal of all: the pursuit of stability and peace.
His working philosophy was built around three points: realism, linkage and shuttle diplomacy.
Realism was a 20th century refinement of 19th century balance-of-power politics in which nations pursue specific national interests, regardless of abstract philosophical concerns, peacefully if possible or by the use of force if necessary. Linkage was his way of joining seemingly unrelated issues such as making economic relations with Moscow contingent on the Soviet Union using its influence on North Vietnam for policy concessions in the Vietnam War. And shuttle diplomacy was Kissinger’s signature technique of simulating negotiations between parties that refused to talk to each other, typically Israel and its neighboring Arab states, by meeting separately with each party and conveying the positions of one to the other after adding his own spin.
Realism and linkage had historical roots that far predated Kissinger. But shuttle diplomacy seemed to be his innovation, starting in early 1974 when he flew back and forth between Israel and Egypt to mediate a settlement of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
Perhaps because his realism seemed to operate beyond the bounds of conventional morality and cut across philosophical distinctions, Kissinger was always a controversial figure, praised for towering pragmatic accomplishments but condemned by ideologues on both the right and the left. His most outspoken critics saw Kissinger as ruthless and accused him of “war crimes,” primarily for the expansion of the Vietnam conflict into Cambodia and the support Washington gave to brutal right-wing dictatorships in Chile and Argentina.
Kissinger’s first diplomatic coup was to end the frosty isolation between the United States and China. In July 1971, he eluded reporters and flew secretly to Beijing, where he quickly established a rapport with Premier Zhou Enlai. There, Kissinger and Zhou plotted Nixon’s ground-breaking trip to China, which took place in February 1972, a visit that Nixon called “a week that changed the world.”
At the time, China was still in the throes of the violent “cultural revolution,” cut off from the United States and with strained relations with most of the world. Its economy was isolated from international markets, consisting of little more than agriculture and handicrafts. Its weapons sector was generations behind the West and the Soviet Union. After Nixon’s trip and Kissinger’s follow-up diplomacy, China’s isolation gradually receded, ultimately allowing the country to evolve into a significant world economic and political power.
