Matt Kroenig: Hello, Emma! I don’t know about you, but I am ready for the upcoming holiday break. Given the news of Henry Kissinger’s passing this week, I thought that might be a good place for us to start.
Matt Kroenig: Hello, Emma! I don’t know about you, but I am ready for the upcoming holiday break. Given the news of Henry Kissinger’s passing this week, I thought that might be a good place for us to start.
Emma Ashford: It’s certainly a controversial topic. I haven’t seen this many people cheering the death of a public figure since Margaret Thatcher died.
Where shall we start? Kissinger was a complex figure with a seriously mixed legacy. There’s a lot to cover, from his diplomatic achievements to his post-government reinvention of himself as an international geopolitical consultant.
MK: Well, I do think cheering the death of almost anyone is in poor taste.
But I would like to start with what he meant for me. As a boy growing up in Missouri who was interested in foreign affairs, I was not familiar with career options in the field. But I was aware of Kissinger’s prominent example of mixing academia and public service. I naively thought, “OK. I’ll just do that.”
EA: He certainly exemplified the scholar-policymaker mold better than most, something that has mostly been lost in the modern era. Kissinger’s academic work undoubtedly prepared him for his government service. His doctoral dissertation was a study of the Congress of Vienna and the politics of European diplomacy in the post-Napoleonic period. It’s not hard to see how some of Kissinger’s own politics grew out of that research: He despised disorder and excessive idealism, believed that coordination between the great powers was necessary to sustain peace, and was generally dismissive of the prospects of small states in power politics.
At the same time, none of Kissinger’s academic works are particularly seminal for scholars, and he never did go back into academia. Once he had attained the heights of power and wealth, he did everything he could to stay there. He liked power, perhaps too much.
MK: I am sure most academics would trade places in a second.
As an aside, my understanding is that Harvard revoked his position as a professor when he overstayed his public service leave. Most universities will give professors a two-year public service leave, but no more. Kissinger decided rightly that serving as the U.S. secretary of state was more important than teaching.
Still, the greatest contribution most academics make is through their scholarship, and Kissinger never slowed down on that front. He continued to write, publish, and influence the foreign-policy debate up until his last days, publishing his last book the year before his 100th birthday.
He spent the last 50 years of his life, post-government service, continuing to do a mix of scholarship, advising governments, and running a successful consulting firm. It was a remarkable career.
EA: Hmm, that’s not quite how I’d put it. As Dan Drezner wrote in his book on The Ideas Industry, Kissinger was indeed a pioneer in post-government consulting careers. Whether that’s a good thing is a different question.
Kissinger portrayed himself as a disinterested elder statesman for much of his life, but in reality, he was selling a product: He was advising all kinds of governments—including one of your favorites, Matt: the Chinese Communist Party—on how to navigate the U.S. political system, and he was using his connections to benefit them.
It’s a model that has been widely replicated since; a sizable number of current Biden administration officials, for example, served at similar consulting firms. I can’t see how it could possibly be good for U.S. national security that senior officials now expect their post-governmental or intra-governmental careers to be all about selling their access for money.
MK: I disagree. If it were such a bad model, it wouldn’t be so widely emulated. As you point out, many former national security officials start consulting businesses after they leave office. They are often advising U.S. and Western firms about geopolitical matters. This is often good for the national security of the country. Many of these firms now, for example, are explaining to big business that, with the changing geopolitics between the United States and China, they need to “de-risk” and reduce their dependence on China. That is both good for these company’s bottom lines and consistent with U.S. strategy.
You’re correct that it is legal to assist foreign governments in gaining access and influence within the United States, but to do so, individuals and companies must register as foreign agents. While there are many businesses that follow that path, the Department of Justice advised in 1989 that Kissinger Associates did not need to be Foreign Agents Registration Act-registered.
Final point: We have to be realistic. There are trillions of dollars riding on understanding geopolitics and U.S. government decisions. Major companies want to have their pulse on these developments. Many of them have government relations offices in Washington for this reason. Someone is going to be doing this work. On balance, I would prefer to have patriots who have served at the highest levels of the U.S. government than others who may be purely driven by mercenary motives.
EA: OK. I tend to think that if the Department of Justice is investigating you for acting as a foreign agent, then you might have strayed a little too close to that line, but fair enough.
Let’s turn to Kissinger’s actual foreign-policy legacy. As one obituary puts it, “Given the kind of offenses listed on Henry Kissinger’s bill of indictment, buckraking might seem less significant compared to the Everest-sized mountain of dead human bodies left by the various policies he advocated over the years.”
I’m not sure I’d go quite that far. Kissinger had some genuine foreign-policy successes: détente with the Soviets, the opening to China, his Arab-Israeli shuttle diplomacy. But he also was complicit in some truly horrible things: coups, assassinations, even genocides. He was not a good person, even by the limited standard of morality we apply to statesmen.
MK: I believe you have previously described yourself as a realist. As you know, as a realist, it does not make sense to apply traditional standards of morality to international relations and foreign policy. The world is an anarchic place in which violence is endemic. It would be foolish for a statesperson to try to impose idealistic moral standards or to transform the world into a utopia. The best they can do is to try to wield the tools of statecraft to advance their country’s interests.
It was reported that Georgetown University was considering renaming its school of foreign service after Madeline Albright, leading to a petition condemning Madeline Albright for her “gross human rights violations” while in office.
I think it is unfortunate and unrealistic that a growing segment of the country seems to think that U.S. foreign policy is inherently immoral.
EA: Those people aren’t serious, nor are the people arguing that Kissinger should be prosecuted for war crimes.
The problem is not that some of Kissinger’s actions in the national interest worked against human rights or democracy. The Cold War was a difficult period, and many of the courses that he proposed were reasonable and even far-sighted. There were certainly those who argued that his willingness to open up to China in the 1970s was a betrayal of U.S. ideals, for example, and they were completely wrong.
But as various people have noted, Kissinger was more a practitioner of machtpolitik than realpolitik. That is to say, his politics tended more toward the use and pursuit of power in all circumstances, rather than the judicious application of power only when required. He often overstepped the bounds of what was necessary, or even expressed appreciation for frankly brutal things regimes were doing to their people. He was complicit in the bombing of Cambodia, genocide in what is now Bangladesh, and the abuses of the Pinochet regime in Chile. None were critical to U.S. national security goals.
MK: There was, of course, a strategic logic to those decisions, including, for example, hitting the supply lines in Cambodia that were fueling the Viet Cong’s war in South Vietnam.
But, as I am sure you would agree, we would not be talking about Kissinger if there were not some notable successes. So, let’s talk about those for a moment.
Along with former U.S. President Richard Nixon and former Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong, he helped to orchestrate the opening to China, which was the most significant geopolitical realignment of the Cold War. It was seen as such a stroke of genius that, to this day, wannabe strategists are recommending a “reverse Kissinger,” for Washington to align with Russian President Vladimir Putin against China, even though that will not work.
In the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, he played a crucial role in deterring the Soviet Union’s intervention. And later, as Martin Indyk details in a recent book, he helped to eject the Soviet Union from the region altogether.
I am not such a big fan of détente, but it was certainly influential and put in train a legacy of strategic stability talks and arms control agreements that lasted for decades.
He was also an effective bureaucratic operator and even managed to get himself appointed as both national security advisor and secretary of state at the same time. As he joked, relations between the White House and the State Department had never been so good.
EA: He was a sneaky, conniving, and excessively flexible operator. That combination produced some stellar diplomatic successes! Indeed, looking at the White House today and its inability to navigate the war in Ukraine or the current chaos in the Middle East, one might wish that we had some people in government who were as creative or as flexible in their thinking as Kissinger.
But at the same time, Kissinger’s conniving and cunning wasn’t always used to further the national interest. For me, the most problematic case is his role in undermining the Vietnam War peace process, which he did to help Nixon get elected. He fed information from the talks to the Nixon campaign, which passed it along to the South Vietnamese to help sabotage the talks. Talks might have failed anyway, but he helped, and tens of thousands of people were killed between that time and the actual U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam a few years later. Those deaths are on his ledger.
MK: I am sure that Kissinger is rolling over in his grave, worried that you don’t approve of his legacy.
But you are right that he was flexible. He is often described as a “realist,” but he was not doctrinaire. He would often update his positions. The book that made him famous advocated for limited nuclear war with the Soviet Union as a way to get around mutually assured destruction, but he later reversed that view, saying that he feared a limited nuclear war could not stay limited.
Most recently, he advocated for Ukrainian membership in NATO after previously opposing it.
EA: By the end of his career, he twisted in the wind to back the opinions of whoever was in power at the time, from former Presidents Bill Clinton to Donald Trump! Yes, he backed Ukrainian membership in NATO, after arguing for years for its neutrality. I wonder if he wouldn’t switch back again if he’d lived a few more years to see the public debate shift again?
MK: I want to pick up on “a few more years.” Why are we debating Kissinger? Why is he perhaps the most famous statesperson in American history? He was a successful academic, but none of his books made it into the international relations theory canon. He had some notable foreign-policy successes, but so did many other national security advisors and secretaries of state.
I think the answer is his sheer longevity and the density of his contributions. He operated at the highest levels of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment for exactly three-quarters of a century, from the publication of his first book in 1957 until earlier this week.
I don’t often agree with Steve Walt, but on Kissinger’s 100th birthday, Walt wrote that Kissinger is so famous because he worked at it harder and longer than anyone else. I think that is basically right.
EA: That sounds about right. He was absolutely determined to cement his legacy and enrich himself, even up to his last few months. He had multiple 100th birthday parties with the rich and famous in the last year.
But for me, that again suggests the biggest problem with Kissinger’s legacy. He wanted to be remembered as America’s most famous statesman, and he spent decades bolstering his image to that end. That’s not the same thing as actually being America’s greatest statesman, who presumably would put the national interest before personal advancement. If the world remembers one thing about Henry Kissinger, it should be this: He served no one more than himself.
MK: Once again, I must disagree. He was a good mentor of talent, helping to elevate people such as Brent Scowcroft. He served on the boards of nonprofits, including the Atlantic Council.
But I doubt we are going to agree on this. And if Kissinger is not America’s greatest statesperson, then who was? That would be a good topic for a future column.
EA: George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Dwight Eisenhower, George Kennan, or any of a long list of others?
But at least Kissinger gave us one final gift: It’s going to be a fun weekend on social media as all the jokes people have been saving up for years finally see the light of day.
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