The running joke about Henry Kissinger was not simply that so many better people died before him, but that he continued to be fêted by the political establishment despite his judgement having been proved repeatedly wrong by history. Détente is a dead letter, not only with regard to post-Soviet Russia but to China as well, where America's "pivot to the Pacific" is a strategy geared to raising rather easing tensions. The military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina are long gone and whilst the later Latin American "pink tide" was hamstrung by neoliberalism, South America is clearly not the wholly compliant partner that Kissinger envisaged in the hemisphere. His advocacy of tactical nuclear weapons has, thankfully, never been adopted by any power. The final irony is that he died at a time when the limits of the "shuttle diplomacy" that he pioneered in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War have been all too visible in the Middle East where the Biden administration has refused to restrain Israel and very publicly disavowed its role as an honest broker.
Kissinger's role as a diplomatic "superstar" was one of the odder cultural developments of the early-1970s. It owed a lot to his presentation as a cosmopolitan intellectual: his heavy German accent being a performative melding of Old World expertise in the service of the dynamism of the New World. In fact, he had lived in the US since he was 15 (his family fled Germany in 1938) but carefully cultivated his outsider status while being the consummate insider. Kissinger owed his advancement to the utility of his theorising about the balance of power, in particular his idea that it could be personalised (he was a fan of both Metternich and Bismarck), the most famous example of this in action being "Nixon to China". Thus foreign policy was bent by ego and domestic ambition. But for all the focus on "legitimacy" and "order" in international affairs, Kissinger's theorising was ultimately just a smokescreen for the right of the US to act as the global policeman and to exercise its power without restraint: might is right. As Thomas Meaney noted in the New Yorker, "If Kissinger was a realist, it was in this sense—of making the image-management aspect of foreign policy a priority".
Today, under Biden as much as under Trump, the US doesn't really care about image-management, at least beyond its own borders. And that bipartisan contempt for the wider world reflects the realities of American power, not the personal preferences of individual politicians, let alone State Department employees. Kissinger's elevation to international celebrity owed everything to the watershed marked by the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, when President Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold. This promised a future of greater geopolitical instability, one that appeared promptly in the form of the 1973 oil crisis, and thus stimulated a public desire for the better management of the emerging world system (what would, in time, become the Washington Consensus). Amidst the war crimes in Cambodia and Bangladesh, it's easy to forget, as Joann Wypijewski noted in the NLR Sidecar blog, that "Kissinger was a symbol, a servant, a latter-day ‘racketeer for capitalism’, in the words of Marine general Smedley Butler. He was also a failure. The objective of his foreign policy approach, he boasted, was order not justice. The world he’s credited with shaping has neither."
Meaney picked up the thread in a more forthright article, also for the NLR Sidecar blog, where he emphasised that the acts attributed to Kissinger were a continuation of American foreign policy rather than a divergence. "Was it so unexpected that the country that had fire-bombed Japanese civilians to get Tokyo to the table also fire-bombed Cambodians in an attempt to get Hanoi to one as well? Was backing the massacre of Timorese an unusual follow-up to backing the mass-killing of Indonesian ‘communists’? Was it so shocking that the political class that had installed the Shah would also ease the way for Pinochet? Was Dr. Kissinger’s record in the Middle East really worse than that of his old nemesis Dr. Brzezinski? For what set the man apart, one may have to look elsewhere." And that elsewhere was image-management, which centred on a personally frutiful contrast of European cynicism and American naivety: "The presiding conceit of Kissinger’s career was that he was bringing geopolitical necessities (he never really warmed to the term ‘realism’) to the attention of a country enamoured with its own innocence, and hampered by its own idealism."
As Meaney concluded, "His trademark method was to find ulterior reasons for what the state was doing already." Again, it's worth contrasting this with the present moment where the US has made little attempt to rationalise, let alone justify, its indulgence of Israel. Beyond the usual obeisance towards a two-state solution and mild censure of settler attacks in the West Bank, the Biden administration has offered no substantive criticism of Israel's behaviour, leading to the conclusion that it will be perfectly happy if the Palestinians are wiped off the map once and for all. Its regional goals are clearly Israeli-Arab normalisation and the restraint of Iran, goals that Biden has pursued just as reliably as Trump did, and the underlying purpose of that is to ensure that the US retains a stranglehold on Middle Eastern oil supplies, which has been the guiding principle of its policy in the region since the Second World War. But why the lack of pretence now? The reason is simple: while the bipolar Cold War required a war of position, the era since 1989 has required merely a war of manoeuvre, evident in the spread of NATO to Russia's borders and the dependence of China on US Treasuries.
In a timely coincidence, the Guardian published a long read by Tom Stevenson on American empire the day after Kissinger's death. This was a salutary reminder that for all the talk of American decline, or the end of the unipolar world, the US remains the global hegemon with a preponderance of financial and military power "so great that its very extent [has] served to disincentivise other states from challenging it". But this is rarely acknowledged, any more than the foreign policy consistency between Bush, Obama and Trump is. Instead, we are regularly regaled with tales of how a change of administration in Washington might jeopardise America's defence of democracy overseas. As Stevenson asks, "Why the reticence to explain the nature of American power? And why ignore that so much of contemporary US grand strategy is oriented precisely to prevent its dissolution?" One obvious explanation is that countries like the UK and Japan, which slavishly follow US policy in foreign affairs and act as continental-scale aircraft carriers for the US military, are unwilling to admit that they are satellites of empire rather than sovereign states. Kissinger dignified the dealings of heads of state through a diplomatic theatre inspired by the Congress of Vienna. For that he was always welcome in elite circles.
There are some interesting comments in the Meaney article in the New Yorker.
ReplyDelete"It took Kissinger’s close contemporary the political theorist Sheldon Wolin to fully dissect Kissinger’s careerist instincts. On the surface, Wolin observed, Kissinger would have appeared a mismatch for the anti-élitist Nixon. But the pairing was perfect: Nixon needed someone who could elevate his opportunism to a higher plane of purpose and make him feel like a great figure in the drama of history. As Wolin wrote, “What could have been more comforting to that barren and inarticulate soul than to hear the authoritative voice of Dr. Kissinger, who spoke so often and knowingly about the ‘meaning of history.’"