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And yet, hearing from friends who more directly suffered the military regimes that were enabled, abetted and even directly supported by the United States during his tenure as national security adviser and secretary of state, it has dawned on me that Kissinger wasn’t a rogue monster. He embodied a theory of power that underpinned the world order of his time.
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It was a world in which human rights, democracy and justice were of little relevance; they were subordinate to the overarching goal of bolstering Washington and its allies in a balance of power with the other great coalition led by Moscow.
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Kissinger is still feted today for his successes: the policy of détente with the Soviet Union; opening relations with Mao’s China; avoiding a potentially fatal hot war between rival nuclear powers.
But as José Miguel Insulza, a Chilean senator and former foreign minister, who fled to Mexico as a young man in 1973 after the bloody coup by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, told me, “the human cost of Kissinger’s grand design was very high.”
It’s an irony that Latin America didn’t matter to Kissinger: The world order was set in Bonn, Moscow and Washington. “Nothing important can come from the South,” he told Chilean foreign minister Gabriel Valdés at a luncheon in June 1969. When Mr. Valdés retorted “you know nothing of the South,” he responded “no, and I don’t care.”
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What did matter was preventing, at any cost, another Latin American country following Cuba into the Soviet embrace. Whether the government of said Latin American country was democratically elected was beside the point.
“We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger said just a few days after Allende was elected president in 1970 on the ticket of the left-wing alliance Unidad Popular. Three years later, Allende was dead. Kissinger “didn’t care what happened to the people of Chile or of Argentina,” Insulza said.
Grim as they were, Washington’s crimes in Latin America pale against the atrocities it committed elsewhere in those days. Hundreds of thousands died in Cambodia, carpet bombed on Kissinger’s advice, in the service of delaying America’s inevitable defeat in Vietnam.
Moscow, for sure, was no more constrained by any sense of morality. Indeed, the Soviet Union contemplated invading Poland as recently as 1980. Accusations of human rights abuses were just another weapon shot over the Iron Curtain from both sides.
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One would hope that by now the world would have overcome the logic of raw power. The Soviet Union is dead. That Cold War is over. There is a consensus understanding that it is essential to guarantee human rights and democratic governance. An International Criminal Court is in place to adjudicate egregious abuses. Today, Washington could not, with a straight face, green-light an Indonesian invasion of East Timor, as Kissinger did.
The global situation is unsettled, though. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which Kissinger justified on balance-of-power grounds similar to those he calculated at the height of the Cold War) suggests the rules-based world order hasn’t quite taken. China and the United States are each casting around for allies to bolster their spheres of influence in what is shaping up to be a new global faceoff. In Gaza, concerns over the human rights of civilians are clearly not front of mind.
It would be a disaster, however, if Washington were to reembrace Cold War logic. The United States may have beaten the Soviets. It might even have become an “indispensable nation” for a little bit. But the ruthless Cold War strategy had unintended consequences.
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It’s not just that the carpet bombing of Cambodia contributed to the emergence of the Khmer Rouge (an oopsie the United States experienced again years later with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State in Iraq). The chasm between Washington’s exalted words about democracy, freedom and the like and its unflinching approach to the Cold War did lasting damage to American credibility.
Michael Shifter, a former president of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank who now teaches at Georgetown, points out that “a half century after the military coup that brought Pinochet to power, the U.S.’s shameful role continues to be felt throughout the region and is still widely invoked.”
Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister, argues that “Washington’s so-called realist foreign policy was so shameless, cynical and transparent that it generated antibodies around that world that undermined the credibility of future presidents.” This will get in the way of Washington’s efforts to find friends in the Global South, whether to back Ukraine or join its brewing conflict with China.
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“Kissinger was doubtless very, very smart,” Carlos Ominami, another former exile of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, who returned to become Chilean economy minister after democracy was restored, said. “One would have preferred that his intelligence had been put in the service of a better cause.”
Kissinger may have died believing it was all worth it. I disagree. To be sure, World War III hasn’t happened. But China is now shaping up to be the enemy. The U.S.S.R. may be gone, but Russia is not looking friendly. Counterfactuals are make-believe, but what if the United States in the Cold War had acted according to its professed values? There probably would have been less Latin American carnage.
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I did not personally experience the violence that Henry Kissinger helped unleash upon Latin America in his day. But I witnessed some of the collateral damage.
The children of exiles from Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and beyond crowded into my high school in Mexico City. The grandson of Chilean President Salvador Allende, deposed in a U.S.-backed coup in 1973, was just a couple of years behind me. It is not difficult for me to write that Kissinger was an abomination.
And yet, hearing from friends who more directly suffered the military regimes that were enabled, abetted and even directly supported by the United States during his tenure as national security adviser and secretary of state, it has dawned on me that Kissinger wasn’t a rogue monster. He embodied a theory of power that underpinned the world order of his time.
It was a world in which human rights, democracy and justice were of little relevance; they were subordinate to the overarching goal of bolstering Washington and its allies in a balance of power with the other great coalition led by Moscow.
Kissinger is still feted today for his successes: the policy of détente with the Soviet Union; opening relations with Mao’s China; avoiding a potentially fatal hot war between rival nuclear powers.
But as José Miguel Insulza, a Chilean senator and former foreign minister, who fled to Mexico as a young man in 1973 after the bloody coup by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, told me, “the human cost of Kissinger’s grand design was very high.”
It’s an irony that Latin America didn’t matter to Kissinger: The world order was set in Bonn, Moscow and Washington. “Nothing important can come from the South,” he told Chilean foreign minister Gabriel Valdés at a luncheon in June 1969. When Mr. Valdés retorted “you know nothing of the South,” he responded “no, and I don’t care.”
What did matter was preventing, at any cost, another Latin American country following Cuba into the Soviet embrace. Whether the government of said Latin American country was democratically elected was beside the point.
“We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger said just a few days after Allende was elected president in 1970 on the ticket of the left-wing alliance Unidad Popular. Three years later, Allende was dead. Kissinger “didn’t care what happened to the people of Chile or of Argentina,” Insulza said.
Grim as they were, Washington’s crimes in Latin America pale against the atrocities it committed elsewhere in those days. Hundreds of thousands died in Cambodia, carpet bombed on Kissinger’s advice, in the service of delaying America’s inevitable defeat in Vietnam.
Moscow, for sure, was no more constrained by any sense of morality. Indeed, the Soviet Union contemplated invading Poland as recently as 1980. Accusations of human rights abuses were just another weapon shot over the Iron Curtain from both sides.
One would hope that by now the world would have overcome the logic of raw power. The Soviet Union is dead. That Cold War is over. There is a consensus understanding that it is essential to guarantee human rights and democratic governance. An International Criminal Court is in place to adjudicate egregious abuses. Today, Washington could not, with a straight face, green-light an Indonesian invasion of East Timor, as Kissinger did.
The global situation is unsettled, though. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which Kissinger justified on balance-of-power grounds similar to those he calculated at the height of the Cold War) suggests the rules-based world order hasn’t quite taken. China and the United States are each casting around for allies to bolster their spheres of influence in what is shaping up to be a new global faceoff. In Gaza, concerns over the human rights of civilians are clearly not front of mind.
It would be a disaster, however, if Washington were to reembrace Cold War logic. The United States may have beaten the Soviets. It might even have become an “indispensable nation” for a little bit. But the ruthless Cold War strategy had unintended consequences.
It’s not just that the carpet bombing of Cambodia contributed to the emergence of the Khmer Rouge (an oopsie the United States experienced again years later with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State in Iraq). The chasm between Washington’s exalted words about democracy, freedom and the like and its unflinching approach to the Cold War did lasting damage to American credibility.
Michael Shifter, a former president of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank who now teaches at Georgetown, points out that “a half century after the military coup that brought Pinochet to power, the U.S.’s shameful role continues to be felt throughout the region and is still widely invoked.”
Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister, argues that “Washington’s so-called realist foreign policy was so shameless, cynical and transparent that it generated antibodies around that world that undermined the credibility of future presidents.” This will get in the way of Washington’s efforts to find friends in the Global South, whether to back Ukraine or join its brewing conflict with China.
“Kissinger was doubtless very, very smart,” Carlos Ominami, another former exile of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, who returned to become Chilean economy minister after democracy was restored, said. “One would have preferred that his intelligence had been put in the service of a better cause.”
Kissinger may have died believing it was all worth it. I disagree. To be sure, World War III hasn’t happened. But China is now shaping up to be the enemy. The U.S.S.R. may be gone, but Russia is not looking friendly. Counterfactuals are make-believe, but what if the United States in the Cold War had acted according to its professed values? There probably would have been less Latin American carnage.
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