Kissinger offered absolution for the sins of American foreign policy

Against standards of decent human conduct, Kissinger can truly be found wanting. But against the standards of conduct of American foreign policy officials during and after the Cold War, Kissinger is more difficult to single out.

Discussion of the legacy of Henry Kissinger was bound to be complex. Many obituaries had been prepared years in advance, a testament to Kissinger’s longevity but also to the polarization of opinion regarding his career.

For a figure as deeply feted by the elite as Henry Kissinger, he could arouse truly intense feelings of animosity. The left hated Kissinger for his long history of war crimes, and because he was the living embodiment of a destructive foreign policy “blob” that would never and could never be brought to account.

The right also hated Kissinger, who paid little but lip service to ideas of American exceptionalism. Kissinger, motivated perhaps by Hans Morgenthau’s injunctions that moral principles cannot be applied to politics and that no state could hold a monopoly on morality, implicitly rejected the idea that the United States was different in any meaningful way from the Soviet Union.

Against standards of decent human conduct, Kissinger can truly be found wanting. He facilitated or directed many of the most appalling acts of violence conducted by the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s. But against the standards of conduct of American foreign policy officials during and after the Cold War, Kissinger is more difficult to single out.

Kissinger played some role in the death of Chilean President Salvador Allende, but he did not authorize the Eisenhower-era coups against Arbenz in Guatemala or Mossadegh in Iran. He may have helped cover up Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, but he was in no way responsible for the murderous bloodletting that marked the transition between Sukarno and Suharto in Indonesia.

He may have extended the Vietnam War, but he neither started it nor presided over its most brutal escalations. He may have given absolution to the invasion of Iraq, but that war was planned and executed by those who considered Kissinger a dire enemy. He may have helped catalyze Cambodia’s collapse into chaos and genocide, but he did not give the go ahead for the elimination of the Gaddafi regime and the onset of Libya’s lost decade. He facilitated the bombing of Cambodia, but he never ordered a drone strike.

The reality is that while Kissinger was distinguished at times in terms of his diplomatic flexibility, little of what he did was particularly controversial within the foreign policy community of the time. The answer to the question “Is it worth sacrificing Dacca in order to win Beijing?” would have been answered with a resounding “yes” by the greater portion of the foreign policy community in 1972. Mao and his cohorts had slaughtered 40 million or more during the 1960s; what were a few hundred thousand Pakistanis to be added to the tally?

It would be wrong to say that Kissinger simply gave voice to the foreign policy community; he was undoubtedly a dynamic actor within it and effectively pursued the ends that he sought. But it would also be wrong to claim that any of his actions were somehow alien to the norms of that community.

Kissinger was mostly unapologetic about this record, not in the sense that he felt he needed to robustly defend it, but in that he barely needed to acknowledge it as a potential source of shame. Robert McNamara begged for absolution at the end of his life; Kissinger was uninterested in the revision that absolution would require.

His true skill was ingratiating himself to those who had power, and escaping the opprobrium that normally fell upon war criminals. Leaders we all felt should have known better nevertheless embraced Kissinger when the time came. Clinton and Bush and Obama each believed that it could be some other way, then discovered that the president of the United States kills people when he gets out of bed each morning. For the powerful, Kissinger offered absolution in the terms of, “Whatever you’re doing, no matter how many people it kills, is okay as long as it serves the national interest.”

Many sins can be placed on Kissinger’s shoulders; indeed, over the course of his career he did not seem particularly averse to the layering of additional sins, as each one seemed to increase his historical significance. Arguably his most strident critics simply enhanced his historical profile. This is perhaps best exemplified by Christopher Hitchens, who attempted to lay all of the sins of postwar American foreign policy upon the shoulders of Kissinger, only to become one of the most enthusiastic advocates of a war that would kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

One possible lesson to learn from Kissinger’s career is that the foreign policy establishment of the United States is rotten to the core, with Kissinger perhaps the worst of a barrel of bad apples. A different possible lesson, one that the statesman himself would probably prefer, is that the job of manning the helm of a great nation’s foreign policy is inherently destructive and morally compromised.

A final lesson to remember — as so many contemplate with great excitement the idea of great power competition with Russia and China, or a new Cold War against Beijing — is that these struggles cannot be waged cleanly, and they absolutely will kill a great many people. At long last, Kissinger himself will not be able to absolve the consciences of those who conduct that struggle.

Robert Farley is a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky.