September 22, 2007
Henry Kissinger Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:50 PM EST The homepage of this website notes that this is the anniversary of Henry Kissinger’s 1973 confirmation as Secretary of State. As I write this, a poll of readers asked to rank Kissinger’s merits in that post has a plurality (30 percent) assessing him as a good Secretary of State, and slightly smaller number (28 percent) assessing him as a great one. My guess is that what I consider a wild overestimate probably reflects disenchantment with the Iraq war, since over the last few years Kissinger’s alleged “realism” has often been juxtaposed to the supposed idealism of the current generation of neoconservatives, who are in one hostile interpretation damned as utopians (this is of course only one interpretation of the neocons, who are in other equally hostile accounts understood as profoundly cynical machiavels, covert Israeli agents, witting or unwitting tools of the oil companies, etc.) According to this particular theory, Kissinger knew the limits of the possible, while his neocon successors did not, and they thus madly sought to democratize a stable Baathist Iraq. By this account order in Iraq necessarily rested on tyranny, and the imperatives of containing Iran required that such a tyranny be based on minority (Sunni Arab) support, rather than majority Shiite support. Whatever the merits of this analysis of Iraq, Kissinger was not, in his day, a particularly realistic statesman, if realism is taken to include even a remotely accurate assessment of the trajectory of international politics. He seems to have had small grasp of economics—by one account, he encouraged the shah of Iran to support the 1973 oil embargo, so as to increase Iranian revenues. Kissinger certainly thought the shah of Iran a sturdy and perdurable American surrogate, our reliable gendarme in the Gulf, which was a fantastic blunder. He was remarkably indifferent to demands for liberty in the old Soviet bloc, Latin America, Greece, indeed everywhere, which means that he did not understand the forces that would within his lifetime destroy the Soviet bloc. He shared this failing with many, but those with whom he shared it are not normally called statesmen of genius, and unlike most of them, his own decisions brought us the shame of supporting tyrants without any durable gain in security; there are places (Greece, for example) where we are still hated for what Kissinger so complacently condoned. He also had a nasty habit of deriding people who took human rights more seriously than his sort of “realist” tends to do. Kissinger’s “realism” was in various other respects strikingly unrealistic. He thought the early-1970s United States a declining power, and the Soviet Union a rising one, a thought widely shared but less than prescient. A few years ago American Heritage published an interview with Ralph Peters—I conducted it—under the title “The Shah Always Falls”. Kissinger is the man who thought shahs rarely fall. He conducted American foreign policy accordingly, and I think very badly. In 1980 I heard an improbably amusing economist, asked for his opinion of Reagan’s chosen economic advisers, pause very briefly before judiciously characterizing them as “naive, but ill-willed.” Almost all liberals and many conservatives used to know this about Kissinger, although they rarely put the thought so pithily. It is not the least dispiriting sign of our times that people willing to use any stick to beat the administration have decided to use this one: Kissinger as statesman and “realist.”
|
