6/1/2020 The Tragic World of Henry Kissinger - Law & Liberty

BOOK REVIEW JUNE 1, 2020

The Tragic World of Henry Kissinger

A Secretary of State in the Nixon Administration, and then

remaining at State in the Ford Administration (unscathed by
Watergate), Henry Kissinger drew upon himself the ire of critics ‘Left’ and
‘Right.’ He hardly could have done otherwise. The period - saw
the agonizing final years of the Vietnam War, the beginning of the
controversial policy of détente with the Soviet Union, and America’s
dramatic ‘opening’ to Communist China. But it was preeminently
Kissinger’s underlying strategic approach to these events that offended
and sometimes enraged his opponents. Kissinger was a foreign-policy
‘Realist,’ as distinguished from the foreign-policy ‘Idealists’ who
predominated not only in Washington but in the media and in academia.

Barry Gewen defines foreign-policy Realism as the insistence that

international politics be understood in terms of economic, geopolitical,
and military power and of national interest. In view of the catastrophic

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character of war, especially in the past two hundred years, as weapons

technology has advanced and civilian populations have been targeted for
destruction, Realists characteristically seek peace militarily through
deterrence, and diplomatically through balancing rival powers against
one another. Foreign-policy Idealists, by contrast, attempt to transcend
the practices of power-politics with reference to moral principles—
typically, human rights—which they attempt to instantiate in political
institutions, international or domestic.

Realism as Bogeyman

Following Kissinger’s account of the matter and also that of his highly
influential intellectual friend, University of Chicago political scientist
Hans J. Morgenthau, Gewen classifies foreign-policy Idealists into two
main types: on the Left are the liberal internationalists, who seek peace
through such constructs as the League of Nations, the United Nations,
and other ‘world-order’ institutions; on the Right are the heirs of
Montesquieu’s commercial-republican peace theory (often miscalled
‘democratic’ peace theory), who hold that peace will advance only insofar
as commercial-republican regimes replace oligarchic and tyrannical ones.
This leads Idealists of the Right to advocate regime change or revolution
in countries ruled by ‘the few’ or by ‘one.’

Gewen has designed this impressive and substantial book with

considerable care. Knowing that most of his readers will adhere to one or
the other Idealist schools, he draws them into a dialogue with Realism,
initially by stating their own opinions for the most part fully and fairly.
He then leads those readers through Kissinger’s analyses of specific
issues. These include the Nixon Administration’s economic warfare
against the socialist regime of Salvador Allende in Chile, the policy of
‘Vietnamization’ by which the United States extricated itself from the war
in Southeast Asia, the rationale for détente with the Soviet Union, and the
geopolitical counterbalancing of the Soviets with the equally tyrannical
Maoist regime in China. As he does so, Gewen shows that the Realist way
has a political and even moral heft of its own, not to be dismissed by
those who wish the world were, or could be, a much better place than it is.

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Against Democratic Faith

Like Morgenthau, Kissinger drew intense criticism for lacking a

thoroughgoing enthusiasm for democracy. When Chileans elected
Allende, a Marxist admirer of Fidel Castro, to the presidency in ,
Kissinger said, “I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country
go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its people.” As Gewen
shows, Kissinger spoke from experience, his parents having fled Nazi
Germany in the s when he was an adolescent; many of the relatives
they left behind died in the death camps. Kissinger was old enough to
have seen how Hitler not only rose to power through democratic elections
but became increasingly popular with Germans in the years preceding
and during the world war. Without of course imagining Allende to have
been anything resembling Hitler, Kissinger nonetheless determined that
Soviet and Cuban support for the Chilean socialists should be matched by
American support for their opponents. The economic boycott Nixon
ordered weakened the regime, which eventually was overthrown by
military officers who were themselves initially reluctant to reverse the
results of an election.

In the larger sense, Kissinger distrusted any highly democratized political

regime. Europe had done best when an aristocratic class with a shared
code of honor negotiated across national borders, limiting wars and
working for an international balance of power. The Napoleonic Wars
following the French Revolution were a product of democratic excesses,
and the world wars of the twentieth century registered the character of
increasingly democratized political societies prey to hyper-nationalist,
demagoguery by Idealists of one sort or another.

At the same time, insofar as democratic societies retained elites, these

consisted not of experienced, prudent, old-regime and old-school
aristocrats but of data-driven bureaucrats pretending to replace practical
judgment with social science—the scientific status of which Kissinger
rather doubted. Social scientists lack the capacity to make sound
judgments because, following the sociologist Max Weber, consigned
judgment to the realm of ‘values,’ values to the realm of emotion, leaving
little room in moral and political thought for prudential reasoning.
Because modern science tends toward reductionism, social science

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reduces political life, including foreign policy, to sub-human elements—

typically, economic interests and social classes.

In recent years, cyberspace operates in much the same way. Once “the
province of a small clique of educated specialists privileged with arcane
knowledge,” computers had become ‘democracratized’—available to
“anyone with a keyboard and a desire to shape the future of mankind.”
Not only has cyberspace become a sort of “Hobbesian state of nature,”
but, like modern science generally, it encourages what Kissinger called
“the mind-set of a researcher”—a fact-finder, a data collector—not that of
a thinker. By contrast, “learning from books places a premium on
conceptual thinking, the ability to recognize comparable data and events
and project patterns into the future.” Facts are indispensable to a
statesman, but they do not by themselves generate a strategy. If all
learning ‘goes on-line,’ who will do the thinking?

Modern bureaucratic elites attempt to fill the space between democracy

and ‘value-free’ social science with historicist progressivism, as seen most
prominently in the influential thought of John Dewey, who attempted to
weld the experimentalism of modern science with moral claims on behalf
of social equality. With Morgenthau, Kissinger simply did not believe that
any sensible foreign policy could be derived from such materials,
pointing to the fact that none had successfully done so. Accordingly, his
years in Washington saw Kissinger struggling to wrest control of policy
from State Department bureaucrats.

Nixon and Kissinger inherited the Vietnam War from the Johnson
administration. Kissinger had visited South Vietnam several times during
the Johnson years, concluding that the United States had no credible
military or political strategy there, and that American officials in the
country knew very little about the people they were attempting to save
from the Communists. With Nixon, he decided that America had more
important concerns—specifically, relations with the Soviet and
Communist Chinese sponsors of the Vietnamese Communists.
“Vietnamization” of the war meant gradual withdrawal of American
troops coupled with training and supplying the South Vietnamese allies,
whose ground troops would continue to receive support from the U.S. Air
Force. Gewen judges this strategy to have been the least bad of three bad

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choices, the others being the obliteration of substantial portions of

Communist North Vietnam on the one hand, or a precipitate pullout on
the other. The latter course, Gewen concedes with regret, would have put
American credibility in question with allies throughout the Pacific. Like it
or not, credibility counts in politics, foreign or domestic. Kissinger
deplored the cutoff of material support to the South Vietnamese when the
Communists made their final, and successful, attempt to take control in
. Now Secretary of State in the Ford administration, he was forced to
sit by and watch as the Communists proceeded to murder a minimum of
, Vietnamese in the South.

Détente didn’t work

because regimes based on
such principles finally
will not cooperate with
regimes founded on the
natural rights to life and
liberty, except for tactical
purposes.
Regarding the Cold War as a whole, Nixon and Kissinger pursued two
main policies: détente with the Soviets and support for the divisions
within the worldwide Communist movement itself. Détente was a term
coined by French president Charles de Gaulle, meaning the relaxation of
tensions between Soviet Russia and the Western republics; Gewen
identifies it as a new name for the Realists’ balance of power. Mutual
deterrence of nuclear war having been achieved, the Cold-War rivalry
now consisted of smaller, more manageable wars along with economic
and political competition. Accordingly, advocates of détente rejected
regime change in the Soviet Union and China as infeasible in the short or

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medium term, rejecting what they took to be Idealist calls for strong
advocacy of human rights within those regimes.

Taking Détente Too Far

When President Reagan took office in , Kissinger joined many in

Washington circles in dismissing him as a potentially dangerous,
democratic-populist simpleton. As the Reagan years went on, however,
Kissinger saw that the supposedly risky and impractical policy of ending
the Soviet regime instead of living with it wasn’t precipitating a nuclear
holocaust but was wringing ever-increasing concessions from a regime
whose internal flaws were becoming increasingly critical under American
pressure. In a rare admission that he might have been mistaken, in the
end Kissinger conceded that he may have taken détente too far.

It is important to see why he was mistaken. Gewen argues that Kissinger

was a sort of Nietzschean. In an inherently meaningless cosmos, life
(including life as lived by nation-states) consisted of the will to power and
the struggle for power by more or less powerful wills in a “planetary
aristocracy.” But Gewen also shows that Kissinger himself, for all his
emphasis on power-politics as the foundation of geopolitical analysis, had
no interest whatever in the Nietzschean precept, “Live dangerously.”
Quite the contrary. Kissinger’s goal was identical to that of Hobbes: self-
preservation, now widened to include the self-preservation of humanity,
threatened as it was by modern military technology. This isn’t
Nietzscheism; it is modern liberalism.

Moreover, Kissinger’s morality was decidedly non-historicist. Rather than

deriving moral and political right from any supposed historical dialectic,
or even from the traditionalist historicism of the Right, Kissinger derived
it from what he called the inherent and unchanging nature of human
beings. To be sure, human beings are not perfectible; the consequences of
human actions are not predictable; and solution to human problems are
always impermanent. Hobbes and Locke insisted on no more. It was the
German Idealists and their epigone who expected the course of events or
‘history’ to elevate human nature into something more than it is. And

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this includes Nietzsche, who longed not for the preservation of man but
for the advent of Superman.

Kissinger went too far with détente not because he was amoral but
because he went too far with Realism. To understand geopolitics simply
as a matter of power, albeit power defined not only militarily but
economically and in terms of diplomatic negotiations, is to downplay the
importance of regimes. In making overtures to Maoist China (for
example), Nixon and Kissinger played power-politics against Soviet
Russia, and arguably played it well. But to describe Mao (or Lenin, or
Stalin) simply in Realpolitik terms is to leave unexplained what men like
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Bukovsky (neither of whom rates a
mention in the book) made plain: Neither Realism nor nationalism can
explain a deliberate policy of mass murder. That policy is only explicable
in terms of the radicalized progressivism of Marxist-Leninist ideology,
which those tyrants espoused, and upon which they built their regimes.
Similarly, on the Right, Hitler’s policy of genocide cannot be explained in
terms of Realism or even of nationalism, only by the historicized ‘race
science’ that imagined such an enormity as an engine of progress.

Détente didn’t work because regimes based on such principles finally will
not cooperate with regimes founded on the natural rights to life and
liberty, except for tactical purposes. Such regimes live dangerously in
principle, even when practicing caution. Reagan saw that. And he was
right to think that if right doesn’t simply make might, it is one
component of lasting might, even if it is no guarantee that any regime, or
any country, will wield might, or pursue right, forever. Barry Gewen has
written the most thoughtful book on Kissinger we have, offering the most
accurate, fair assessment of his policy intentions. He has written what
amounts to a history of American foreign policy since the Second World
War—a history seen through the prism of Kissinger’s mind and career, to
be sure, but no ordinary mind and career.

REVIEWED

The Inevitability of Tragedy

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by Barry Gewen

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Will Morrisey is professor emeritus of politics at Hillsdale College. His

most recent book is Churchill and De Gaulle: The Geopolitics of Liberty.

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