Henry Kissinger, 1923-2023
The most important and controversial American diplomat of the postwar era is gone at 100.
David E. Sanger, New York Times, “Henry Kissinger Is Dead at 100; Shaped Nation’s Cold War History“
Henry A. Kissinger, the scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States’ opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so, died on Wednesday at his home in Kent, Conn. He was 100.
His death was announced in a statement by his consulting firm.
Few diplomats have been both celebrated and reviled with such passion as Mr. Kissinger. Considered the most powerful secretary of state in the post-World War II era, he was by turns hailed as an ultrarealist who reshaped diplomacy to reflect American interests and denounced as having abandoned American values, particularly in the arena of human rights, if he thought it served the nation’s purposes.
He advised 12 presidents — more than a quarter of those who have held the office — from John F. Kennedy to Joseph R. Biden Jr. With a scholar’s understanding of diplomatic history, a German-Jewish refugee’s drive to succeed in his adopted land, a deep well of insecurity and a lifelong Bavarian accent that sometimes added an indecipherable element to his pronouncements, he transformed almost every global relationship he touched.
At a critical moment in American history and diplomacy, he was second in power only to President Richard M. Nixon. He joined the Nixon White House in January 1969 as national security adviser and, after his appointment as secretary of state in 1973, kept both titles, a rarity. When Nixon resigned, he stayed on under President Gerald R. Ford.
Mr. Kissinger’s secret negotiations with what was then still called Red China led to Nixon’s most famous foreign policy accomplishment. Intended as a decisive Cold War move to isolate the Soviet Union, it carved a pathway for the most complex relationship on the globe, between countries that at Mr. Kissinger’s death were the world’s largest (the United States) and second-largest economies, completely intertwined and yet constantly at odds as a new Cold War loomed.
For decades he remained the country’s most important voice on managing China’s rise, and the economic, military and technological challenges it posed. He was the only American to deal with every Chinese leader from Mao to Xi Jinping. In July, at age 100, he met Mr. Xi and other Chinese leaders in Beijing, where he was treated like visiting royalty even as relations with Washington had turned adversarial.
He drew the Soviet Union into a dialogue that became known as détente, leading to the first major nuclear arms control treaties between the two nations. With his shuttle diplomacy, he edged Moscow out of its standing as a major power in the Middle East, but failed to broker a broader peace in that region.
Over years of meetings in Paris, he negotiated the peace accords that ended the American involvement in the Vietnam War, an achievement for which he shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. He called it “peace with honor,” but the war proved far from over, and critics argued that he could have made the same deal years earlier, saving thousands of lives.
Thomas W. Lippman, Washington Post, “Henry Kissinger, who shaped world affairs under two presidents, dies at 100“
Henry A. Kissinger, a scholar, statesman and celebrity diplomat who wielded unparalleled power over U.S. foreign policy throughout the administrations of Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford, and who for decades afterward, as a consultant and writer, proffered opinions that shaped global politics and business, died Nov. 29 at his home in Connecticut. He was 100.
His death was announced in a statement by his consulting firm, which did not give a cause.
As a Jewish immigrant fleeing Nazi Germany, Dr. Kissinger spoke little English when he arrived in the United States as a teenager in 1938. But he harnessed a keen intellect, a mastery of history and his skill as a writer to rise quickly from Harvard undergraduate to Harvard faculty member before establishing himself in Washington.
As the only person ever to be White House national security adviser and secretary of state at the same time, he exercised a control over U.S. foreign policy that has rarely been equaled by anyone who was not president.
He and Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the secret negotiations that produced the 1973 Paris agreement and ended U.S. military participation in the Vietnam War. His famous “shuttle diplomacy” after the 1973 Middle East war helped stabilize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
As the impresario of Nixon’s historic opening to China and as the theoretician of détente with the Soviet Union, Dr. Kissinger earned much of the credit for seismic policy shifts that redirected the course of world affairs.
Alan Cullison, Wall Street Journal, “Henry Kissinger, Who Helped Forge U.S. Foreign Policy During Vietnam and Cold Wars, Dies at 100“
Former presidential adviser Henry Kissinger has died, according to a statement posted on his website, bringing to a close one of the most polarizing and influential diplomatic lives in U.S. history.
[…]
Kissinger’s diplomatic coups made him a hero to war-weary Americans fearing nuclear armageddon. But he drew the ire of both the American left, which held him responsible for brutalities committed abroad, and the right, which regarded him with suspicion for advocating detente with Communist regimes.
Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, along with the Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho, for pursuing secret diplomatic talks that forged the Paris Peace Accords, ending the U.S. military campaign in Southeast Asia.
Le Duc Tho refused his award, saying that peace wasn’t achieved. Kissinger accepted his prize “with humility,” and offered to return it after the fall of South Vietnam two years later.
Kissinger still won gratitude for helping to extricate the U.S. from the war with its power mostly intact. In 1974, he was featured as a diplomatic superman on the cover of Newsweek, clad in tights, a cape, and a “Super K” emblazoned on his chest.
“Henry Kissinger…literally wrote the book on diplomacy,” John Kerry, who was then secretary of state, said at a ceremony in 2014. Kissinger “gave us the vocabulary of modern diplomacy, the very words ‘shuttle diplomacy’ and ‘strategic patience.’”
In half a century, Kissinger never lost his love of the public spotlight and global politicking. He parlayed his contacts to foreign governments and global business leaders into a lucrative consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, which he established in 1982.
He maintained an ambitious writing career into his 90s, publishing books on history, strategic policy and his own diplomatic activities. In the book “World Order,” which came out in 2014, Kissinger brought his views to bear on a world grown both more divided and interdependent.
In 2022, when he was in his late 90s, he published “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy,” in which he profiled post-World War II leaders whom he called visionary.
Among his lasting achievements was overseeing the Nixon administration’s clandestine outreach in the early 1970s to the People’s Republic of China, resulting in the restoration of full diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing.
That successful execution of the “China card” was credited with helping to tip the global balance against the Soviet Union and accelerating Beijing’s integration into the international economy.
The Economist, “Henry Kissinger never quite belonged where he wanted to be“
Early in June 1970, soon after America had invaded Cambodia, Henry Kissinger secretly visited Brian McDonnell, a 27-year-old peacenik he had spotted in Lafayette Park opposite the White House. It was one of his many efforts that year to persuade his younger critics that they should give war a chance.
As with so many others, he failed with Brian, but they stayed in touch. While Richard Nixon sulked in the West Wing, his national security adviser and the long-haired activist would meet from time to time to talk about the war and the philosophy of Kant, struggling, Mr Kissinger wrote, “to fashion at least a temporary bridge across the mutual incomprehension”. He never lost the belief that he could win over his critics. And not just the movers and shakers, but also those far from the cover of Time and out of range of the Oval Office microphones. By arguing and arguing some more, he was asserting that he belonged and that he counted.
He had started as an outcast, growing up in pre-war Germany among people who despised and rejected him for being a Jew. The Nazis sacked his father from the public high school in Fürth, near Nuremberg. His mother was the first to grasp that the “Hitler State” held no future for her children. In 1938, 15-year-old Heinz, as he was then, fled to America with his family. He never shed the accent; his voice, like gravel in a goldfish-bowl, added deeply to his seriousness. But his younger brother Walter learned to speak like a regular American, claiming later to be “the Kissinger who listens”.
Even his detractors admitted he had a brilliant mind. His undergraduate thesis was so profuse, at 383 pages, that it supposedly led Harvard to introduce the “Kissinger rule”, limiting students to less than half that length. His doctorate examined how diplomacy sustained stability in Europe for the best part of a century after Napoleon’s defeat. When he entered Nixon’s administration 15 years later, the insights he had gained from studying Castlereagh and Metternich would help him grapple with the roiling ambitions of the United States and the Soviet Union.
His style was to work outside the official machinery of the State Department and the foreign service, which he thought had sapped American diplomacy of its vigour and creativity. “Back-channels” with the Russians, the Chinese and just about everyone else suited Nixon’s taste for conspiracy. And they suited his own yearning to be at the centre of the action, pulling the strings.
Of course, deception played a useful part, in big matters as well as small. When his team grumbled that they had no dining privileges at the White House, he let them think it was all the chief of staff’s fault. In fact, it was his own idea. He didn’t want his people forging links over lunch with useful contacts outside the National Security Council. Although he was too clever to lie outright, he led people astray. Shimon Peres, an Israeli sparring partner, admiringly called him “the most devious man I have ever met”.
Never did he fall into Castlereagh’s trap of losing his self-belief. He cut ties for a while with Walter Isaacson over his wretched book, with its psychologising and its cheap gibe that Dr K surely felt that even his own three-volume autobiography did not quite do justice to his achievements.
Plenty of aides may have left his service, but many stayed loyal because on the most important questions of the day he was not only penetrating, but he also let them have their say. And nowhere did he face more questions than the realignment of American foreign policy amid the ruins of the Vietnam war.
By 1972, America was vulnerable: humiliated abroad and divided at home. His answer was to exploit growing antagonism between the Soviet Union and China to create a new equilibrium in which each looked to America to bolster its position. Later, he shuttled between Egypt and Israel to supplant the Soviet Union with America in the Middle East. It was a piece of statecraft worthy of his 19th-century heroes. He had put America back in the driving-seat just when everything was against it.
What thanks did he get? The doubters and intellectuals said he had sacrificed America’s principles and over a million lives. He had fought on in Vietnam and taken the war to Cambodia and Laos for the sake of American “credibility”. He had blessed a Pakistani genocide in what became Bangladesh, because Pakistan was helping him with China. He had plotted coups and assassinations in Chile and an insurgency in Angola, because he thought countries would fall like dominoes to Soviet plots. When he won the Nobel peace prize in 1973, Christopher Hitchens, a British journalist, said he should have been tried for war crimes—and the charge stuck.
Tom Gjelten, NPR, “Henry Kissinger, legendary diplomat and foreign policy scholar, dies at 100“
Henry Kissinger, one of the country’s most important foreign policy thinkers for more than half a century, has died at the age of 100.
[…]
As a secretary of state and national security adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger played the major behind-the-scenes role in building the architecture that enabled more manageable relations with the Soviet Union, China, and major Arab nations. At the same time, he was closely associated with some of the most controversial U.S. foreign policy moves in recent decades, by promoting intensive bombing campaigns in Southeast Asia and repeatedly turning a blind eye to human rights abuses by governments perceived to be supportive of U.S. interests.
Though he never worked directly under a U.S. president again after Ford left office, Kissinger’s achievements were long lasting. U.S. superpower relations to this day still bear his imprint, and he remained a sought-after voice on international affairs to the end of his life.
“Kissinger was the leading scholar-practitioner of the post-World War II era,” said Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “There were other great secretaries of state and a long list of impressive historians, but no one who combined the two pursuits as Kissinger did.”
[…]
In America, the young Kissinger worked in a factory during the day and went to school at night, until he was drafted into the U.S. Army.
Sent to Germany, Pvt. Kissinger was among the American soldiers who liberated starving Jewish prisoners at a concentration camp in Ahlem. He met some of them again 60 years later, when he spoke at the screening of a documentary film about Ahlem, with many camp survivors present.
“There’s nothing I’m more proud of than having been one of those who had the honor of liberating the Ahlem concentration camp,” Kissinger said, in an uncharacteristically emotional speech.
[…]
In 1973, Nixon made Kissinger his secretary of state, while keeping him as his national security adviser. When Gerald Ford took over after Nixon’s resignation in 1974, he retained Kissinger as secretary of state, though not as national security adviser.
In fact, Kissinger had already made his mark. The hard-nosed foreign policy approach he advocated was associated more with Kissinger himself than with the presidents under whom he served. Indeed, his promotion of détente with Moscow was later criticized by some conservatives in his own Republican Party.
Kissinger’s guiding principle was that U.S. national interests take precedence over more idealistic aims, like the promotion of democracy and human rights.
“I used to say to my colleagues,” Kissinger told an interviewer in 2007, “we’re a country, not a foundation. We have to conduct foreign policy for America.”
With that unwavering commitment, Kissinger advocated bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Cambodia to strengthen the U.S. negotiating position. He was comfortable with the U.S. giving a green light to the “dirty war” in Argentina and to Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, because those governments were U.S. allies. Likewise, the U.S. could welcome a coup against Salvador Allende, the elected socialist president in Chile.
Kissinger’s detractors said his identification with such policy decisions meant he was liable for war crimes. At public events, like his 2012 appearance at Harvard, accusations were inevitable.
[…]
Kissinger was accustomed to such questions and regularly encouraged his critics to consider “the big picture.”
“Just study who did what, not people who live off proving their country is evil and their leaders are criminal,” Kissinger told the Harvard questioner. “Start from the assumption that rational people were in government. What led to what decisions?” He urged his critic to go through the minutes of a national security meeting.
“You may not agree with it,” he said, “but you won’t throw around words like war criminal then.”
Kissinger knew something about criminal leaders from his own experience in Nazi Germany, but it did not keep him from engaging with other governments that executed their opponents. It may have been that Kissinger’s own life experience made it easier for him to be dispassionate about tough policy choices.
David Rothkopf, his one-time assistant, thinks Kissinger’s view of the world was in part a result of his childhood experience in Germany and then his service as a young man in the U.S. Army.
“Those are the formative years,” Rothkopf said. “I think to understand Kissinger, you have to understand a man who escaped the Holocaust, a man who went back to fight in this big grand war, a man who saw the United States as the champion against an almost absolute evil.”
Having seen the United States as being on the side of good, Rothkopf suggests, Kissinger may have been more willing to justify questionable U.S. actions around the world.
Readers will have their own view of Kissinger’s policies, now half a century in the past. Having heard him speak many times over the years, I tend to share Rothkopf’s assessment. The essence of Realist foreign policy, or Realpolitik in nod to Kissinger’s heritage, is raison d’état: securing the vital interests of the country is paramount, overriding considerations of morality and even law if the stakes are high enough. Defeating the Communist menace was an existential pursuit that justified quite a lot.
With the advantage of hindsight, much of the mindset of the Cold War was absurd. Vietnam coming under Communist control posed little danger to the United States. Ditto socialism in Chile. But Nixon and Kissinger were hardly the only American statesmen who thought otherwise. Indeed, the Vietnam war was at its height when they took office.
It fascinates me that he’s so reviled by so many yet continued to be consulted by Presidents and Secretaries of State right up through the end. It is perhaps the nation of the pressure cooker of having to make life-and-death decisions that those who have done so become part of a club.
I am not going to wade into the controversies concerning Kissinger but tell a joke about the famous ego he was known to have. Kissinger had a book rejected by publishers. It was titled- Famous people who met me. RIP Mr. Secretary.
That Kissinger was brilliant is unquestioned, that Kissinger was immoral is unquestioned as well.
Even though it has been more than 50 years since I first uttered those very words I clearly remember being verbally assailed as an unpatriotic traitor for saying them like it was yesterday.
This might tell us something about the character of all those politicians.
As in many things, in the end it turns out the Dirty Effing Hippies were right.
If the allegations of the Chennault Affair are correct, they had just taken office by sabotaging Johnson’s effort to end the war.
He was from Fürth. It would have been a Franconian accent.
You think I’m joking? My wife is from that area and she can tell who’s from Fürth by how they pronounce the German word for “soup.”
Calling in Kissinger a realist is American code for being a bootlicking toady, a courtier, a total zero. Many immigrants to America become American via racism. Henry became one by sucking dick and climbing the ladder. It’s the sad truth. The guy spent years with Nixon drunkenly going off about Jew this and Jew that and instead of having a real ego and telling him off and quitting, he just sucked more dick.
People are going to be praising his horrifying foreign policy as an important contrast to his war crimes, as if the results–the House of Saud balancing the Middle East, China murdering Uighur, millions in American-intervened Central and South America fleeing north–are not also crimes. He was truly a worthless person, and the reason Americans praise him and find him ambiguous or interesting is that they see their own worthlessness in him. RIP.
That’s a lot of tags!
@Mister Bluster:
This might tell us something about the character of all those politicians.
It’s like finish the thought. Whenever presidents have terrible ideas about American foreign policy, like invading Iraq, they get Kissinger to write some boring op-ed in support of the policy, and presto, your idea is now serious and hard-edged in the views of the people who need to be told their fantasies are serious and hard-edged. The whole thing is a circle-jerk for the perpetual failures who gave us the actual Iraq invasion.
The journalist who wrote that sentence and the editor who approved it should be thrown out of a helicopter over the ocean.
@Modulo Myself:
This makes him sound a whole lot cooler and socially useful than he was.
@Sleeping Dog:
Less immoral than amoral.
Kissinger wasn’t pro-evil or anti-human rights, he was simply indifferent to them if they were necessary, in his relatively short-term view, to advance the United States (or himself).
I preferred this obituary:
Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies
@SKI:
I went back and forth as to whether to say he was amoral or immoral and came down on immoral, due to the outcomes of the policies he advocated. Cambodia, Chile, the results are are prima facie examples of evil.
@Mister Bluster:
Or tell us that those who dislike Kissinger are off
their medsbase.You gotta love “negotiated the exit from Vietnam.” My recollection of the fall of Saigon is of an ignominious collapse. I propose that K’s coffin be dumped into the sea from an aircraft carrier.
@Slugger:
What is playing out in Israel right now may be following a similar course. A country settling with Fanatics. Fanatics use the truce to regroup and strike again when they are ready.
@gVOR10:
For the last 55+, the Democratic Party has a history of blaming their defeats on anything but voters not being happy with their nominee. You claim that’s why they lost in 68, The Carter briefing books in 1980, or a Supreme court decision in 2000 or James Comey in 2016? What are the Democrats going to blame for their losing next year?
Oh, Hell Week is in full swing, and I can’t comment on this. Maybe later. One salient absurdity was nuclear war planning. Having thought about it for a while, it makes no sense whatsoever.
@Kathy:
Appropriately named MAD.
@Slugger:
Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the war. It turned out to be drag it out four years, pretend we were winning, get re-elected as a lame duck, and quit. I still remember Kissinger, just before the election, announcing we pretty much had a deal worked out. A deal that evaporated after the election.
And now Vietnam is a sorta ally against China and reliable source of cheap blue jeans. No dominoes having fallen.
@Sleeping Dog:
Isn’t the Khemer Rouge, the ones who actually killed almost half the Cambodian people the true example of evil? Somehow I don’t recall hearing Chamberlain and Baldwin or French President Lebrun as examples of evil for the millions killed in world war two because they refused to stand up to Hitler. Their inaction was more calamitous.
@Sleeping Dog:
It doesn’t work that way. Kissinger didn’t *want* those results. He just didn’t care that they were a possibility. Amoral, not immoral.
@Bill Jempty:
It’s an empirical fact that Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 won the endorsement of voters over their oppents — in the later case, to the tune of millions.
So of all the overdetermined factors to blame for those Democratic defeats in those you, claiming “the voters weren’t happy with the Democratic nominee” is insufficient. That’s just math.
Probably the same thing they said after the Big Looming Red Wave of 2022 and the 2023 vote that was supposed to show how unhappy voters were with Biden and Democrats: “Scoreboard.”
What are people like you going to say when your self-assured guarantees of MAGA victory in 2024 implode yet again?
@Bill Jempty:
Under the title, Kissinger is Dead, Finally Something Good Has Happened in 2023, Erik Loomis at LGM does a through fisking of Kissinger’s career, including,
@SKI: “Kissinger wasn’t pro-evil or anti-human rights, he was simply indifferent to them if they were necessary, in his relatively short-term view, to advance the United States (or himself).”
Meaning himself, start and stop.
Maybe Hamas and the Israelis can use Henry’s casket for a negotiating table if there are ever any peace talks.
Found this from 1971 on WikiP. Henry’s smiling face is here (3:06) so I figure it is appropriate for this thread.
10+minutes of time travel into the past provided by the WayBac machine.
@gVOR10: Are you sure that isn’t Zbigniew Brzezinski speaking to China about Pol Pot.
We are all being terribly mean to Henry. No one should have their entire life judged by a single genocide.
@DK:
I didn’t make predictions about 2022 or 2023. I am predicting a Trump win next year. People vote their wallets and we know the discontent there, rightly or wrongly.
Nobody here is admitting their wild pre-2020 predictions of Biden getting almost 400 electoral votes and taking Texas even. I predicted a Biden win but didn’t go that far.
I predict who I think will win, not who I hope does.
The Washington Post ran a decent obituary, then undercut the seriousness of the moment by running an adjacent article about Kissinger’s “secret swinger” reputation. OK, enough with Cambodia, Chile, Iran, etc. etc. Look at this picture of him with Jill St. John!
@Bill Jempty:
My intuition – and that’s all it is, a feeling – is that Trump has peaked, and Biden has bottomed out. Of course: black swan events can change that in a heartbeat, and I’m not sure that a health problem with either man even qualifies as unexpected. But right now everyone is convinced that Trump gets the GOP nom, and everyone is sure that Biden is screwed. I think the first is likely but not inevitable. As for the latter, the wallowing in Biden’s age was inevitable, so the timing is just about perfect for the pendulum to swing on that.
Is the natural optimism of Americans a thing of the past? I don’t know. But if there remains some core of optimism, Biden wins because Trump has no plan but revenge.
Happy Hank!
He truly embodied American foreign policy for the past 60 years. And I mean that in a bad way.
The next week or so of people praising the war criminal will turn my stomach.
I know it’s generally considered rude to protest someone’s funeral, and the Westboro Baptist Church are assholes for that, but I think we can make an exception here.
May he burn in hell for eternity.
@Bill Jempty:
Mmm hmm. What happened to people voting with their wallets in 2022 and 2023? Did people forget?
We keep seeing the discontent with Trump, MAGA extremism, and forced birth. Why some continue to pretend that discontent isn’t factoring into voter behavior in a big way I don’t know, but maybe they’ll figure it out when Trump loses Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, New Hampshire, and the electoral college. Again.
@Gustopher:
My take on Henry was formed by Admiral Zumwalt’s book “On Watch”. He was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when Henry managed the Nixon China-trip, and the top guy in the Navy during the Yom Kipper war.
On one hand, Zumwalt was appalled at the snakiness and sheer gall of the man, to keep the Joint Chiefs out of the loop on the China trip, forcing them to conduct espionage on their own POTUS to figure out what the hell was going on. On the other? The Yom Kipper war. Zumwalt’s take was the US fleet in the Med was out-gunned two to one. Every ship he had was ringed by Soviet subs. The Soviets put everything they had into the Med. They were ready for a war, we were not. Nixon? Drowning his Watergate sorrows in a room in Florida. Completely out of commission. The US had no POTUS and nobody was willing to step up…except Henry, who managed with great skill to defuse the situation.
Zumwalt had to hand it to him on that one, and he detested the man. IHO, the features which he most detested in Henry, the gall and snakiness, may well have saved the world.
“They say best men are molded out of faults,
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad”
― William Shakespeare
I’m working on a new book, a distinctly adult work, a satire (and we know how well satire sells) called The CEO of Hell. The conceit is that Satan is an artist, not a numbers guy, and he’s done a bad job managing Hell – only a fraction of corpos get a dip in the Lake of Fire and even fewer get a good old-fashioned anal penetration by demons – so GTF (God the Father) and The Kid decide to fire Satan and replace him with a numbers guy, someone who knows how to manage crowds: essentially a younger but deceased Bob Iger. Meanwhile the fired Satan shows up on earth and comic mayhem ensues.
And now I can write Kissinger into it.
It is telling that Le Duc Tho refused the Nobel he was awarded jointly with Henry the K and that Vietnam and the US have reasonable relations marked by Bush’s cordial visit in 2006. We should have surrendered Saigon in 1969 instead of 1974. A lot of American soldiers would not have died in the prolonged withdrawal engineered by K (as well as tens of myriads of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian soldiers and civilians). What were we fighting for in 1968-1974? To save Nixon’s ego?
@Slugger:
These days we are perhaps too accustomed to naive, inexperienced POTUSes, at the mercy of their advisers. Nixon was not that, he had a lot of experience and a formidable (if a bit twisted) intellect. He was not Henry’s puppet.
@Modulo Myself:
Someone does not know what “Realism” is in international relations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(international_relations)
People like “realist” John Mearsheimer have been embarrassingly and foolishly wrong in their takes on the Russia-Ukraine dustup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer#:~:text=Mearsheimer%20is%20best%20known%20for,in%20an%20anarchic%20international%20system.
@Michael Reynolds:
Michael,
Is it the truth or an urban legend, that Satan now or used to have smoking and non-smoking sections in hell?
@Michael Reynolds:
Does Satan have diplomatic relations with China?
@DK: @DK:
Are you forgetting that the Republicans took over the House of Representatives due to the 2022 election?
Polls aren’t supporting that. Then you might say, Bill, you said many times the polls are wrong. So I did. Each time I was saying they underestimated Trump and people polled are telling pollers what they want to hear. George Bernard Shaw said something if you want people to laugh, just tell them the truth.
If they’re underestimating Trump now, you know what’s going to happen. You just don’t like it.
@dazedandconfused: We can only judge a man by what he did, not by hypotheticals of what would have happened if he wasn’t there.
One could just as easily craft a hypothetical where we don’t support Israel in the You Kippur war at all, Israel falls, OPEC doesn’t start the embargo, Carter’s presidency is a success and we don’t it get Reagan and the far right Republican Party leading to Trump and a direct threat to our democracy.
(And in this hypothetical, either the Middle East is less of a mess, but we have a large Jewish refugee/immigrant problem/opportunity in various countries in the west, or there was a second Holocaust, or both — it’s a hypothetical, take your pick)
But in all likelihood we would have muddled our way through it without Kissinger, as we muddled our way through so many other things, with only modest differences. The Great Man Theory is often overstated (especially by the PR firms hired by people who think they are Great Men — Musk is definitely a fan of the Great Man Theory)
@Bill Jempty:
The Republicans defied the polls and underperformed at historic levels.
(Either that or the Democrats overperformed, holding the Senate and keeping the House losses in single digits, but polling afterwards looks more like the American people were saying “we want change, but not that change”)
@Bill Jempty:
In my world-building of Hell and the afterlife, GTF offered buyouts to other gods – the Greeks, the Norse, the Aztecs etc… – and the adherents of any god who accepted the offer is subject to Hell. So, very few Chinese, quite a fair number of sub-Saharan Africans, but mostly its Europe, South and North America.
@Bill Jempty:
Trump lost in 2020. Biden won more electoral college votes in 2020 than Trump in 2016.
What did polls say about the 2022 election? Are you forgetting Republicans were supposed to pickup 40-50 seats in some big Red Wave according to polls? What happened?
What happened in the Senate in 2022, where Democrats picked up a seat? What happened with those polls that supported Oz over Fetterman?
What happened this month in this year’s elections, which looked like a Blue Wave?
How have Trump-aligned candidates been doing in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia since 2020?
Those are the questions you don’t want to answer, clinging to 2016 instead. Because don’t want to admit it wasn’t Republican voters who’ve been underestimated in 2022 and 2023.
@Gustopher:
Is there any room for the notion that Kissinger may be something different than the caricature of pure evil presented by his haters? You have dismissed Admiral Zumwalt as a nobody presenting hypotheticals, so I must ask.
He was the quintessential realist, and I would have some of those around to counter the ideologues myself.
@dazedandconfused: In covering the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil,” positing that cold dispassion — in its opportunism, selfishness, carelessness, and ruthless pursuit of power — can result in as much inhumanity as active sadism.
The idea was controversial but it rings true. I can see why certain quarters label Kissinger accordingly.
@Bill Jempty:
Historically the democratic party should of lost substantially more seats in the house along with the senate. I’m not saying 2024 is in the bag but there is no denying that the Democratic party outperformed expectations by a good amount in 2022.
The polls right now don’t really mean much to me. Trump is calling half the country vermin and talking about how he’ll eliminate us but the media is too busy talking about how Biden is too old to care. No one is paying attention outside of the hyper partisans and other political junkies. At this point I’m glad the polls are looking bad for Biden because I don’t want a repeat of what happened with Hillary and her inevitable election. I want the democratic voters to be scared/motivated to vote. I know I’ve only got anecdotal experience but with Hillary I know people who didn’t bother voting because they’d have to stand for hours and she’d win anyway…
I fear that economic anxiety is going to be used by the ruling class to ensure Trump’s return. I expect a deluge of “the economy sucks and it’s the democrats fault” pieces across the media spectrum in 2024. Economic conditions suck for a lot of people and some of it is structural and intentional. The ever rising requirements for “entry level” jobs combined with the heavy slathering of “entry level jobs are for kids you’re not supposed to be able to afford to live!!!” means more and more of America is just struggling to survive. The top 1% (especially the 0.1%) continue to take over ever more of the wealth in America by hoovering up housing as real estate investments. Then we wonder why people who work are homeless and why there’s a housing shortage. This very real problem is going to be twisted by the media into purely the fault of democrat policies. Miss placed anger galore could easily result in Biden losing.
EDIT : If you’re wondering my “solution” to the economic issue is to tax the shit out of the rich. The top 0.1% have so much wealth it’s an abstract score board for them. The top 1% should not own +55% (and growing) of the wealth of this country…
@Michael Reynolds: @Michael Reynolds: “We are all being terribly mean to Henry. No one should have their entire life judged by a single genocide.”
The bitter joke is it’s an open question of how many genocides he helped.
@Slugger:
Truman shouldn’t have allowed the French to return to Vietnam after WW2 in the first place, particularly since Nguyen Ai Quoc — after assisting the Allies against Japan — wanted dialogue and relations with the West, particularly, with the U.S. And U.S. forces most certainly should have got tf out after bailing out France’s ass — yet again — in Dien Bien Phu in ’54. But, Washington rules.
@Matt:
Why, Matt? Why?
@DeD: DOH.
I don’t even HAVE an excuse for that one.