I stole this from Jacob T Levy who posted it to Twitter and a screenshot was shared on a blogpost but it sums up Kissinger perfectly
‘In a way that is all too familiar but ramped up to a world historic scale, he regularly indulged the slippage from “sometimes national security requires doing terrible things” to “the more terrible things I do, the more I must be a great man doing making hard choices and advancing national security” ‘
Also (now me again) the Chinese had him totally pegged didn’t they, flatter his ego, treat him like an important man, put on a good spread (and no doubt lots of women) sling him plenty of cash for his ‘consultancy’ and they have a voice pushing their agenda in the media and corridors of power for decades
The increasingly toad-like Kissinger would show up regularly in Beijing, squatting next to some Stalinist gargoyle who’d taken the afternoon off from sending people to forced labour camps
Tony Judt's article was perhaps the most nuanced and perceptive piece ever written on Kissinger, one that transcends above the cheerleading and prosecutorial camps. He gives remarkable lee way to Kissinger on how the situation in Indo-China was so grim by the time he came to office that any US action was going to lead to disaster and that much of Kissinger's actions were done in the context of the Cold War, were unpleasant and even excretable decisions arguably had to be made, decisions that would later to go on to damage the US in the Post-Cold War era. Kissingers reply to the article and Judt's follow up are enjoyable reading: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/11781928
I am probably being biased, I've longed enjoyed Henry Kissinger's books and I get the devils advocate argument for his actions, plus i am not usually in the political camp of his detractors. However his tenure in power raises difficult questions on the accountability of secret government and one that we had hopped would be consigned to the history books. Unfortunately we are now in a second Cold War and we will now have to decide whether to dust off his ideas once again.
A good summary of Kissinger's career. I was always mystified that Kissinger maintained his influence long after his failings became apparent. On a trivial point, Ursula von der Leyen's tweet strikes me as truism rather than eulogy, apart perhaps from the slightly odd phrase "excellence in diplomacy" which could be just another way of saying "craftiness".
I appreciate that you have no patience for the myth that Kissinger was at all an anti-Communist crusader. He was one of the worst enablers of Communism in the history of American domestic politics. Possibly THE worst.
But he was not at fault for Allende. For one, the US got cold feet during our actual coup attempt on Chile in 1970, but Vieux, the guy we contacted to do it did it anyway. For another, Allende was an avowed Stalinist, literally on the KGB payroll, whose goal was to turn Chile into a mountainous Cuba, so the notion that there was ever a moral reason not to overthrow him by any means necessary is absurd. And to wrap it up, the '73 Coup had nothing to do with the US. It was entirely a Chilean domestic affair, motivated by Allende destroying the country's economy and its civil society:
I stole this from Jacob T Levy who posted it to Twitter and a screenshot was shared on a blogpost but it sums up Kissinger perfectly
‘In a way that is all too familiar but ramped up to a world historic scale, he regularly indulged the slippage from “sometimes national security requires doing terrible things” to “the more terrible things I do, the more I must be a great man doing making hard choices and advancing national security” ‘
Also (now me again) the Chinese had him totally pegged didn’t they, flatter his ego, treat him like an important man, put on a good spread (and no doubt lots of women) sling him plenty of cash for his ‘consultancy’ and they have a voice pushing their agenda in the media and corridors of power for decades
The increasingly toad-like Kissinger would show up regularly in Beijing, squatting next to some Stalinist gargoyle who’d taken the afternoon off from sending people to forced labour camps
Just a great great sentence
Tony Judt's article was perhaps the most nuanced and perceptive piece ever written on Kissinger, one that transcends above the cheerleading and prosecutorial camps. He gives remarkable lee way to Kissinger on how the situation in Indo-China was so grim by the time he came to office that any US action was going to lead to disaster and that much of Kissinger's actions were done in the context of the Cold War, were unpleasant and even excretable decisions arguably had to be made, decisions that would later to go on to damage the US in the Post-Cold War era. Kissingers reply to the article and Judt's follow up are enjoyable reading: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/11781928
I am probably being biased, I've longed enjoyed Henry Kissinger's books and I get the devils advocate argument for his actions, plus i am not usually in the political camp of his detractors. However his tenure in power raises difficult questions on the accountability of secret government and one that we had hopped would be consigned to the history books. Unfortunately we are now in a second Cold War and we will now have to decide whether to dust off his ideas once again.
A good summary of Kissinger's career. I was always mystified that Kissinger maintained his influence long after his failings became apparent. On a trivial point, Ursula von der Leyen's tweet strikes me as truism rather than eulogy, apart perhaps from the slightly odd phrase "excellence in diplomacy" which could be just another way of saying "craftiness".
I appreciate that you have no patience for the myth that Kissinger was at all an anti-Communist crusader. He was one of the worst enablers of Communism in the history of American domestic politics. Possibly THE worst.
But he was not at fault for Allende. For one, the US got cold feet during our actual coup attempt on Chile in 1970, but Vieux, the guy we contacted to do it did it anyway. For another, Allende was an avowed Stalinist, literally on the KGB payroll, whose goal was to turn Chile into a mountainous Cuba, so the notion that there was ever a moral reason not to overthrow him by any means necessary is absurd. And to wrap it up, the '73 Coup had nothing to do with the US. It was entirely a Chilean domestic affair, motivated by Allende destroying the country's economy and its civil society:
https://kyleorton.substack.com/p/myth-1973-american-coup-in-chile