Henry Kissinger at 100: A crooked legacy

Few people remain influential at 100. They are either dead or about to die, frail in mind and body.

Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, is both alive and influential. He might be frail in body, but his mind is sharp. Having outlived almost all his detractors, the man once accused of a dark side that changed much of the world, has evolved over the past decades into a statesman feted by leaders globally. Nobody alive has more experience of international affairs than him, The Economist magazine recently wrote after interviewing him.

If Kissinger’s actions in countries such as Cambodia, Lao, Vietnam, Chile, Bangladesh, and Argentina among others were questionable and deeply criticised, he did have a few credits to his account, which he used well to keep himself relevant in the more than four decades since he last held any official position in the US government.

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Kissinger’s biggest coup was bringing China out from behind the Iron Curtain at the peak of the Cold War when in 1971, he made a secret visit to Beijing after feigning illness while on an official visit to Islamabad. He jumped on a Pakistan air force aircraft and travelled to meet the Great Helmsman Mao Zedong and his deputy Chou Enlai and eventually ended up becoming a trusted friend of and advisor to successive Chinese leaders. He also must be credited with initiatives around détente with the Soviet Union and the Middle East shuttle diplomacy in the 1970s when the world was hit by the first oil crisis.

In the book A New Cold War – Henry Kissinger and the Rise of China that I co-edited we talk about how that trip and a later visit by then US President Richard Nixon redefined US-China relations and the global balance of power forever. More significant than the political and diplomatic stamp of acceptance was the economic empowerment of China thanks to the supportive US and trade policies. Kissinger, in many ways, helped create an economic behemoth that Americans today hate and fear.

Kissinger has probably written as much on issues of national and international importance as he has been written about. An army of reporters and authors have slammed him and lauded him too. Intrepid journalist Seymour Hersh “gave us the defining portrait of Kissinger as a preening paranoid, tacking between ruthlessness and sycophancy to advance his career, cursing his fate and letting fly the B-52s,” Greg Grandin wrote in his book Kissinger’s Shadows – The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. 

“Kissinger, in Hersh’s hands, is nonetheless Shakespearean because the pettiness gets played out on a world stage with epic consequences,” he wrote.

Indeed, Kissinger’s shadow has been both long and wide and sometimes dark. Historical documents, many available in the National Security Archives of the US record his role in the overthrow of the leadership in Chile, support for genocidal wars, secret bombing campaigns in Southeast Asia and secret wiretapping of his own officials.

And then there was East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh but not before Pakistani military carried out what the US envoy to Dhaka called a ‘selective genocide’ that left half a million dead, hundreds of thousands of women raped and burdened India with millions of refugees pouring in from across the border.

Kissinger and Nixon both turned a blind eye to missives from American officials in Dhaka who in a diplomatic cable accused their own government of “bending over backwards to placate the West Pak dominated government and to lessen likely and deservedly negative international public relations impact against them.” The secret military support to Pakistan continued.

In November 1971, as India grappled with the crisis and prepared to go to war against Pakistan, its western neighbour, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi travelled to Washington for talks on the issue. Nixon and Kissinger, hugely obliged to Islamabad for its help in reaching out to the Chinese weren’t very excited about the visit. Declassified documents report a conversation between the two in which Kissinger called Indians “bastards” and Nixon called Gandhi a “bitch’.

So, who is the Kissinger we might want to remember? Somebody who needed to be charged as a war criminal for the bombings in Cambodia or a sober statesman with a worldview that we need to follow?

After stepping down from the government, Kissinger reinvented himself as an advisor to global political and business leaders. He has spent time writing about and commenting on issues that matter, including jointly penning a book on challenges posed to the world by the spread of artificial intelligence.

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There are few others than Kissinger who understand the complications around great-power confrontation as the United States and China continue to bare their teeth at each other in a world battling very different geopolitical challenges post the Covid epidemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine – both of which have introduced new economic and political uncertainties to the world.

Kissinger’s advantage is that he knows and respects history. He understands global blocs and national interests. Though an avid proponent of realism, Kissinger also appreciates that the new world needs new paradigms. Moreover, he has lived through several US presidents and every Chinese leader from Mao to Xi Jinping to appreciate the impact of the deepening fault lines between a superpower and a nation trying to be powerful.

At 100, he understands the new world and knows there is no guaranteed course. It might be worth looking at him now more as a sober statesman.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

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