Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

In this context, it is a strange irony of the Kissinger literature that so many of the critiques of Kissinger’s mode of operation have a subtle undertone of anti-Semitism. The more books I have read about Kissinger, the more I have been reminded of the dreadful books I had to read twenty years ago when writing the history of the Rothschild family. When other nineteenth-century banks made loans to conservative regimes or to countries at war, no one seemed to notice. But when the Rothschilds did it, the pamphleteers could scarcely control their indignation. Indeed, it would take a great many shelves to contain all the shrill anti-Rothschild polemics produced by Victorian antecedents of today’s conspiracy theorists (who, as we have seen, still like to drag in the Rothschilds). This prompts the question: might the ferocity of the criticism that Kissinger has attracted perhaps have something to do with the fact that he, like the Rothschilds, is Jewish?

This is not to imply that his critics are anti-Semites. Some of the Rothschilds’ fiercest critics were themselves Jews. So are some of Kissinger’s. Bruce Gold, Heller’s Kissinger-hating professor, advances the “covert and remarkable hypothesis that Henry Kissinger was not a Jew”—a hypothesis based partly on his father’s insight that “no cowboy was ever a Jew.”

In Gold’s conservative opinion, Kissinger would not be recalled in history as a Bismarck, Metternich, or Castlereagh, but as an odious shlump who made war gladly and did not often exude much of that legendary sympathy for weakness and suffering with which Jews regularly were credited. It was not a shayna Yid who would go down on his knees on a carpet to pray to Yahweh with that shmendrick Nixon, or a haimisha mentsh who would act with such cruelty against the free population of Chile…. Such a pisk on the pisher to speak with such chutzpah ! 79

To say that American Jews have been ambivalent toward the man who is arguably their community’s most distinguished son would be an understatement. Even sympathetic biographers like Mazlish and Suri use questionable phrases like “court Jew” or “policy Jew” to characterize Kissinger’s relationship with Nixon. 80

V

The crux of the matter, nevertheless, is how we judge Kissinger’s foreign policy — both its theory and its practice. For the vast majority of commentators, the theory is clear-cut. Kissinger is a realist, and that implies, in Anthony Lewis’s crude definition of the “Kissinger Doctrine,” “an obsession with order and power at the expense of humanity.” 81According to Marvin and Bernard Kalb, Nixon and Kissinger “shared a global realpolitik that placed a higher priority on pragmatism than on morality.” 82In the 1960s, Stanley Hoffmann had been more than a colleague to Kissinger; he had been a friend and admirer, who had welcomed his appointment by Nixon. Yet by the time Kissinger published the first volume of his memoirs, he, too, had joined this club. Kissinger had, he wrote in a venomous review, “an almost devilish psychological intuition, an instinct for grasping the hidden springs of character, of knowing what drives or what dooms another person.” He also had “the gift for the manipulation of power — exploiting the weaknesses and strengths of character of his counterparts.” But

[i]f there was a vision beyond the geopolitical game, if the complex manipulation of rewards and punishments needed to create equilibrium and to restrain the troublemakers was aimed at a certain ideal of world order, we are left free to guess what it might have been…. [His] is a world in which power is all: equilibrium is not just the prerequisite to order, the precondition for justice, it is order, it amounts to justice. 83

Like so many other less learned authors, Hoffmann concluded that both Nixon and Kissinger (the former “instinctively,” the latter “intellectually”) were “Machiavellians — men who believed that the preservation of the state (inseparable in Machiavelli from that of the Prince) requires both ruthlessness and deceit at the expense of foreign and internal adversaries.” 84This kind of judgment recurs again and again. According to Walter Isaacson, “power-oriented realpolitik and secretive diplomatic maneuvering… were the basis of [Kissinger’s] policies.” 85John Gaddis calls the Nixon-Kissinger combination “the triumph of geopolitics over ideology,” with their conception of American national interests always paramount. 86Kissinger, says Suri, was “hardened against idealistic rhetoric that neglected the ‘realistic’ importance of extensive armed force and preparations to use it.” 87He invariably placed the “demands of the state above other ethical scruples.” 88

So deeply rooted is this view of Kissinger as an amoral realist — a “hard-boiled master of realpolitik who will not sacrifice one iota of American interest”—that the overwhelming majority of writers have simply assumed that Kissinger modeled himself on his “heroes” Metternich and Bismarck. 89Kissinger did indeed write about both men in, respectively, the 1950s and the 1960s. But only someone who has not read (or who has willfully misread) what he actually wrote could possibly think that he set out in the 1970s to replicate their approaches to foreign policy. One of the quirks of the “Killinger” literature is that, by comparison, so little is made of Kissinger’s book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy . With its cold, calculated argument for the graduated use of nuclear weapons, this might very easily be presented as evidence that Dr. Kissinger was indeed the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Yet Kissinger’s critics prefer different battlegrounds to those of Central Europe, the core conflict zone of the First and Second World Wars, which even a limited nuclear war would have laid waste.

VI

The Cold War, which was the defining event of Henry Kissinger’s two careers as a scholar and as a policy maker, took many forms. It was a nuclear arms race that on more than one occasion came close to turning into a devastating thermonuclear war. It was also, in some respects, a contest between two great empires, an American and a Russian, which sent their legions all around the world, though they seldom met face-to-face. It was a competition between two economic systems, capitalist and socialist, symbolized by Nixon’s “kitchen debate” with Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959. It was a great if deadly game between intelligence agencies, glamorized in the novels of Ian Fleming, more accurately rendered in those of John le Carré. It was a cultural battle, in which chattering professors, touring jazz bands, and defecting ballet dancers all played their parts. Yet at its root, the Cold War was a struggle between two rival ideologies: the theories of the Enlightenment as encapsulated in the American Constitution, and the theories of Marx and Lenin as articulated by successive Soviet leaders. Only one of these ideologies was intent, as a matter of theoretical principle, on struggle. And only one of these states was wholly unconstrained by the rule of law.

The mass murderers of the Cold War were not to be found in Washington, much less in the capitals of U.S. allies in Western Europe. According to the estimates in the Black Book of Communism, the “grand total of victims of Communism was between 85 and 100 million” for the twentieth century as a whole. 90Mao alone, as Frank Dikötter has shown, accounted for tens of millions: 2 million between 1949 and 1951, another 3 million by the end of the 1950s, a staggering 45 million in the man-made famine known as the “Great Leap Forward,” yet more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. 91According to the lowest estimate, the total number of Soviet citizens who lost their lives as a direct result of Stalin’s policies was more than 20 million, a quarter of them in the years after World War II. 92Even the less bloodthirsty regimes of Eastern Europe killed and imprisoned their citizens on a shocking scale. 93In the Soviet Union, 2.75 million people were in the Gulag at Stalin’s death. The numbers were greatly reduced thereafter, but until the very end of the Soviet system its inhabitants lived in the knowledge that there was nothing but their own guile to protect them from an arbitrary and corrupt state. These stark and incontrovertible facts make a mockery of the efforts of the so-called revisionist historians, beginning with William Appleman Williams, to assert a moral equivalence between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. 94