Schelling bore some intellectual responsibility for America’s involvement in Vietnam. He had a mind like a computer, which he used to apply mathematical formulas to military strategy. Whether one was “deterring the Russians” or “deterring one’s own children,” he said, the problem was the same: to figure out the proper ratio of threat to incentive. He adopted the economist’s insights, especially the ideal that “bargaining power comes from the capacity to hurt,” to cause “sheer pain and damage.”
As one reporter summed up the group’s objections, violation of a neutral country’s sovereignty “could be used by anyone else in the world as a precedent for invading another country, in order, for example, to clear out terrorists.” Even if the invasion succeeded on its own terms and cleared out enemy sanctuaries, Schelling later told a journalist, “it still wouldn’t have been worth the invasion of another country.”
“I know who you are… you’re all good friends from Harvard University.” “No,” said Schelling, “we’re a group of people who have completely lost confidence in the ability of the White House to conduct our foreign policy and we have come to tell you so. We are no longer at your disposal as personal advisers.”
Kissinger’s view of the world, conventionally described as valuing stability and the advance of national interests above abstract ideals like democracy and human rights, is often said to clash with America’s sense of itself as innately good, as an exceptional and indispensable nation. “Intellectually,” Walter Isaacson, writes, his “mind would retain its European cast.” Kissinger had a worldview that a “born American could not have.” And his Bavarian accent did grow deeper as he grew older.
But reading Kissinger as alien, as out of tune with the chords of American exceptionalism, misses the point of the man. He was in fact the quintessential American, his cast of mind perfectly molded to his place and time.
As a young man, Kissinger embraced the most American of conceits: self-creation, the notion that one’s fate is not determined by one’s condition, that the weight of history might impose limits to freedom, but within those limits there is considerable room to maneuver. “The Past is dead, and has no resurrection, but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. Necessity describes the past but freedom rules the future.”
Kissinger’s metaphysics, as they evolved from his thesis to his most recent book, comprised equal parts gloom and glee. The gloom was reflected in his acceptance that experience, life itself, is ultimately meaningless and that history is tragic. “Life is suffering, birth involves death. Transitoriness is the fate of existence. Experience is always unique and solitary. The generation of Buchenwald and the Siberian labor camps cannot talk with the same optimism as its fathers.” The glee came from embracing that meaninglessness, from the realization that one’s actions were neither predetermined by historical inevitability nor governed by a higher moral authority. There were “limits” to what an individual could do, “necessities,” as Kissinger put it, imposed by the fact that we live in a world filled with other beings. But individuals possess will, instinct, and intuition — qualities that can be used to expand their arena of freedom.
Kissinger is inevitably called a “realist,” which is true if realism is defined as holding a pessimistic view of human nature and a belief that power is needed to impose order on anarchic social relations. But if realism is taken as a view of the world that holds that reality is transparent, that the “truth” of fact can be arrived at from simply observing those facts, then Kissinger was decidedly not a realist. Rather, Kissinger in his thesis was declaring himself in favor of what today the Right denounces as a radical relativism: there is no such thing as absolutely truth, he argued, no truth at all other than what could be deduced from one’s own solitary perspective. “Meaning represents the emanation of a metaphysical context. Every man in a certain sense creates his picture of the world.” Truth, Kissinger said, isn’t found in facts but in the questions we ask of those facts. History’s meaning is “inherent in the nature of our query.”
Kissinger wasn’t alone among postwar policy intellectuals in invoking the “tragedy” of human existence and the belief that life is suffering, that the best one can hope for is to establish a world of order and rules. George Kennan, a conservative, and Arthur Schlesinger, a liberal, both thought human nature’s “dark and tangled aspects,” justified a strong military. The world needed policing. But both men eventually became critical, some extremely so, of American power.
Not Kissinger. Fortified by his uncommon mix of gloom and glee, Kissinger never wavered. The gloom led him as a conservative, to privilege order over justice. The glee led him to think he might, by the force of his will and intellect, forestall the tragic and claim, if only for a fleeting moment, freedom. “Those statesmen who have achieved final greatness did not do so through resignation, however well founded. It was given to them not only to maintain the perfection of order but to have the strength to contemplate chaos, there to find material for fresh creation.”
Worse, the sense that the US was the source of as much bad as good in the world began to seep out into popular culture, into novels, movies, and even comic books, taking the shape of a generalized, even if not always political, skepticism and antimilitarism — a “critical disposition,”as one writer put it, that “has become a cultural belief, entirely taken for granted and now part of the conventional wisdom.”
In doing so, Kissinger provided a new generation of politicians a template for how to justify tomorrow’s action while ignoring yesterday’s catastrophe. The present can learn from the past, he said, but not through an obsessive reconstruction of “cause and effect.” Kissinger dismissed “causal” reasoning as a false, or lower-order and deterministic, form of comprehension. Rather, history teaches “by analogy.” And each generation has the “freedom” to “decide what, if anything, is analogous.” In other words, if you don’t like the lesson Richard Nixon and Vietnam teaches, don’t worry about it. There’s always Neville Chamberlain and Munich.
“If we spend our time debating what happened eleven or twelve years ago,” former VP Dick Cheney today says, “we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face.” The US, Cheney insists, needs to do “what it takes, for as long as it takes.”
Kissinger perfected this type of dodge. He was a master of advancing the preposition that the policies of the US and the world’s violence and disorder are entirely unrelated, especially when it came to accounting for the consequences of his own actions. Cambodia? “It was Hanoi,” Kissinger writes, pointing to the North Vietnamese to justify his four-year bombing campaign of that neutral nation. Chile? That country, he says in defense of his coup-plotting against Salvador Allende, “was ‘destabilized’ not by our actions but by Chile’s constitutional President.” The Kurds? “A tragedy,” says the man who served them up to Saddam Hussein, hoping to turn Iraq away from the Soviets. East Timor? “I think we’ve heard enough about Timor.”
Over the course of his career he advanced a set of premises that would be taken up and extended by neoconservative intellectuals, and policy makers: that hunches, conjecture, will, and intuition are as important as facts and hard intelligence in guiding policy, that too much knowledge can weaken resolve, that foreign policy has to be wrested out of the hands of experts and bureaucrats and given to men of action, and that the principle of self-defense (broadly defined to cover just about anything) overrules the ideal of sovereignty. In so doing, Kissinger played his part in keeping the great wheel of American militarism spinning ever forward.
Studying “discernible reality” was not the way the world worked any more, Rove said: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.” The quote circulated widely, interpreted as the blind ideology of the Bush administration taken to its conceited conclusion, the idea that reality itself could bend to neocon will.
But Kissinger said it four decades earlier: “An expert respects ‘facts’ and considers them something to be adjusted to, perhaps to be manipulated, but not to be transcended… In the decades ahead, the West will have to lift its sights to encompass a more embracing concept of reality… There are two kinds of realists: those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.”
History is an endless unfolding of a cosmic beat that express itself in the sole alternatives of subject and object, a vast succession of catastrophic upheavals of which power is not only the manifestation but the exclusive aim; a stimulus of blood that not only pulses through veins but must be shed and will be shed.
Kissinger doesn’t believe in historical inevitability. So were he to be asked this question, he would surely answer no. More importantly, Kissinger was offering the above definition of history — as a reflexive, pulsating projection of power without any intelligible objective other than the projection of power — not as a recommendation but as a warning, a cautionary description of the fate that often befalls great civilizations when they lose their sense of purpose, when they forget why they are projecting their power and only know that they can project their power. He was urging statesmen not to succumb to history’s cosmic beat, not to fall into a “repetition” of the kind of unforced “cataclysmic wars” that brought down past great civilizations. It was advice more easily given than followed.
But Spengler also waged a relentless assault on the very idea of reality. He insisted that there existed a higher plane of experience that was inaccessible to rational thought, a plane where instinct and creativity reigned. “We have hardly yet an inkling of how much in our reputedly objective values and experience is only disguise, only image and expression.” To get behind image and expression, to penetrate perceived material power and interests and grasp what Spengler called destiny, one needed not information but intuition, not facts but hunches, not reason but a soul sense, a world feeling. “Often enough a statesman does not ‘know’ what he is doing, but that does not prevent him from following with confidence just the one path that leads to success.”
“All of life is permeated by an inner destiny that can never be defined. History discloses a majestic unfolding that one can only intuitively perceive, never causally classify.” Spengler, he said, “affirmed that there are certain ultimate goals, which no hypothesis can prove, and no sophistry ever deny, expressed in such words as hope, love, beauty, luck, fear.”
Spengler believed that cause-and-effect analysis was a “ridiculous simplification of the inextricable medley of converging elements that went to make up even the least important item in history.”
Kissinger too dismissed what he called “mere causal analysis” as a kind of superstition akin to primitives trying to explain what causes a steam engine to move forward. Such a “magic attitude,” he said, is an effort to escape the meaninglessness of existence by finding meaning in “data.” Causal reasoning focuses on the “typical” and the “inexorable,” affirming the false doctrine of “eternal recurrence” — that is, the belief in historical inevitability. If something happened once it was bound to happen again, and again. Kissinger rejected this idea. Instead, he affirmed the existence of a realm of consciousness that superseded the material world, a realm that Spengler called “destiny” but Kissinger preferred to describe as “freedom.” “Reality that is subject to the laws of causality,” Kissinger wrote, represents only the outer, surface appearance of things. But “freedom is an inward state” and “our experience of freedom testifies to a fact of existence which no thought-process can deny.”
According to Spengler and Kissinger, it is at the moment when the “causality-men” and the “fact-men” take over that a civilization is in most danger. As the dreams, myths, and risk taking of an earlier creative period fall away, intellectuals, political leaders, and even priests become predominantly concerned with the question not of why but how. The intuitive dimensions of wisdom get tossed aside, technocratic procedure overwhelms purpose, and information is mistaken for wisdom. “Vast bureaucratic mechanisms develop a momentum and a vested interest of their own.”
Western culture was history’s highest expression of technical reason: it “views the whole world,” Kissinger wrote, “as a working hypothesis.” The “machine” was its great symbol, a “perpeteum mobile” — a perpetual motion machine that asserted relentless “mastery over nature.” And the vastly powerful and obsessively efficient US was the West’s vanguard.
Technical knowledge will be of no avail to a soul that has lost its meaning.
Spengler wrote as if decline was inevitable, as if the cycle he described — in which each civilization experiences it spring, summer, autumn, winter — were as unavoidable as the spinning of the earth. Once societies pass their great creative stage and the logicians, rationalists, and bureaucrats arrive on the scene, there is no turning back. Having lost a sense of purpose, civilizations lurch outward to find meaning. They get caught up in a series of disastrous wars, propelled forward to doom by history’s cosmic beat, power for power’s sake, blood for blood’s. “Imperialism is the inevitable product” of this final stage, Kissinger wrote, summing up The Decline of the West’s argument, “an outward thrust to hide the inner void.”
Kissinger accepted Spengler’s critique of past civilizations but rejected his determinism. Decay was not inevitable. “Spengler,” Kissinger said, “merely described a fact of decline, and not its necessity.” “There is a margin,” he wrote in his memoirs, “between necessity and accident, in which the statesman by perseverance and intuition must choose and thereby shape the destiny of his people.” There were limits to what any political leader could do, but to hide “behind historical inevitability is tantamount to moral abdication.”
Kissinger might have come to the conclusion that the best way to avoid decline was to avoid war altogether, to put America’s resources to building a sustainable society at home rather than squander them in adventures in places far and wide. But Kissinger took a different lesson from Spengler: it wasn’t war that was to be avoided but war fought without a clear political objective. He in fact advocated fighting wars far and wide — or at least advocated for a willingness to fight wars far and wide — as a way of preventing the loss of purpose and wisdom that Spengler identified as taking place during civilization’s final stage.
One of the problems with bureaucracies, Kissinger pointed out, is that they tend to compartmentalize functions, which in the case of foreign relations meant severing diplomacy from warfare. For the rest of his career, Kissinger would insist that you can’t practice the first without the possibility of the second; diplomats needed to be able to wield threats and incentives equally. Here, in analyzing the weaknesses of containment, Kissinger was arguing that statesmen had to overcome their caution and think of containment as both a military and a political doctrine, remaining alive to putting into place whatever combination of war and diplomacy was required to check Soviet expansion, to see the whole globe and be willing to act in any part of it, and not in reaction but proactively. They cross a line in Korea, we strike in Baku. “Hit-and-run actions” aimed “to disperse their armies,” Kissinger said.
Such a policy “makes for a paralysis of diplomacy,” Kissinger said, for as time went on, the advantage would steadily tilt way from the US toward its adversaries: “As Soviet nuclear strength increases, the number of areas that will seem worth the destruction of New York, Detroit or Chicago will steadily diminish.” There was very little Moscow or Peking could do over which Washington would risk total nuclear war (as, Kissinger said, the impasse in Korea demonstrated.)
Insulated by two oceans and exhilarated by two victories in world wars fought on foreign soil, the US, Kissinger said, lacked the self-awareness required of a world power. An absolutist sense of morality — “so purist and abstracted” — absolved American leaders from having to make “decisions in ambiguous situations.” American politicians didn’t know how to conduct the “minutiae of day-to-day diplomacy.” Everything was “all-or-nothing.” Kissinger believed that the US needed to be willing to fight a “major” war. That, though, was impossible since all that its leaders could imagine was a “massive” conflict of total destruction. Added to the problem was the country’s technological fetishism, its tendency to respond “to every Soviet advance in the nuclear field by what can be best described as a flight into technology, by devising ever more fearful weapons.”
The more powerful the weapons, the greater becomes the reluctance to use them.
In order to “test” power — that is, in order to create one’s consciousness of power — one needed to be willing to act. And the best way to produce that willingness was to act. On this point at least, Kissinger was unfailingly clear: “inaction” has to be avoided so as to show that action is possible. Only “action,” he wrote, could void the systemic “incentive for inaction.” Only “action” could overcome the paralyzing fear of the “drastic consequences” (that is, nuclear escalation) that might result from such “action.” Only through “action” — including small wars in marginal areas like Vietnam — could America become vital again, could it produce the awareness by which it understands its power, breaks the impasse caused by an overreliance on nuclear technology, instills cohesion among allies, and reminds and increasingly ossified foreign policy bureaucracy of the purpose of the American power.
Alarmism was then, as it is today, a good career move: “We must not delude ourselves about the gravity of our position,” he said, for “our margin of survival has narrowed dangerously.”
“One-percent doctrine,” as expressed by Dick Cheney, that if there is even the slightest chance that a threat will be realized, the US would act as if that threat were a foregone conclusion: “It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It’s about our response.”
What one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one’s system, and on the concept one has of one’s self and one’s relationship to the universe.
Threat every human being, including yourself, as an end and never a means.
We can’t, in other words, be both radically free and subject to a fixed moral requirement. Kissinger admitted that some people might find such a position a “counsel of despair,” since it rejects the possibility of any foundational truth. But, he said, it was actually liberating since it allowed men to escape, however fleetingly, the misery of existence: “Our values are indeed necessary, but not because of an order of nature; rather, they are made necessary by the act of commitment to the metaphysics of a system. This may be the ultimate meaning of personality, of the loneliness of man, and also of his ability to transcend the inevitability of his existence.”
“Henry, you’re brilliant. But you’re arrogant. In fact you’re the most arrogant man I’ve ever met. Mark my words,” Elliott continued, “you arrogance is going to get you in real trouble one day.”
“That man Nixon is not fit to be president.” He knew of what he spoke, for Kissinger had been in charge of keeping Rockefeller’s “shit files” on Nixon, “several filing cabinets” containing what today is called oppositional, or negative research.
Intentionally or not, these excuses mimic the approach to the past Kissinger outlined in his undergraduate thesis. Truth is not found in “the facts of history” but from a “construct” of hypotheticals, counterfactuals, and conjectures.
Four years earlier, Kissinger had elaborated on the importance of political imagination in his discussion of JFK’s response to the Cuban missile crisis. The “essence” of good foreign policy, Kissinger wrote, “is its contingency; its success depends on the correctness of an estimate which is in part conjectural.” The problem, though, is that successful nation-states rationalize their foreign policy. They create a foreign service, with protocols, guidelines, clear procedures, and grades for promotion, administered by functionaries who depend on experts deeply versed in the particularities of their particular region. The whole system is set up to strive for “safety” and “predictability,” to work for the maintenance and reproduction of the status quo. “The attempt to conduct policy bureaucratically leads to a quest for calculability which tends to become a prisoner of events.” Routinization leads to caution, caution to inaction, inaction to atrophy. Success is measured by “mistakes avoided rather than by goals achieved.”
In contrast, great statesmen, the ones who will truly make a difference, never let themselves become paralyzed by a “pre-vision of catastrophes.” They are agile, thriving on “perpetual creation, on a constant redefinition of goals.”
Even with access to Johnson’s negotiating instructions, he couldn’t have had exact information about the decisions being made at the White House. He had to have been winging it, at least to some degree, guessing at what others knew, imagining what others would do with that guess, playing the angles, sussing out the chance, all the while giving the appearance of composure and certainty.
In modern democratic societies, politics are founded on the principles thought to be absolute and timeless — civil equality, political freedom, and due process — applicable to all people, everywhere, at all times. Diplomacy, however, reveals these ideals to be, by definition, negotiable and their application contingent on political expediency. The interstate system is made up of competing polities, each representing unique cultures and values, each with its own history and interests. Wars, crises, and diplomatic tensions may occur over any given issue. But sustained threats to the international system appear when one nation insists that its parochial “version of justice” is universal and tries to impose it on other nations. “The international experience of a people is a challenge to the universality of its notion of justice,” Kissinger wrote, “for the stability of an international order depends on self-limitation, on the reconciliation of different versions of legitimacy.”
For Kissinger, the incongruity between domestic absolutism and international relativism was more than a technical problem. It was primal, for it forced nations to confront the fact that there were limits to their “will-to-infinity,” that ideals heretofore thought to be in harmony with the heavens were actually just really their own particular thing.
Kissinger dwelled awhile on the danger statesmen face when they point out to their nation’s people that they are not, in fact, the world, that their aspirations are not boundless, that other peoples, with different interests and experiences, exist. Unwilling to accept these limits, citizens often stage “an almost hysterical, if subconscious, rebellion against foreign policy.” The most common expression of this rebellion, Kissinger argued, is to impose an impossibly hight test of purity on diplomats, limiting their ability to compromise with, or even talk to, evoys of nations deemed to be immoral, unnatural, and beyond the pale.
Thus the double-bind burden of statesmen. They need to represent the aspirations of their people, yes, and strive to resist the Spenglerian rot. But they also must gently accommodate citizens to the fact of mortality. They need to use their art to help their nation admit its limitations, accepting that its ideals are not timeless, its morals not pristine. “The statesman must therefore be an educator,” Kissinger wrote, “he must bridge the gap between a people’s existence and his vision.”
Nixon wanted to press Israel to give up its nuclear program but, not wanting to lose pro-Israel votes in Congress, relented. The president also thought he would get “more political than national security value” from SALT talks with Moscow.
We knew Henry as the ‘hawk of hawks’ in the Oval Office. But in the evenings, a magical transformation took place. Touching glasses at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would suddenly become a dove. And the press, beguiled by Henry’s charm and humor, bought it. They just couldn’t believe that the intellectual, smiling, humorous, ‘Henry the K’ was a hawk like ‘that bastard’ Nixon.
Kissinger was effective with liberal critics. With religious folks, he could invoke his experience with in the Holocaust. With reporters, he could flatter and leak and stroke their egos. And with students, he cultivated a compelling mix of irony and candor.
Never at a loss for a useful historical analogy, Kissinger told Nixon that if “Britain had a press like this in WW2, they would have quit in ’42.”
By late spring, the negotiating momentum had swung to the North Vietnamese. On May 2, Kissinger sat down in Paris with North Vietnam’s main representative, Le Duc Tho, in a meeting he described as “brutal.” “Le Duc Tho was not even stalling,” Kissinger said. “Our views had become irrelevant; he was laying down terms.” “He operated on us like a surgeon with a scalpel with enormous skill,” Kissinger remembered years later.
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
Kissinger, in fact, had Ellsberg’s kind of methodology in mind when he criticized, in his undergraduate thesis, the smallness of American social science and the conceits of “positivism,” the idea that truth or wisdom could be derived from logical postulates or mathematical formulas.
He related a story of how Robert McNamara, soon after being named secretary of defense, shook up the bureaucracy by immediately flooding the Pentagon officers and staff with written questions. The answers he received weren’t important. What mattered was that McNamara, by demanding detailed responses on an impossibly short deadline, was establishing his dominance. And the questions were designed in such a away as to show that the defense secretary was already familiar with controversies and rivalries, that he had his own informants embedded in the department.
According to Kissinger’s worldview, Ellsberg shouldn’t have existed, or at least he shouldn’t have done what he did. Midlevel experts and analysts were supposed to be risk-avoiding functionaries, little better than insurance actuaries. His faith in data, his belief that he could capture the vagaries of human behavior in mathematical codes and then use those codes to make decisions, should have led him to a state of, if not paralysis, then predictability. As Kissinger would later write, “most great statesmen” are “locked in permanent struggle with the experts in their foreign offices, for the scope of the statesman’s conception challenges the inclination of the expert toward minimum risk.”
Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.
I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve know other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.
First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in way you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using that what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t… and that all those other people are fools.
Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the NYT can. But that takes a while to learn.
IN the meantime, it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: “What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?” And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues… and with myself.
You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.
Kissinger, at a later date, complained to Ellsberg about his former Harvard colleagues, including Thomas Schelling, who had turned against the war. He was, reports Ellsberg, “contemptuous of their presumption that they could judge a policy when they knew so little about policy making from the inside.”
“They never had the clearances,” Kissinger said.
“When the record is written,” he said, seemingly on the verge of tears, “one may remember that perhaps some lives were saved and perhaps some mothers can rest more at ease, but I leave that to history. What I will not leave to history is a discussion of my public honor.”
The rest of the White House was being revealed to be little more than a bunch of shady two-bit thugs, but Kissinger was someone America could believe in. “We were half-convinced,” Ted Koppel said in a documentation in 1974, just after Kissinger’s threatened resignation, “that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man.” The secretary of state was a “legend, the most admired man in America, the magician, the miracle worker.” Kissinger, Koppel said, “may be the best things we’ve got going for us.”
Most great statesmen have been either representatives of essentially conservative social structures or revolutionaries. The conservative is effective because as a defender of the status quo he doesn’t have to justify his every step along the way. But the revolutionary also has an advantage in that he believes himself liberated from the past. He thus has more freedom to act and more easily dissolves technical limitations. Kissinger was a conservatives, but he was also a dialectician, and he believed that revolutionaries possessed a number of qualities — surety of purpose, a vision for the future, an ability to overcome institutional lethargy — that conservatives would need if they were to best the revolutionary challenge.
Freedom means the knowledge of necessity.
Kissinger was familiar with Hegel’s “unity of opposites,” the notion that ideas, people, political movements, and nations are defined by their contradictions. He believed that effective diplomacy was the managing of those contradictions, that what made great statesmen great was their ability to “restrain contending forces, both domestic and foreign, by manipulating their antagonisms.”
The efforts of old revolutionaries, for reasons more sentimental than rational, to rediscover their roots, to convince themselves that the purposes for which they had sacrificed so much in seizing power had not been totally overwhelmed by the compromises they had had to make in actually wielding power.
Arms dealers joked that the shah devoured their manuals in much the same way as other men read Playboy.
Reading the diplomatic record, one comes away with an impression that Kissinger must have felt an enormous weariness preparing for meetings with the shah, as he considered the precise gestures and words he would need to make it clear that his majesty mattered, that he was valued.
What is the most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?
These hearings really weren’t confrontational. The senators questioned Kissinger with a “mixture of admiration, respect, and bewilderment.”
But, really, what don’t we know? Certainly the fact that we had been torturing people — and training our allies to torture people — long before 9/11 was known to anyone who wanted to know. Kissinger was right: information alone is not knowledge; too much data can overwhelm wisdom; the “truth” revealed by “facts” is not self-evident.
Symington summed up the “dove” position: “What I do not like about this is that we did not know about it.”
“Frankly, Mr. Secretary,” said Dellums, thinking he had cornered Kissinger, “and I mean this very sincerely, I am concerned with your power, and the method of your operation, and I am afraid of the result on American policy… Would you please comment, sir?”
Kissinger gave a pitch-perfect response, delivered with just a hint of borscht-bell syntax: “Except for that, there is nothing wrong with my operation?”
If you agree with our ends, then why question our means?
Some act. Somewhere. In the future, Washington will have to take “tougher stands” in the international arena “in order to make others believe in us again.” Inaction needs to be avoided to show that action is possible.
If there is a perception overseas that we are so weakened by our internal debate [over Vietnam] so that it looks liek we can’t do anything about a country of 8 million people, then in three or four years we are going to have a real crisis.
Kissinger rarely put anything on the record in normal diplomatic channels if he could devise a more secretive back channel instead.
The silent nod, the public gesture. A four-minute “word alone” with a key player in an international death-squad consortium, an impassioned speech on human rights. Secrecy and spectacle. Modern statecraft has long operated between these two poles, as diplomats have moved back and forth between the dark corner and the limelight. Do it quickly, Kissinger told his foreign allies. Do it theatrically, he told Ford: “Let’s look ferocious!”
Kissinger is known for the “lapidary precision” of his character analysis, his ability to capture a person’s essence in a few exact words. But Reagan left him at a loss.
Reagan had apparently told Kissinger, “Hell, people are remembered not for what they do, but for what they say. Can’t you find a few good lines?”
Acting implies calculation. Nixon and Kissinger were calculated: they manipulated events and choreographed gestures, creating the atmospherics that served their purposes. And even the existentialist Kissinger believed that reality existed. He wasn’t a solipsist. Individuals might not have unmediated access to that reality their relative, subjective perspective, but he did think that reality set limits and imposed restraints, or “necessities.”
Reagan was a rung further up the metaphysical ladder, a politician who managed to abolish the distinction between appearance and reality. “There are not two Ronald Reagans,” Nancy Reagan once said, responding to the idea that her husband was a cynic, that his homespun was disingenuous. “You look in back of a statement for what the man really means,” Nancy continued, “but it takes people a while to realize that with Ronnie you don’t have to look in back of anything.”
Previously, at least since WW1, it had been mostly Democrats who started and ran the nation’s wars, doing so in the name of spreading democracy. Republicans had long been the party of the hard line, but their hard line tended to be chauvinist, isolationist, and know-nothing, devoid of the democratic evangelicalism associated with the Wilsonian tradition of the Democratic Party. That would change with Reagan.
Kissinger lated complained about Rumsfeld’s “ambitions.” He was, Kissinger said, “the rottenest person he had known in government.”
What Reagan and his followers did, then, was to keep Kissingerism by splitting it in two. They claimed as their own the half that emphasized that the human condition was radical freedom, that decline was not inevitable, that the course of history could be swayed by the will of purposeful men. Rodgers writes that “by the time Reagan entered the White House, freedom’s nemesis had migrated into the psyche. Freedom’s deepest enemy was pessimism: the mental undertow of doubt, the paralyzing specter of limits, the ‘cynic who’s trying to tell us we’re not going to get any better.’” Into Regan’s speeches slipped an “enchanted, disembedded, psychically involute sense of freedom” celebrating the “limitless possibilities of self and change.”
“America’s not just a word,” Reagan said in his 1984 address, “it is a hope, a torch shedding light to all the hopeless of the world… You know, throughout the world, the persecuted hear the word ‘America,’ and in that sound they hear the sunrise, hear the rivers push, hear the cold, swift air at the top of the peak. Yes, you can hear freedom.”
The flimsiness of Kissinger’s comparison is instructive. Foreign policy makers often invoke analogies — usually ones involving Nazis, Hitler, or Munich — for two reasons. The first is to provide a simple framing mechanism to justify action in the present. Saddam is Hitler — three words that concisely convey a world of moral and historical meaning. The second is to deflect away from methods of historical inquiry, such as cause-and-effect analysis, that might place responsibility for current crises on past policies. Kissinger has said, over and over again, that one of the worst conditions that can befall a political leader is to become “prisoner of the past,” to be overly worried about repeating mistakes. Statesmen must refuse, as Kissinger has refused, to accept the proposition that the consequences of any previous action, no matter how horrific, should restrict their room to maneuver in the future.
The bombing was an effective recruitment tool for the Khmer Rouge. Propaganda doesn’t seem like quite the right word, since it implies some form of deception or manipulation.
The ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told.
The bombing sanctioned their extremism: when political-education cadres pointed to charred corpses and limbless children that this was a “manifestation of simple American barbarism,” who could disagree?
But covert ops and political opportunism were not Kissinger’s chief contribution to American militarism. Rather, it is his philosophy of history that was key in restoring the imperial presidency at the moment of its greatest vulnerability. As we saw earlier, the “realism” he is famous for is profoundly elastic, anticipating the extreme subjectivism of the neoconservatives. Kissinger taught that there was no such thin as stasis in international affairs: great states are always either gaining or losing influence, which means that the balance of power has to be constantly tested through gesture and deed. He warned policy makers and defense intellectuals to watch out for the “causal principle.” Let antiquarians concern themselves with why the current crisis had come about. Statesmen have to respond to the crisis and not obsess over its root causes. Their responsibility is to the future, not to the past.
As with most military actions, the invaders had a number of justifications to offer, but at that moment the goal of installing a “democratic” regime in power suddenly flipped to the top of the list. In adopting that rationale for making war, Washington was in effect radically revising the terms of international diplomacy. At the heart of its argument was the idea that democracy trumped the principle of national sovereignty.
Today we are living in historic times. A time when a great principle is spreading across the world like wildfire. That principle, as we all know, is the revolutionary idea that people, not governments, are sovereign.
Einaudi’s remarks hit on all the points that would become so familiar early in the next century in Bush’s “Freedom Agenda”: the idea that democracy, as defined by Washington, was a universal value, that “history” represented a movement toward the fulfillment of that value, and that any nation or person that stood in the path of such fulfillment would be swept away.
In the mythology of American militarism that has taken hold since George W. Bush’s wars, the actions of his father, George H. W. Bush, are often held up as a paragon of prudence. After all, their agenda held that it was the duty of the US to rid the world not just of evildoers but of evil itself. In contrast, the elder Bush, we are told, recognized the limits of American power.
And we were going to do it in the name of not national security but of the “civilized advancement” of democracy. Later, after 9/11, when George W. Bush insisted that the ideal of national sovereignty was a thing of the past, when he said nothing — certainly not the opinion of the international community — could stand in the way of the “great mission” of the US to “extend the benefits of freedom across the globe,” all he was doing was throwing more fuel on the “wildfire” sparked by his father.
As a public official, Kissinger repeatedly mocked the principle of sovereignty. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” he once said of Salvador Allende’s 1970 election.
The cosmic has rhythm, tact, the grand harmony that binds together lovers or crowds in moments of absolute wordless understanding, the pulse that unites a sequence of generations into a meaningful whole. This is Destiny, the symbol of the blood, of sex, of duration. This answers the question of when and wither, and represents the only method of approaching the problem of time. It is felt by the great artist in his moment of contemplation, it is embodied by the statesman in action and is lived by the man of the Spring-time culture. It constitutes the essence of tragedy, the problem of “too late”, when a moment of the present is irrevocably consigned to the past. The microcosm contains tension and polarity, the loneliness of the individual in a world of strange significances, in which the total inner meaning of others remain an eternal riddle. Rhythm and tension, longing and fear, characterize the relationship of the microcosm to the macrocosm.
The two men concluded that the old big-bellied B-52s that had been used extensively in Vietnam and now were being deployed to bomb Baghdad were more effective at sowing terror and generating panic than the lean “hi-tech” missiles the media were fascinated with.
Such color commentary, along with the real-time reporting, the night-vision equipment, and camera-carrying smart bombs, allowed for the public consumption of a techno-display of apparent omnipotence that, at least for a short time, helped consolidate mass approval. The assault was meant as both a lesson and a warning for the rest of the world. And with instant replay came instant gratification, confirmation that the president had the public’s backing.
A 12-year siege ensured, with the sanctions greatly damaging Iraq’s economy and inflicting unimaginable hardship.
That’s more children than died in Hiroshima. “We think the price is worth it,” Albright responded.
But, Wolfowitz said, the problem with this new militarism was that it was born out of softness, not hardness, out of “complacency bred by our current predominance.” It came too easy and had no real costs. There were, he wrote, in what almost sounded liked a complaint, “virtually no American casualties” in Clinton’s wars.
He did, though, worry that the window of opportunity wouldn’t stay open long. He advised Bush to act fast “while the memory of the attack on the US is still vivid and American-deployed forces are still available to back up the diplomacy.”
“Withdrawal of US troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public,” Kissinger warned Nixon. “The more US troops come home, the more will be demanded.” Don’t get caught in that trap, Kissinger told Gerson, for once withdrawals start, it will become “harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers.”
Kissinger remains consistent that one shouldn’t look to history to find the causes of present problems or the origins of blowback. Too much information about the past makes for paralysis. As Bush’s hawkish ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, recently said, past decisions are “irrelevant to the circumstances we face now.” What is relevant is how we act to contain the current threat. “If we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago,” Dick Cheney insists, “we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face.” “I won’t talk about the past,” Jeb Bush said, when asked if he would address his brother’s foreign policy if he rant for the presidency himself. “I’ll talk about the future.”
Unlike the older forms of conquest, European expansion starting in the late 19th century was not driven by the specific appetite for a specific country but conceived as an endless process in which every country serve only as a stepping-stone for further expansion.
In a way, Kissinger achieved such a fusion between self and system. The melding is so complete that Kissinger can’t imagine criticism of his policies as anything other than criticism of what he thinks America should be. “If we want to bring America together in the crisis that we face,” he recently said, “we should stop conducting these discussions as a civil war,” that is, stop trying to hold public officials responsible for the actions they take in the name of national defense.