The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Henry Kissinger

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Apart from serving as Secretary of State under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford between 1973 and 1977, Henry Kissinger was appointed National Security Advisor when the newly elected Richard Nixon entered the White House in 1969. Photo by Marvin Joseph /The Washington Post

When Henry Kissinger died last week, a friend asked “what do you think of Kissinger? Was his ‘raison d’état’ not just morally wrong, but did it sometimes lead to perverse outcomes? Conniving war criminal or prescient statesman? Or possibly both?”

All good questions, and many people have been asking them in the very large number of articles that have appeared since his death.

Apart from serving as Secretary of State under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford between 1973 and 1977 – and who, along with Alexander Haig, was effectively running the country during the Watergate scandal – Kissinger was appointed National Security Advisor when the newly elected Nixon entered the White House in 1969. He had an eight-year run as the country’s premier policy-maker on the international stage.

Kissinger 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.

In such a long and varied life, it’s only possible to pick out a few diplomatic highlights (and lowlights) in a short review of Kissinger’s career. Let’s call them the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Ending the American military participation in the Vietnam War was definitely good. As National Security Adviser, Kissinger sought initially to find a way to end the war on American terms. The bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and 1970, for example, was an attempt to deny safe sanctuary to the Viet Cong but made little difference other than leading to the eventual triumph of the fanatical Khmer Rouge.

 After 1970, the United States had no good options, and Kissinger sought an exit. Accepting the obvious, Paris became the setting for Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Le Duc Tho to discuss terms for peace. They met a total of 68 times. The Paris Peace Accords leading to a ceasefire in Vietnam were signed on January 27, 1973. For these efforts, they later shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

The “opening to China” in 1972 was also positive. Nixon had been interested in improving relations with Beijing, leveraging schisms in the Sino-Soviet relationship to further contain his Cold War adversary in Moscow. By late 1970, Nixon and Kissinger were ramping up efforts to establish communication with the Communist state. Kissinger said he “was thinking of China as a road to balance the Soviet Union.”

In 1971, Kissinger was secretly dispatched to Beijing for discussions with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai on mending their divisions. Nixon’s history-making trip to China in the spring of 1972 led to the Shanghai Communiqué, which stated the U.S. formally acknowledged “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China.”

Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy during and after the 1973 Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War was, in my view, more “bad” than good, but still forgivable. In the initial stages of the conflict, the Egyptian and Syrian armies made significant gains. The Pentagon and Secretary of Defence James Schlesinger were strongly opposed to any resupply of American equipment. So Israel’s isolation and Nixon’s preoccupation with Watergate left only Kissinger.

Kissinger later denied deliberately delaying airlifts of weapons to replenish Israel’s depleted supplies during the war, saying any delay was due to logistical problems. But others have maintained Kissinger had deliberately delayed the supply because he “wanted Israel to bleed just enough” to soften the way for post-war diplomacy.

In January 1974, Kissinger helped negotiate the first Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement, and in May, he arranged a Syrian-Israeli disengagement after a month of intense negotiations.

Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy secured one last deal in September 1975 with the conclusion of a second Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement. This, in many ways, began the long-term change in the relation of forces between Israel and the Arab states, to the former’s detriment.

The “ugly” best describes Kissinger’s role in the overthrow of Chile’s leftist president Salvador Allende in September 1973. He urged Nixon to overthrow the democratically elected Allende because Allende’s “model” might become “insidious.” He assisted in the consolidation of the Augusto Pinochet military regime which lasted until 1990.

Kissinger’s influence in Latin America spread far beyond Chile. He played a role in Operation Condor, which linked the military regimes in an intelligence-sharing network to hunt down left-wing dissidents. He also turned a blind eye to the Argentinean military’s “dirty war” against its people following the 1976 overthrow of Isabel Peron.

Another ugly mark on his record was the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in December 1975, which set the stage for the long, bloody, and disastrous occupation of the territory that ended only after an international peacekeeping force was introduced in 1999. This course of action of dubious legality resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Timorese.

We should remember that Kissinger was a scholar before he entered political life. His seminal 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, written while he was a professor at Harvard, was a standard text in political science courses at universities in the 1960s. I studied it at McGill. He will be long remembered.