Henry Kissinger, 1923-2023

Whatever else you may think of Henry Kissinger, who died yesterday, he certainly left his mark on the world. The editors of the Washington Post declaim:

Henry A. Kissinger, who died on Wednesday at 100, was one of the most consequential statesmen in U.S. history. Though his greatest triumphs occurred a half-century ago, his legacy is complex, contested and contains lessons that should inform Americans facing complicated foreign policy challenges now.

In less than four years during the early 1970s, Mr. Kissinger brokered the opening of relations between the United States and China, the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, major arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union, and Israeli-Arab accords that made the United States the dominant power in the Middle East.

While forging and defending this policy of “detente” — the easing of tensions with the Soviet Union — Mr. Kissinger also pursued what he regarded as a zero-sum contest for global influence with the Soviets, spurring him to what he once privately described, late in life, as his proudest achievement: the negotiation of disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Syria following their 1973 war. Rather than rely on multilateral forums, the then-secretary of state invented “shuttle diplomacy” and personally brokered the deals, which had the benefit of excluding Moscow. In the aftermath, a once-formidable Soviet presence in the Middle East withered, and the United States became the region’s arbitrating power — a state of affairs that has endured into the 21st century.

He is castigated for his role in the bombing of Cambodia and IMO insufficiently praised for crafting what has been very nearly the only actual foreign policy in American history. Like it or loathe it, it was a foreign policy rather than the emergent style more typical of the United States, in which competing domestic interests contend with one another. I also wonder if he would be receiving so much posthumous lambasting if he had not served the only American president to resign from office under a cloud.

Update

Here’s an excerpt from the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s encomium:

Kissinger was a target of both the right and left in those perilous Cold War years, often unfairly. His 1973 peace agreement with North Vietnam that ended the U.S. participation in the war is often mocked because the North overran the South two years later.

But Kissinger and Nixon inherited the unpopular war from Lyndon Johnson and had little choice other than to manage U.S. withdrawal. Kissinger’s strategy was to negotiate a settlement that allowed the South to take over its own defenses without half a million U.S. troops. He achieved his peace settlement and won a controversial Nobel Peace Prize for it. But the strategy collapsed when the U.S. Congress slashed aid to the South in 1975. Saigon fell within weeks. A Senator named Joe Biden was among those voting to abandon the South.

Kissinger has long argued, rightly we think, that the South would have survived if Congress hadn’t abandoned support. And Lee Kuan Yew, the late leader of Singapore, often said that U.S. support for South Vietnam gave the countries of Southeast Asia the time to build resistance to Communists in their countries. They are freer today because of it.

The left also blames Kissinger for supporting dictators. But the alternatives then, as now, weren’t usually democrats of the left’s imagining. They were often Communists who would have aligned themselves with the Soviets, as Fidel Castro did in Cuba.

In Chile, for example, Salvador Allende won a presidential election with 37% of the vote and took the country sharply to the left with Cuban and Soviet intelligence and other aid. The U.S. provided covert aid to Allende’s political opponents, but declassified briefings from the time show the U.S. was unaware of the military coup that deposed him.

Kissinger wasn’t responsible for Augusto Pinochet’s coup or its bloody excesses. Chile eventually became a democracy and free-market success. Cuba remains a dictatorship.

My own criticism of Dr. Kissinger is that he was objectively wrong too frequently. He was wrong on our handling of the Soviets (he overestimated them) and wrong about the Chinese. Much good has come from opening ties between the U. S. and China. Millions of Chinese people have benefited at substantial costs to Americans and the political benefits envisioned never materialized.