I have recently finished Walter Isaacson's masterful biography of Henry
Kissinger and have emerged with the following rather disjointed reflections.
What is immediately striking about the man who is so (often grudgingly) hailed for his intellectual brilliance and audacious diplomatic accomplishments is the shocking degree of unprofessionalism with which he conducted his work. Isaacson's book is filled with innumerable instances of Kissinger setting up staff members to take falls for him, pitting them against each other, tapping their phones, reading their personal files, and deceiving them about the reality of situations and what sort of responses were necessary from them. Just to what degree this was perpetuated and accentuated by the air of distrust, paranoia, and secrecy emanating from Richard Nixon's office is difficult to judge; however, it is notable that Kissinger behaved in virtually the same way during his time at Harvard. Isaacson cites a Kissinger associate as saying something to the effect that he was the stereotypical totalitarian bureaucrat: fawning and obsequious to his superiors, tyrannical to his inferiors, jealous and paranoid to his equals. This is borne out in his drive to single-handedly dominate all American foreign policy during his years in power, as he marginalized and then took over the State Department, drove out most of his staff members, and often conducted major diplomacy without bothering to inform anyone else, including the President.
This was, as Isaacson repeatedly points out, due to the warring aspects of his personality: part staggering ego and part persistent insecurity. He thought both that nobody could do it better than him, and that everyone was trying to undermine him and take over. The result was a disorganized, divided, embittered staff often working at cross-purposes, and one can only imagine how much more the interests of the United States could have been served with just the slightest degree of professionalism.
Further, he had such contempt and distrust for democratic process that (in my judgment), he lost an untold amount of viewpoints and expertise which would have greatly aided in the decisions he made, and would have given his diplomacy the guiding mandate which it constantly lacked. It is telling that Isaacson made the following comparison between Kissinger and Zhou Enlai: "the Chinese knew from experience that reshaping foreign policy usually meant reeducating the masses, rather than simply keeping them in the dark." As I will suggest several more times, Kissinger is indeed a brilliant man, but he is brilliant in analysis--his judgment is nearly always wrong.
Much is made of Kissinger's diplomatic feats. Reading closely, however, I found little evidence to support this. The final agreement with Hanoi in 1973 (which won Kissinger the world's most controversial Nobel Peace Prize) was literally word-for-word the demands Hanoi made in 1969. The decision to back Pakistan in an effort to balance with China against India in the 1971 India/Pakistan war was a gross miscalculation. The opening to China itself, while certainly a brilliant conceptual move, consisted in minutia of being consistently outmaneuvered by Zhou Enlai. In effect, his overweening ego caused him to underestimate virtually everyone he dealt with, and he refused to see that they regularly beat him at his own game.
I have always viewed Kissinger's greatest accomplishment as being the last bastion of nineteenth century diplomacy in the modern era. As a scholar, he specialized in the diplomacy of Metternich and Castlereagh and Bismarck (I am now greatly curious to read his doctoral thesis on Metternich) and was a leading exponent of realist theory. However, he seemed to latch on to the cynical amoralism of realist thought and often (in my opinion) conducted diplomacy which was amoral simply for the sake of being amoral. The 1971 India/Pakistan war is the prime example: the United States found itself backing a repressive military regime which had surprise attacked the world's most populous democracy and was attempting to stop a population from achieving self-determination through means of mass slaughter. And, worse in terms of realism, the United States found itself backing what was clearly the losing side. In no way were American interests helped by this, and in many more ways there were harmed.
And as a second criticism in this vein, as Kissinger took over personal control of all American foreign policy, I believe he fancied himself like the great diplomats of the last century, a force unto himself, a floating nexus of policy and the shaping of history. Consequently, much of what he did was concerned less with advancing the interests of the United States (let alone of fostering stability and peace) and more about advancing his own fame, stature, and place in history. And even when this habit was not manifested in a personal egocentrism, it showed itself in a persistent trend of viewing every crisis everywhere in the world as directed at the United States in general and himself in particular, even when it clearly was not.
However. Kissinger was not without formidable qualities and successes. Chief among the latter, in my opinion, was his "shuttle diplomacy" in the Middle East, which brokered the peace that ended the 1973 Yom Kippur war and arguably averted Israel from using its nuclear arsenal. Kissinger was at his best when he was negotiating simply for the sake of negotiation. Certainly he seems to have been more sympathetic to the Israelis, though I doubt he was motivated by Zionist zeal or Jewish solidarity. But he recognized that his personal credibility was his greatest asset at the time, so he dealt fairly (if not openly) with all parties, and was able to turn a bitter regional war into the closest the region had come to peace in a long time.
Likewise, as I mentioned, his analytical abilities were virtually unrivalled. He recognized, for instance, that there was nothing to be gained by permanent hostility with Moscow. He recognized that it was possible to be closer to Moscow and Beijing than they were to each other, and that rather than Communism being an impenetrable monolith, there were tensions between the two powers that could be exploited. He recognized that only a credible, amoral outsider could broker peace in the Middle East, and that stability was in America's interests.
Kissinger wrote in his thesis that "men become myths not by what they know or what they achieve, but by the tasks they set for themselves." If that is so, Kissinger's ego led him to set monumental tasks for himself, which he did usually achieve, and while those tasks may not always have been in the interests of either America or the world, he must in a sense be admired for his audacity.
There are two larger issues which occurred to me while reading this book. The first is the obvious comparison between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
I realize this is a very popular comparison to make, and those who make it tend to do so based on only the most shallow of analyses. There is a lot to it, though, even on close examination.
The war in Vietnam was begun based on a gross misunderstanding (and underestimation) of the situation, the enemy, and of what goals could realistically be achieved. The Americans quite plainly had not read their history and knew nothing about the place or the people who inhabit it. The same is quite obviously true of Iraq.
The problems of extraction are similar, except that in Iraq, there is no opposition government with whom to negotiate. Should the United States pull all of its soldiers out of Iraq today, the country will dissolve not into a unified enemy regime but into a Hobbesian "war of all against all," until one faction is able to dominate the others and install a brutal dictator. However, the same reality has presented itself: the initial goals of the war are not feasible, and never were. Bismarck's maxim has come into force: "woe to the statesman whose reasons for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as its beginning."
Kissinger proposed that since the inital goals of the war were no longer feasible, the realistic American goal in Vietnam should be to establish through military action and negotiation a "decent interval" between the American withdrawal and the inevitable collapse of the Saigon regime. Since the Baker report has recently proposed pretty much what the bipartisan commission on the Vietnam war proposed in 1969, right down to the temporary "troop surge" in the most heavily contested strategic area, it stands to reason there will come a point where it is clear that America can hope for no greater goal in Iraq than it achieved in Vietnam: a "decent interval."
Of course, we all know that isn't going to happen in this case. The first thing the Americans did in Iraq was begin construction of fourteen permanent military bases and move all of the logistics and material out of Saudi Arabia. Iraq is necessary for the interests of the United States in a way Vietnam never was. And it's more than just the oil (although that is certainly a big part), and even the oil should be viewed more through the lens of "contingent necessity," which dictates less that America seize the oil for its own use and more that it do so to keep it from the hands of rivals.
No, it's much more about a sizeable military presence in the Gulf region, to prop up the rotting Saudi regime without being on their soil (so as not to provoke any more bin Ladens who are furious about the presence of infidels occupying the most holy places of Islam), to balance against Russia and China, to safeguard Israel and the UAE and other American client states, and to block against the rise of Iran as a regional power. America cannot afford to get out of Iraq. The question remains whether it can afford to stay.
The second issue which arose while reading this book is more theoreticcal. Kissinger is frequently quoted as referring to a line from Goethe: "given the choice between justice and order, between a society which is disorderly and just or orderly and unjust, I will always choose the latter." I thought immediately of E.H. Carr and his characterization of the left being those who would choose the former, and the right those who would choose the latter. And I think, to take the analysis a step further, those favored qualities are what each philosophy is based on and largely dictates the way in which each philosophy is pursued.
Consider. The American right is orderly. They seem like automatons to the rest of us, like mindless footsoldiers in disciplined, unquestioning ranks, obeying their superiors without thought, absolutely unstoppable in their conviction. I think of Yeats: "the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
The left, however, is disorganized. It is very concerned with what is right and what is moral and it is incessantly fighting amongst itself, eating its own young. Get any two leftist intellectuals in a room and you will immediately have three mutually exclusive opinions and much time will be given to agonizing introspection and second-guessing about the morality of each.
Can these philosophies be divorced from their accompanying qualities? Must the two qualities be conflicting and mutually exclusive? I would suggest that is perhaps the task of the modern intellectual wishing to enact real change in the world. The task is to bring either justice to the right or order to the left.
The question, therefore, is which would be the more difficult task. Can the right (and I am speaking here of the right in general, not the American right, which I feel has long since been hijacked--and American politics is a morbid joke anyway, or at best a grotesque sport, like dog-fighting) be just? Can there be a just, equitable, egalitarian rightist philosophy? My instinct is to suggest there cannot, that the right is based on the protection of the few, not the suffering of the many. But I won't categorically rule it out.
What about the left? Can the left be orderly and still just? Is it possible to impose order on the left? It certainly would make you very unpopular with a lot of people who delight in nothing so much as writing angry articles. Can a just order be imposed?
I don't know. But I think figuring these things out is the only chance we have to really change things, rather than just perpetuating the same sets of stupidites our forebearers invented. I am in all things thinking for a clever third option, something which will become obvious if only the context is enlarged enough, and in this instance, I think I see the question, if not yet the answer.
