Henry A. Kissinger died on Wednesday, November 29, 2023. And I bought my fourth Kissinger book, Diplomacy, at Half Price Books just the day before.
I started buying Kissinger books in the middle of 2022 with the purchase of On China, according to my catalog of books on LibraryThing.
There is lots of fun stuff in On China, starting with the British Macartney mission to China in 1793. See, the Brits wanted to trade with China, so they sailed around the world to China to show the Chinese how great it would be. But the Son of Heaven wasn't having anything to do with trade. First of all, the Chinese regarded all foreigners as barbarians, and second, all they knew was tribute and gifts to and from the barbarians. It was shortly after humiliating Macartney that the Qing dynasty lost the Mandate of Heaven and China entered its Century of Humiliation that only ended with the Nixon/Kissinger trip to China.
Whatabout Mao Zedong? Kissinger says that Mao would frequently inject Confucian sayings into their negotiations. I was shocked: Mao a Confucian scholar? I thought he was a stem-to-stern Commie.
The other surprise from On China is that Kissinger has been visiting China regularly ever since 1971. His last visit was last July, and President Xi said:
"The Chinese people never forget their old friends, and Sino-U.S. relations will always be linked with the name of Henry Kissinger."
But why would Mao care about friendship with the U.S.? Because his big worry was the Soviet Union and its divisions poised on China's border. Just like we worried about the Soviet divisions threatening the Fulda Gap.
On the other hand, there are clearly a lot of people that think that Kissinger was evil, mostly lefties that didn't like the bombing of Cambodia or the Pinochet coup in Chile.
But I think that Kissinger's greatest moment as a diplomat was as 20-year-old PFC Kissinger in 1945. La Wik:
During the American advance into Germany, Kissinger, though only a private (the lowest military rank), was put in charge of the administration of the city of Krefeld because of a lack of German speakers on the division's intelligence staff. Within eight days he had established a civilian administration.
Krefeld is a town of about 250,000 just down the street from Duisburg and Düsseldorf. I think it was in preparation for this event that W.C. Fields coined the All-American exclamation: "Godfrey Daniels, Mother of Pearl!"
Now, lookee here! Here's Francis P. Sempa writing "Time to End Wilsonian Foreign Policy," citing Kissinger's support in his Diplomacy for "realism in foreign policy" over "Wilsonianism." Wilsonianism is all about making the world safe for democracy, and gave us World War I, World War II, and the Bush mess in the Middle East, not to mention expanding NATO eastward, which George Kennan said would be the "most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era."
Problem is, of course, that the foreign policy establishment is all-in on a Wilsonian foreign policy, bless its heart. So when Kissinger dedicates Diplomacy
To the men and women of the Foreign Service of The United States of America, whose professionalism and dedication sustain American diplomacy[,]
He is contradicting his own words in American Foreign Policy -- of which I have a copy -- where he writes:
Bureaucracy becomes an obstacle when what it defines as routine does not address the most significant range of issues or when its prescribed mode of action proves irrelevant to the problem.
When this occurs, the bureaucracy absorbs the energies of the top executives… the analysis of where one is overwhelms the consideration of where one should be going.
And that is why, almost a century before Kissinger's foreign policy service, Lord Salisbury conducted British foreign policy out of his back pocket and usually bypassed the British Foreign Office, according to Andrew Roberts in Salisbury: Victorian Titan.
The one thing negative thing about Henry Kissinger is that he mentored WEF maven Klaus Schwab.
He mentored Schwab at Harvard in 1966-1967, just a few years before Schwab founded the European Management Symposium, which was the predecessor of the World Economic Forum (WEF), in 1971 and apparently followed Kissinger’s directive to form a global scope institution that deals with crises of “world-wide impact.”
Oh dear, what a shame. Do you see the problem? As soon as you set up a "global scope institution" to deal with "crises of 'world-wide impact'," then the bureaucrats of said institution will immediately go out looking for crises.
Hey, I know! Whatabout a climate crisis! What could go wrong!
One fine day, I pray, we’ll see a smart Jewish kid like Kissinger come out of the woodwork and dig the economy out of the climate crisis the way that PFC Kissinger got Krefeld sorted in 1945.
If only.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: National Archives
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