Henry Kissinger and the amorality of Realpolitik

From the publication of his first two books in the 1950s to his pronouncements on Ukraine, he demonstrated that he thought a solid sense of right and wrong was too much to ask of foreign policy

People don’t tend to have tepid opinions of Henry Kissinger.

The headlines of obituaries at Huffpost and Rolling Stone don’t mess around. Both use the. term “war criminal.”

But consider Hillary Clinton’s take. She was on a panel of former Secretaries of State that included Kissinger and James Baker on October 31 of this year. The event capped a decades-long friendship:

The two former secretaries of state have been close for years, with Clinton calling him "a friend" and noting that she "relied on his counsel" when she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

"He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels. Though we have often seen the world and some of our challenges quite differently, and advocated different responses now and in the past...." she wrote in a review of his book "World Order" that was published in the Washington Post in 2014.

She also included mentions of Kissinger in her own book "Hard Choices," which detailed her time as secretary of state, referencing him during portions about China.

Clinton and Kissinger's ties extend beyond politics: The two are so friendly that when Clinton was set to present a fashion industry award to designer Oscar de la Renta, the event was re-arranged so that both Clinton and de la Renta were able to attend Kissinger's 90th birthday party in New York.

While he relished the role of jet-setting public intellectual, he had the creds as someone who had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. When he got to the United States, having fled Germany due to harassment of his Jewish family, he attended high school classes at night so he could work in a shaving brush factory by day. He’d only been in the US for five years when he was drafted into the Army. He was a mere private when he found himself back in Germany, where he was charged with administration of a city in the immediate post-Nazi period, and then made a Counterintelligence Corps special agent. When he got back stateside, he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and doctorate from Harvard.

He started to give the foreign-policy world a taste of his particular take on Realpolitik in his 1957 book in which he suggested that tactical nuclear weapons could be used to win sub-cataclysmic skirmishes throughout the world. Hey, better than reserving that kind of firepower for massive retaliation, right?

He was originally decidedly not a fan of Richard Nixon. As late as July 1968, he was publicly calling Nixon dangerous. But when the candidate Kissinger started out supporting in that year’s presidential race, Nelson Rockefeller, dropped out, it took Kissinger no time at all to schmooze the Nixon campaign for an influential spot in the inner circle. Mind you, he hedged his bets by staying in touch with the Humphrey campaign and offering his services should the election tilt that way.

His approach to the war in Vietnam wasn’t based on any kind of the-spread-of-Communism-stops-here principle. He participated in the Paris peace talks on the assumption that a military victory by South Vietnam and the US was not in the offing, and that the South should agree to a coalition government in which the Viet Cong was the other major partner. He was also simultaneously having secret meetings with North Vietnamese diplomat Xuan Thuy.

Nixon-era Vietnam policy took a number of twists and turns before all US forces were withdrawn in 1973. Of course, in April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks smashed through the gates of the South Vietnamese presidential palace in Saigon, a major setback in US Cold War aims.

Kissinger was able to crow, for the moment, about three big achievements of 1972:

In 1972 the administration achieved what Kissinger called “three out of three”: Nixon’s February visit to China, the May Moscow summit, and Kissinger’s October breakthrough with Le Duc Tho in Paris. On the phone to Nixon, Kissinger spoke of having “set up this whole intricate web. When we talked about linkage, everyone was sneering.”

But the cost of the achievements was letting some other global situations fester:

In pursuit of this strategic trifecta, Kissinger was prepared to sacrifice smaller pieces on the chessboard. Pakistan took precedence over India and East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh), because Islamabad was the key conduit to Beijing. South Vietnam and Taiwan found that the U.S. was a fickle ally. Kissinger’s many critics focused on the human costs of strategic decisions that were, Kissinger long argued, inevitably choices between evils.

Such a means of prioritization solved momentary problems, in Kissinger’s view, but consider the longer term ramifications. Pakistan is not any kind of reliable ally for 2023 America. Russia has cast all reservations about being deemed a rogue state aside. And, of course, China has made it clear in the era of Xi that it aims to knock the US down a peg within the international order.

My fellow contributor to Ordinary Times, Andrew Donaldson, provides about as concise a description of Kissingerian Realpolitik as I’ve seen today, making clear just how devoid it is of any hope that lasting good can prevail from a well-crafted-and-implemented foreign policy:

George Will made the observation in his Washington Post reflection that Kissinger saw global conflict like the Cold War as something to manage. There are quotes galore of Kissinger talking about managing world affairs, maintaining “balance”, how he “admired the Chinese” as “scientists of equilibrium, artists of relativity” and on and on. ““The management of a balance of power is a permanent undertaking, not an exertion that has a foreseeable end,” he wrote in his book about his years in the White House.

One man having nigh unaccountable power prattling on about abstractions like balance and management when there were millions of lives at stake should have been a huge red flag. Kissinger took pride in trying to get all the “sentimentality” out of foreign policy. And while there is validity to that, doing so in totality strips away the human costs of decision making. Throw in “we have to stop the communists, x, y, z this, that, and the other” and such things are contextualized and excused in the moment.

The problem of the great man who sees himself as the manager of world affairs is that no man is great enough to not start believing he knows best how to achieve that balance. Worse, too many folks start to believe him as well, and any chance at normal bounds or accountability go away in inverse proportion to the increase in flowery words of praise and various other accolades.

This lens for viewing history and the world stage informed Kissinger’s lamentable take on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His position was that Russia is too powerful, too impossible to sequester in irrelevance, for Ukraine and the West to think that pre-February 2022, much less pre-2014, borders were a reasonable goal to pursue.

Realpolitik is actually a tepid approach to world affairs. Maybe it has something to do with Kissinger having spent his formative years in a Germany that was decadent and unstable, and then, when he turned ten, a fearsome totalitarian and expansionist actor. He didn’t have early-life experience in the United States he went on to represent. That might have made the difference in terms of a sense that America’s continued existence was proof that breakthroughs for real human advancement, the kind that opens the door for ordered liberty to spread, were possible.

Kissinger seems to have had no such faith in America’s capacity to move that needle.

Thus, while we can say he was an impressive figure, we really can’t say that there was anything inspiring about him.