Kissinger's Influemce Never Ebbed

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

When Henry Kissinger died recently, he was already, so to speak, a legend. Her was clearly the most important American Secretary of State since two earlier men who also exercised an outsized influence on American foreign policy: John Foster Dulles, who served under President Dwight Eisenhower between 1953 and 1959 during much of the Cold War; and Cordell Hull, who oversaw Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s foreign policy from 1933 to 1944, during the Depression and Second World War.

Apart from serving as Secretary of State under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford between 1973 and 1977, Kissinger was appointed National Security Advisor when the newly elected Nixon entered the White House in 1969. So he had an eight-year run as the country’s premier policy-maker on the international stage.

Kissinger’s period in office was incredibly consequential. It witnessed the final years of the Vietnam War, genocide in Cambodia, a strategic U.S. opening to communist China, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, an Indo-Pakistani War, a military coup in Chile, the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Arab states, and the ensuing global oil crisis.

But Kissinger’s influence didn’t ebb after he left the State Department in 1977. He almost became secretary of state again as part of a co-presidency briefly considered by former California Governor Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford during the Republican Convention in 1980.

But even without a cabinet post, Kissinger remained available for high-level presidential commissions and routinely provided advice to subsequent presidents. Most important, he continued to provide advice to the elites he had worked with by passing messages, sharing analyses, connecting people, and remaining relevant in an ever-changing world.

In later years, his realpolitik views on foreign policy remained constant. His opinion on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, for instance, was that recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina was a mistake, and that the West would have done better to have allowed the Serbs and Croats there to join their respective countries.

 As for the 1999 Kosovo war, the Rambouillet Agreement, which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia, was, as far as he was concerned, a provocation and so an excuse to start bombing Serbia.

“Rambouillet is not a document that any Serb could have accepted. It was a terrible diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that form,” he stated.

On Russia and Ukraine, in a 2014 article in the Washington Post he wrote: “The west speaks Ukrainian; the east speaks mostly Russian. Any attempt by one wing of Ukraine to dominate the other -- as has been the pattern -- would lead eventually to civil war or break up.” He also asserted that Crimea should remain under Russian control.

But following Russia’s 2022 invasion, Kissinger felt that the invasion’s outcome pointed to NATO membership for Ukraine at the end of a peace process.

In a statement made a month before his death, Kissinger responded to the outbreak of the Hamas-Israel war by saying that the goals of Hamas “can only be to mobilize the Arab world against Israel and to get off the track of peaceful negotiations.”

Kissinger was a scholar before he entered political life. His Harvard University PhD dissertation, Peace, Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium: (A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich), two eminent 19^th century foreign ministers, was completed in 1954.

We studied his seminal 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, written while he was a professor at Harvard, in international relations courses when I was an undergraduate at McGill University in the 1960s. He will be long remembered.