Henry Kissinger

10 Key excerpts on "Henry Kissinger"

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  The Eccentric Realist

  Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy

  • Mario Del Pero(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  2

  KISSINGER AND KISSINGERISM

  Most studies of Henry Kissinger tend to present him as the quintessential exponent of a continental European realism that became popular in Cold War America. According to this established interpretation, Kissinger’s approach to world affairs was always distinguished by an attempt to oust the extreme moral and ideological traits, which had made the Cold War a peculiar and unique period in the history of modern international relations. The popular historian and pundit Walter Russell Mead has claimed that for Kissinger, “the United States and the Soviet Union” were simply “two great powers like Prussia and Austria.” According to one biographer, Kissinger adhered to a flexible and uninhibited realpolitik that rejected “moral absolutes.” Such an approach left little or “no room for idealism.” As a scholar, and even more so as a statesman, Kissinger has therefore been described (and sometimes stereotyped) as the last, great adept of a realist tradition that adapted to the changed structure of the world system but was careful to respect the basic rules of international politics. His “reliance on great power diplomacy, his assumption of unquestioned priority of international over domestic politics, his Weberian conception of the statesman’s personal responsibility for the ethical dilemmas of foreign policy—all these tenets of realism,” political scientist Michael Joseph Smith has argued, “informed Kissinger’s approach.”1

  The Education of Heinz Kissinger

  This reading of Kissinger as an unreconstructed archrealist is one that needs to be challenged or at least qualified. Kissingerian realism has been (and still is) far from linear, coherent, and doctrinally orthodox. A good dose of opportunism and unscrupulousness induced Kissinger to adapt his realism to the spirit of the times and to U.S. Cold War political culture (if not to politics tout court). As underlined by one of the intellectual fathers of U.S. realism, political scientist Hans Morgenthau, one of Kissinger’s greatest skills has been his ability to “adjust” from time to time “intellectual conviction to political exigencies.” In government as well as in academia, Morgenthau critically maintained, Kissinger operated as a “many-sided” Odysseus, a “polytropos” with multiple faces, whose intellectual peripateticism was rarely disinterested. “Kissinger,” Morgenthau argued in 1975, “is a good actor who does not play the role of Hamlet today, of Caesar tomorrow, but who is Hamlet today and Caesar tomorrow.”2

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  The US Secretaries of State and Transatlantic Relations

  • Klaus Larres(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The scholar statesman: Henry Kissinger Dieter Dettke Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

  Statesmen become statesmen as much by the power of their office and the force of their personality and vision as by the circumstances and conditions of their time. Rarely does history allow men to join the rank of statesman from a position of derivative power. Metternich, Castlereagh, Bismarck and Disraeli, the great statesmen of the nineteenth century, whose policies Henry Kissinger had studied and admired so much, were able to act on their own visions and perceptions of the raison d'état from positions of great authority without major domestic concerns. They were less restricted by their respective domestic environment and public opinion at home and abroad than statesmen of the first and the second half of the twentieth century. When Kissinger arrived in the corridors of power in Washington in the late 1960s, American foreign policy was in a profound crisis over Vietnam. Initially very little attention was paid to the country's policies towards Europe and Washington's relations with its transatlantic allies. After all, the global power configuration had begun to shift to the disadvantage of the United States. The more US military forces appeared to be bogged down in Indochina, the more American global preeminence was challenged politically as well as economically. Mutual vulnerability became the defining condition for diplomacy in the nuclear age. Regional and local conflicts generated more dilemmas than opportunities and both superpowers saw their freedom to act militarily beyond their borders severely limited.

  Kissinger's greatest achievement under these conditions was the statesmanship he demonstrated in spite of the Vietnam War and in particular with regard to East-West relations in Europe and elsewhere. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for the Paris Peace Agreement. But what he achieved through negotiations was hardly the comprehensive peace in Indochina he attempted to bring home from Paris. The agreement barely covered the unilateral nature of the US withdrawal and it did not prevent the communist takeover of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. His most important contribution to modern statecraft in the twentieth century was the profound transformation of great power relations at a time of fierce political competition and ideological conflict, the creation of principles to reduce the risk of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union and other agreements with the Soviet Union as well as with China at a critical stage in the development of East-West relations. Indirectly, he thus contributed to a peaceful end of the Cold War.

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  Critical Practices in International Theory

  Selected Essays

  • James Der Derian(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  11 Great men, monumental history, and not-so-grand theory A meta-review of Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy Source: Forum review article, Mershon International Studies Review (April 1995), vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 173–180. Editor’s Note: In the first issue of the Mershon International Studies Review the Forum section featured a debate concerning the recently published book by Alexander L. George, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (1993). The primary thesis of the book, that both scholars and practitioners of foreign policy benefit from better communication and collaboration, went unchallenged. In this chapter, James Der Derian, who authored On Diplomacy (1987) and Antidiplomacy (1992), offers a critique of this assumption through a meta-review of the recent book by analyst-turned-politician Henry Kissinger: Diplomacy (1994a). Diplomacy is a history of the attempt by statesmen to bring order to international politics through a balancing of war and diplomacy, national interest and morality, domestic values and international necessities. For Kissinger, lessons derived from the balance of power politics of classical figures like Richelieu, Metternich, and Bismarck must be applied to current times if the “new world order” is ever to become more than a slogan of aspiration. This is especially true for the United States, where the recurrent tension between Theodore Roosevelt’s realism and Woodrow Wilson’s idealism must be skillfully and diplomatically balanced if the U.S

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  Mental Maps in the Era of Détente and the End of the Cold War 1968–91

  • Jonathan Wright, Steven Casey, Jonathan Wright, Steven Casey(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  15 He had rarely commented upon such profound global changes as decolonization or the role of the People’s Republic of China in international affairs.

  If Nixon had the practical experience in high diplomacy that Kissinger lacked, the Harvard professor had the knowledge – of history and theory – that the new president craved. Both were extremely ambitious, and both wanted broad recognition of their abilities and intellect. Installed in the White House in early 1969 – one in the Oval Office, the other nearby in the West Wing basement – they had an opportunity to make a major difference in US foreign policy and, in turn, in shaping the course of international relations writ large.

  American Decline in a Turbulent World

  Much like his campaign strategies, Nixon’s foreign policy views were, in fact, malleable when he entered the White House in January 1969. They certainly lacked in specificity regarding the major challenges that would preoccupy the new administration. Nixon had, by and large, supported the escalation of the Vietnam War and offered, in 1968, only a non-specified ‘secret plan’ on how to end the war. He had published, in 1967, what many would later consider a remarkably prophetic essay on China, arguing, in essence, that in the long run the United States would have to come to terms with the world’s most populous nation. But in the same essay Nixon also wrote that ‘the world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus our aim, to the extent that we can influence events, should be to induce change.’16 This, of course, was not exactly how US policy would unfold during the Nixon presidency. In various speeches during the presidential campaign Nixon had also referred to ‘a new era of negotiation’ with the Soviet Union. There was a hint of change, but hardly anything approaching a strong commitment to détente. As for the so-called Third World, Nixon was loathe to promote American ideas and liberal democracy as something to be emulated. As he put it in a speech in 1967, ‘It is time for us to recognize that much as we like our own political system, American style democracy is not necessarily the best form of government for people in Asia, Africa and Latin America with entirely different backgrounds.’17

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  A Companion to Richard M. Nixon

  • Melvin Small, Melvin Small(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy . New York: Columbia University Press.

  Small, Melvin (1999). The Presidency of Richard Nixon . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

  Smith, Gerard (1980). Doubletalk: The Story of the First Strategic Arms Limitation Talks . Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

  Suri, Jeremi (2007). Henry Kissinger and the American Century . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

  Szulc, Tad (1978). The Illusion of Peace: Foreign Policy in the Nixon Years . Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

  Time (1973). January 1: 15ff.

  United States Department of State (2003). Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976 . Vol. 1. Foundations of Foreign Policy . Washington: GPO.

  ——(2007). Soviet-American Relations: The Détente Years . Washington: GPO.

  ——(2008). Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976 . Vol. xvii. China, 1969–1972 . Washington: GPO.

  Valeriani, Richard (1979). Travels with Henry . Boston: Little, Brown.

  Yaqub, Salim (2008). “The Weight of Conquest: Kissinger and the Arab-Israeli Dispute.” In Frederik Logevall and Andrew Preston (eds.). Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969–1976 . New York: Oxford University Press: 227–48.

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  Chapter Twenty-one

  THE VIETNAM WAR

  Jeffrey P. Kimball

  President Richard M. Nixon considered his highest foreign-policy priorities to be the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Middle East, and the Vietnam War. During his first term, he ranked the latter as “problem No. 1” and “the most urgent.” In early October 1969, as the war entered its ninth month under his direction, Nixon understood that a critical mass of the public would regard the conflict as “his war” (Kimball 2004: 75, 200, 169) as much as it had been “McNamara’s war” or “Johnson’s war.” Acutely aware of the political ramifications of continuing the conflict, looking ahead to his reelection bid in 1972, and concerned about his his

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  Modern America: A Documentary History of the Nation Since 1945

  A Documentary History of the Nation Since 1945

  • Robert H Donaldson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Kissinger was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Furth, Germany, in 1923. In 1938 his family fled the Nazi anti-Semitism of the time, settling in New York. In 1943, Kissinger became a naturalized citizen and joined the U.S. Army, serving in Europe as an interpreter and intelligence officer. After the war, he pursued a brilliant academic career at Harvard, where he became a professor of international affairs in 1957.

  At least in part because of his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957), Kissinger’s advice was sought after by national political leaders. He became a part-time foreign policy advisor to the Kennedy administration in the early sixties, and is usually credited with devising JFK’s “flexible response” strategy, arguing the need for both conventional and nuclear forces in response to Soviet aggressions.

  Through the sixties, Kissinger continued to advise the Johnson administration, but he also served as a behind-the-scenes advisor to several Republicans, particularly Nelson Rockefeller, who ran unsuccessfully for his party’s nomination in 1964 and again in 1968. When Nixon was elected in 1968, he appointed Kissinger as his national security advisor. With Nixon’s support, Kissinger immediately concentrated the foreign policy structure of the administration under the authority of the National Security Council, effectively circumventing and limiting the power of the State Department and the secretary of state.

  Kissinger often expressed his lack of faith in the American moralistic approach to its cold war foreign policy: the assumption that the American system was morally superior to the Soviet system, and therefore it would ultimately win out. He argued for a more pragmatic approach that recognized the Soviet Union as a rival superpower in a balance of power and a threat of equal force. Once a perception of equality was accepted by both sides, areas of cooperation could be pursued. The policy became known as “détente.”

  In 1969 Kissinger began secret talks with North Vietnam in an attempt to bring a favorable end to the war. In 1973, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho for secretly negotiating conditions for an American withdrawal from Vietnam.

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  Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy

  The Continuing Story of a Death Foretold

  • Stefano Guzzini(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Henry Kissinger, as National Security Advisor (1969–73) and later Secretary of State (1973–77), had elaborated a set of geostrategic assumptions, which was one of the inspirations of this new policy, the US version of detente. His approach was a historically based realism. He proposed updating the principles of nineteenth century European statecraft and applying them to the circumstances of his time. Yet already, after Kissinger’s first years at Nixon’s side, this task proved not only to have been self-consciously heroic and neoromantic (Hoffmann 1978), but also unrealizable. It did not succeed in accommodating the emancipation of new states, outside the direct control of the central bipolar concert, and the independence of the economic sector of international relations, outside the reach of the classical diplomat. Kissinger’s efforts represent both a grandiose attempt to invigorate the codes of nineteenth century diplomacy, and the limits of such an attempt.

  Whereas Chapter 5 attested some of the anomalies of realism as an explanatory theory, the failure of Kissinger’s project bears witness to the limitations of reapplying realism understood as a diplomatic practice. As the next chapter of this interlude will show, the crisis of realism as a theory and practice in the main country of International Relations, not only eventually led to a fragmentation of the US foreign policy establishment, but also of the academic discipline.

  KISSINGER’S GENERAL APPROACH

  Kissinger applied a historical approach to the study and practice of diplomacy. His major political endeavour consisted in devising an international order which could combine the flexibility and, indeed, generosity of nineteenth century diplomacy with the changed circumstances of the twentieth century. Vital to the functioning of the European Concert was the existence of what Kissinger calls a legitimate order. A legitimate order, not to be confused with a just one, is an order whose principles are agreed by all of its participants (for more detail, see Chapter 3

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  The Post-Heroic Presidency

  Leveraged Leadership in an Age of Limits

  • Michael A. Genovese, Todd L. Belt(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  25 Richard Nixon, along with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, would be in control of foreign policy. It would be a highly personalized process, with powers jealously guarded by Nixon and Kissinger. This over-personalization and deinstitutionalization of foreign policy decision making was a distinctive characteristic of the Nixon style in foreign affairs.

  Kissinger, a Harvard professor of government, had written extensively about international politics. Nixon admired his work and, during the transition, invited Kissinger to the Pierre Hotel to discuss the new administration’s foreign policy. Several days after their meeting, Richard Nixon offered Kissinger the job of national security adviser. On December 2, 1968, Kissinger’s appointment was announced to the press, at which time Nixon remarked that Kissinger was “keenly aware of the necessity not to set himself up as a wall between the President and the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense.”26 But this was not to be. Immediately after his appointment, Kissinger began a thorough reevaluation of U.S. foreign policy. This study was coordinated by Kissinger and his staff, and all contents of the reports had to be approved by Kissinger himself. The reports that the Kissinger team prepared gave area and subject reviews of U.S. foreign relations and problems along with policy options for the president’s review. Known as National Security Policy Memoranda (NSPM), these reports were the basis of many of the early Nixon administration policies.

  Nixon and Kissinger had a complex, symbiotic relationship. Before the meeting at the Pierre Hotel, Nixon had met Kissinger only once, but he admired Kissinger’s book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. As Nixon notes in his memoirs, “I had a strong intuition about Henry Kissinger,” and added, “I decided on the spot that he should be my National Security Adviser.”27 It was a strange match, this small-town, Quaker politician and the German Jewish academic and refugee from Nazi Germany, but it was a match that worked to the advantage of both parties.28

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  History of American Foreign Policy, Volume 2

  From 1895

  • Jerald A Combs(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Then, as his role in the spectacular back-channel negotiations with China, Russia, and Vietnam became known, Nixon permitted Kissinger to hold public news conferences rather than anonymous backgrounders. Kissinger, with his brilliant analyses and quick wit, became an instant media star. His favorite technique was to poke fun at his own foibles, particularly his megalomania. When asked if he had read Bernard and Marvin Kalb’s biography Kissinger, he said, “No, but I like the title.” After his appointment as secretary of state, one reporter inquired if he preferred to be called Mr. Secretary or Dr. Secretary. Kissinger replied, “I don’t stand on protocol. If you will just call me ‘Excellency,’ it will be okay.” When he unveiled the statue of Thomas Jefferson during the opening of the Jefferson room on the eighth floor of the State Department, he quipped with mock disappointment, “Oh, I thought it would be me.” In this way Kissinger established a separate identity from the president. As Watergate eroded Nixon’s power and reputation, Kissinger took more and more public responsibility for foreign affairs. Nixon had to move him out of the White House and put him in formal charge of foreign policy as secretary of state to protect the administration’s diplomatic successes and ongoing negotiations from the taint of the White House scandal, and Kissinger survived to carry the Nixon-Kissinger policies into the administration of Gerald Ford. At the outset of the administration, Nixon and Kissinger, analyzing the balance of power, believed they had a way to stabilize the Cold War, extricate the United States from Vietnam, and fashion a “structure of peace.” First, recognizing the strain between China and the Soviet Union, they would reopen diplomatic relations with China. Cooperation with China would alter the balance of power and give the Soviet Union an incentive to come to its own accommodation with the United States

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  Henry Kissinger

  Perceptions of International Politics

  • Harvey Starr(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  44 Similarly, Kissinger praises Nixon for understanding geopolitical structures and balance, of balancing interests, goals, and the capabilities of competing states:

  It was a hard lesson to convey to a people who rarely read about the balance of power without seeing the adjective “outdated” precede it. It was not one of the least ironies of the period that it was a flawed man, so ungenerous in some of his human impulses, who took the initiative in leading America toward a concept of peace compatible with its new realities and the awful perils of the nuclear age, and that the foreign leaders who best understood this were the two grizzled veterans of the Long March, Mao and Chou, who openly expressed their preference for Richard Nixon over the wayward representatives of American liberalism. . . . For sovereign nations, predictability is more crucial than spasmodic brilliance or idiosyncratic moralistic rhetoric. They must gear their actions to the performance of others over extended periods of time; their domestic survival and international security alike may depend upon it. And it was on this level of shared geopolitical interest transcending philosophies and history that the former Red-baiter and the crusaders for world revolution found each other.45

  As both Ward and Mazlish point out, as the years passed, Kissinger also sought out men whose intellectual positions fit with his own. Ward comments that Kissinger “would commit himself to the ideas of Nixon, a man for whom he has no personal respect.”46 Mazlish notes that the relationship between the two men was formal and intellectual, that they never became friends. Mazlish contends that, in his relationship with Nixon, Kissinger supported Mazlish’s proposition that Kissinger had a unique ability to fit with different kinds of men.47 Ward echoes this idea: “Perhaps because of his growing confidence in his own ability and his own ideas, Kissinger became able and willing to accept the challenge of trying to put his ideas into action even if the man who would make the final decision was not a man who Kissinger particularly admired.”48

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