Kissinger's Shadow

Dean Acheson, often considered to be the greatest secretary of state in the twentieth century (even by Henry Kissinger), liked to say that statesmanship consisted of “the apprehension of imponderables.” Foreign policy decisions are complicated and intricate, always based on imperfect information, and their genesis ultimately resides in the intuitive feel of the statesman for particular situations and structured outcomes. For Greg Grandin, Kissinger is similarly an “existentialist,” who believes not in the transparency of decision, but in its opacity; not in truth, but in how statesmen create truths (p. 15). Grandin traces this stance to Oswald Spengler, whose pessimism influenced Kissinger less than did his belief in intuition, hunches, or “a soul sense” (p. 19). Kissinger made these ideas his own. “History discloses a majestic unfolding,” he wrote, “that one can only intuitively perceive, never causally classify” (p. 18). In other words, Kissinger follows his intuition, and history majestically unfolds. Perhaps this was true of the opening to China in the 1971–1972 period, a master stroke, except that it was Richard M. Nixon's idea, not Kissinger's. The simultaneous détente with the Soviet Union was also quite an achievement, except that within a few years Kissinger had repudiated it: history had unfolded to make Kissinger look like an appeaser, at least according to Ronald Reagan (p. 161). But what about the secret bombing of Cambodia and Kissinger's connivance in overthrowing Prince Sihanouk's government and demolishing his careful neutralism, both of which, in Grandin's view, led to the Pol Pot nightmare? What of his constant intrigues to depose Salvadore Allende's democratic government in Chile and his squalid succoring of Augusto Pinochet; his cultivating Indonesian generals when they first invaded and then wreaked genocide in East Timor; his holding Deng Xiaoping's hand after the Tiananmen massacres; his fawning on Ferdinand Marcos, Park Chung-hee, and the Shah of Iran? All of these Grandin effectively lays at Kissinger's doorstep. Yet for Ted Koppel in these same years, here was “a legend, the most admired man in America, the magician, the miracle worker” (p. 110). When we compare Kissinger's appalling record to his continued standing among American elites (Hillary Clinton is a fan), perhaps we can call him a mess of a statesman but a great ventriloquist

Apprehension · Epistemology · Intuition · Political science · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law · Philosophy

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