Kissinger’s Shadow

by Greg Grandin

  Then Zwillich mentioned Cambodia.

  “Cambodia!” Kissinger cried, in despair more than anger.14 He went on to rehearse the same arguments—the areas bombed were mostly uninhabited; it was North Vietnam that first violated Cambodia’s sovereignty; the United States had a right to defend itself—he had been making for years. But this time he added something new. He justified Cambodia by pointing to Barack Obama’s drone strikes. The current administration,” he said, “is doing it in Pakistan, Somalia.”

  Here, then, is a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle. Kissinger is invoking today’s endless, open-ended war to justify what he did in Cambodia and Chile (and elsewhere) nearly half a century ago. But what he did nearly half a century ago created the conditions for today’s endless wars.*

  It’s not so much that Kissinger’s justification for bombing Cambodia set actual juridical precedents used by government lawyers to sanction today’s global counterinsurgency campaign and drone strikes. Then, as now, legal rationales are often pasted on after the fact. It’s more that by executing such an assault, and getting away with it, Kissinger provided a broad set of effective political arguments to justify war: when called on by Congress or the public to account for his actions, he invoked the right to self-defense, the effectiveness of his policies (“except” for being illegal, he asked the Pike Committee in 1975, “there is nothing wrong with my operation?”), and the need to deploy enough military force to establish credibility and achieve our political goals.

  Perhaps the most influential argument Kissinger made to validate his war on Cambodia was the need to destroy enemy “sanctuaries.” Over and over again, while in office and out, he has insisted that bombing and cross-border raids were required to protect American lives (often, when doing so, greatly exaggerating the numbers of US soldiers killed: “500 Americans a week,” Kissinger said in 1991).15 That argument was outside of the mainstream of international law in 1970, so much so it prompted Thomas Schelling’s public break with Kissinger. Today, it is unquestioned. The goal of denying “safe haven” to terrorists is, write Micah Zenko and Amelia Mae Wolf in Foreign Policy, “the premise for the war in Afghanistan and for the expansion of drone operations into Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Most recently, it has underlined the rationale for initiating an open-ended war to degrade and destroy the Islamic State.”16 As it did in Southeast Asia, the premise mystifies more than it clarifies, deflecting attention away from the fact that such aggressive militarism often worsens the problem—while turning the whole world into a battlefield. Fourteen years, and counting, at a cost of four trillion dollars, and counting, the global war on terror has acted as an accelerant, leaving behind a series of failed or failing states (among them, Iraq and Libya) and taking an organization, Al Qaeda, which had been mostly contained to Afghanistan, and transforming its cause into a worldwide danger.

  It doesn’t matter. “If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven,” Barack Obama has said, allowing Kissinger his retroactive absolution: Obama does it.

  * * *

  There’s a remark by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism where she describes administrators of the British Empire as “monsters of conceit in their success and monsters of modesty in their failure.” Arendt is referring specially to the Empire’s higher aristocratic officers, a new kind of imperialist who became one with the imperial system. Unlike older forms of conquest, European expansion starting in the late nineteenth century “was not driven by the specific appetite for a specific country but conceived as an endless process in which every country would serve only as a stepping-stone for further expansion.” The particular vices or virtues of these administrators mattered little, for “once he has entered the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion, he will, as it were, cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process, identify himself with anonymous forces that he is supposed to serve in order to keep the whole process in motion; he will think of himself as mere function, and eventually consider such functionality, such an incarnation of the dynamic trend, his highest possible achievement.”17

  In a way, Kissinger achieved such a fusion between self and system; his personal ascendance became indistinguishable from the restoration of the imperial presidency, his personal success as exceptional as the nation he served. 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.

  Arendt said that imperial officials who have achieved such an overidentification of self and system “had to be perfectly willing to disappear into complete oblivion once failure had been proved, if for any reason they were no longer ‘instruments of incomparable value,’” as London’s consul general in Cairo called the bureaucrats who carry out a “policy of Imperialism.” Rarely, though, did Kissinger ever have to consider this fate. For a while in 1970, after the invasion of Cambodia, Kissinger, joking about the criticism he faced from former Harvard colleagues, talked about quitting the White House and joining the faculty at Arizona State. He seemed resigned, one reporter said, “to finishing his teaching career in the academic boondocks.”18 But Kissinger evolved and adapted, surviving the Cambodia hearings, Watergate, and the Church Committee investigation, never losing his incomparable value, especially when it came to justifying war.

  Far from disappearing into oblivion, he endures. And after Kissinger himself is gone, one imagines Kissingerism will endure as well.

  NOTES

  PRELUDE: ON NOT SEEING THE MONSTER

     1.  Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (1991), describes Schelling’s influence on Vietnam strategy.

     2.  For the Harvard delegation, see “Friends Said ‘No’ to Kissinger,” Boston Globe, May 10, 1970; Michael Kinsley, “Eating Lunch at Henry’s,” Inside the System, ed. Charles Peters and Nicholas Lehmann (1979), p. 197; David Warsh, “Game Theory Suggests Quick Action on Greenhouse Effect Is Remote,” Washington Post, June 13, 1990; “Cambodia Act Called ‘Sickening,’” Hartford Courant, May 10, 1970; “Harvard Visit to Kissinger ‘Painful,’” Boston Globe, May 9, 1970.

  INTRODUCTION: AN OBITUARY FORETOLD

     1.  A. J. Langguth, Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975 (2000), p. 564.

     2.  Walter Isaacson, Kissinger (1992), p. 31; Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (2007), p. 33.

     3.  Henry Kissinger, “The Meaning of History (Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant),” AB honors thesis, Harvard University, 1950 (held by Widener Library, Harvard; henceforth cited as MH), p. 23.

     4.  Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis was written under the direction of William Yandell Elliott, who applied Kantian thought to diplomatic history. But by the time he arrived at Harvard, Kissinger had a prior engagement with Continental philosophy, under the tutelage of Fritz Kraemer, a Prussian anti-Nazi conservative whom Kissinger met while he was stationed as an infantry private at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. Kraemer held a number of graduate degrees, including one from the University of Frankfurt in 1931, just around the time Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and other social theorists formed what is now known as the Frankfurt School. Astute readers will clearly recognize in Kissinger’s writings themes and arguments often associated with the Frankfurt School, and Kraemer might have been a link. “Over the next decades,” Kissinger said at his 2003 funeral, “Kraemer shaped my reading and thinking, influenced my choice of college, awakened my interest in political philosophy and history, inspired both my undergraduate and graduate theses.” Bruce Kuklick, in Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (2006), notes that there were a number of scholars critical of positivism at Harvard at the time Kissinger was an
undergraduate, including Henry Sheffer and W. V. O. Quine.

     5.  Quoted in Hanes Walton Jr., James Bernard Rosser Sr., and Robert Louis Stevenson, The African Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (2007), p. 16.

     6.  MH, pp. 326–27.

     7.  MH, p. 348.

     8.  MH, p. 9.

     9.  For the use of “tragedy,” see my introduction to a recent edition of William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (2011).

  10.  Frank Costigliola, The Kennan Diaries (2014), p. 541.

  11.  Henry Kissinger, “Peace, Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium (A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich), PhD thesis, Department of Government, Harvard University, 1954, published in 1957 as A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problem of Peace, 1812–1822. Page 213 for the quotation.

  12.  Oriana Fallaci, Interview with History (1976), p. 44.

  13.  “The New Establishment,” Vanity Fair, October 1994.

  14.  Michael Glennon, National Security and Double Government (2014); Scott Horton, Lords of Secrecy (2005). See also, Matthew Dickinson, Bitter Harvest: FDR, Presidential Power and the Growth of the Presidential Branch (1999); Douglas Stuart, Creating the National Security State: A History of the Law that Transformed America (2009); Garry Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (2011); Harold Koh, The National Security Constitution (1990).

  15.  Morton Kondracke, “Leaning on the Left,” New York Times, March 15, 1992.

  16.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a speech to the American Council on Education on October 8, 1970, seems to be the first to use the term “adversary culture,” which he said was “entrenched in higher education.” He went on: “The intellectuals’ propensity to condemn in the sixties what they helped formulate in the fifties has only helped to further the breach between the public and the university.” Early neoconservative attempts to formulate the concept tended to stress psychological explanations having to do with the softness and prosperity of bourgeois society, in which young people seek “meaning” through protest. See Norman Podhoretz, “The Adversary Culture and the New Class,” in The New Class?, ed. B. Bruce-Biggs (1979); Irving Kristol, “The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals,” Encounter, October 1979. More recently, Paul Hollander revived the concept in the wake of 9/11 and cast a wide net: “Adherents of the adversary culture can be found in a wide variety of settings, organizations and interest groups. They include postmodernist academics, radical feminists, Afrocentrist blacks, radical environmentalists, animal rights activists, pacifists, Maoists, Trotskyites, critical legal theorists and others. They often have different political agendas but share certain core convictions and key assumptions: all are reflexively and intensely hostile critics of the United States or American society and, increasingly, of all Western cultural traditions and values as well. The most important among their beliefs is that American society is deeply flawed and uniquely repellent—unjust, corrupt, destructive, soulless, inhumane, inauthentic and incapable of satisfying basic, self-evident human needs. The American social system has failed to live up to its original historical promise and, they insist, is inherently and ineradicably sexist, racist and imperialist” (“The Resilience of the Adversary Culture,” National Interest [2002]).

  17.  Kissinger, For the Record (1981), p. 124.

  18.  Interview with ABC News, June 22, 2014; available at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/06/22/cheney_pay_attention_to_current_threat_cant_debate_what_happened_12_years_ago.html.

  19.  Cambodia: Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War (2003), p. 470; Chile: Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (1982), p. 383; the Kurds: Kissinger, Years of Renewal (1999), pp. 576–96; Timor: transcript of August 1995 confrontation between Kissinger and journalists Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn; available at http://etan.org/news/kissinger/ask.htm.

  20.  “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times, October 17, 2004.

  21.  “Strains on the Alliance,” Foreign Affairs, January 1963.

  1: A COSMIC BEAT

     1.  “The Salad Days of Henry Kissinger,” Harvard Crimson, May 21, 1971.

     2.  James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans (2004), p. 77.

     3.  All quotations from Spengler taken from 1926 translation, by Charles Francis Atkinson, of The Decline of the West, hereafter cited as DW. This sentence is from p. 425.

     4.  DW, p. 17.

     5.  MH, p. 15.

     6.  MH, p. 17. A good way to understand the influence that Spengler’s critique of positivism had on Kissinger is to consider a short book the liberal Arthur Schlesinger published in 1967, The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941–1966, which set out what has since become known as the “quagmire thesis.” America, Schlesinger said, slipped into Vietnam by accident; the war was a “triumph of the politics of inadvertence.” “Our present entanglement,” he argued, stemmed not from “deliberate consideration” but rather from “a series of small decisions,” one misstep after another, “until we find ourselves entrapped today in that nightmare.” Schlesinger offered no theory of history that could explain this absentmindedness, no way to account for how, exactly, the most powerful and prosperous nation in world history, at the apex of its attainment and creativity, might stumble like a drunk down a blind alley and wake up lost in the rice paddocks of Southeast Asia, bankrupting itself in an unwinnable war. Kissinger, unlike Schlesinger, did have a theory and he got it from Spengler: purposeless war is a symptom of civilizational decline, and the descent begins imperceptibly. States might continue to amass and project power, but at some point in their evolution, at the height of their success and complexity and largely because of that success and complexity, they lose a sense of self-understanding.

     7.  The quotation regarding objective laws comes from Morgenthau’s classic 1947 work, Politics among Nations, offered as a simplified definition of what political realists believe, one that Morgenthau immediately qualifies.

     8.  H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler (1991), p. 70. John Farrenkopf, in his book on Spengler, Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics (2001), p. 41, writes: “Spengler criticizes cause-and-effect historical analysis because it implicitly denies that cultures have the capacity to burst forth as foci of pristine and nonderivative cultural creativity and vitality. According to the mechanistic, causal approach, ‘everything follows, nothing is original.’”

     9.  Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 68, wrongly suggests that Kissinger “sidled away” from this critique of causality. He didn’t, expressing variations of it throughout his career, as we shall see.

  10.  Henry Kissinger, White House Years (2011), p. 56.

  11.  MH, pp. 13–14; 75; 102; 105; 194; for the quotations on causality and militarism.

  12.  For these two memos, see the William Y. Elliott Papers at the Hoover Institution Archives, box 28.

  13.  Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945–1955 (1992), p. 140. Most Kissinger biographers, when they discuss Kissinger’s Harvard mentor, William Elliott, focus on his “flamboyance,” downplaying his very close ties with domestic and national intelligence agencies and his unapologetic advocacy in favor of domestic surveillance. Diamond’s chapter “Kissinger and Elliott” does a good job (based on declassified US government documents) at tracing the complicated nexus of Harvard Yard and Langley, at the center of which was Elliott, a committed Cold Warrior who suggested (in a 1958 article that he inscribed to J. Edgar Hoover) that an “Atlantic Round Table for Freedom,” based on the “Round Table of Arthurian legend” that held “the West against Hun and Moslem,” be established, composed of “ten outstanding Companions,” or modern “Knights.”

  14.  Among the most interesting of t
hese early articles are: “American Policy and Preventive War,” Yale Review (1955); “Military Policy and Defense of the ‘Grey Areas,’” Foreign Affairs (1955); “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” Foreign Affairs (1956); “Reflections on American Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs (1956); “Controls, Inspection and Limited War,” Reporter (1957); “Missiles and the Western Alliance,” Foreign Affairs (1958); “The Policymaker and the Intellectual,” Reporter (1959); “As Urgent as the Moscow Threat,” New York Times Magazine (1959); and “The Search for Stability,” Foreign Affairs (1959).

  15.  Kissinger, “Military Policy and Defense of the ‘Grey Areas.’”

  16.  Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957), p. 190.

  17.  The term “grey areas” to refer to the nations outside of Europe was first used by Secretary of the Air Force Thomas Finletter in February 1951 (later expanded on in his 1954 Power and Policy). Interestingly, Kissinger, in his 1951 memos cited above, criticized the “grey area” concept, associating it with Washington’s tendency, as evinced in Korea, to allow the Soviets to dictate where and when it would fight. But Kissinger’s evolution into a nuclear strategist, and his advocacy of limited, tactical nuclear war, allowed him to embrace the idea of fighting in “grey areas”: if Washington could back up its conventional forces with the credible threat of nuclear power when it fights in, say, Indochina, then it wouldn’t necessarily be ceding the advantage to Moscow.