The world Henry Kissinger leaves behind

Henry Kissinger died at his home in Connecticut on November 29 at the age of one hundred years. He was remembered in several obituaries that appeared in the newspapers around the world. He was actively involved in most parts of the world, including Pakistan, a subject I will pick up later in this writeup. First, I will review how the world sees him at the time of his death. One of the more thoughtful obituaries is by David E Sanger who writes on foreign affairs for The New York Times.

Although I was a student at Harvard while Kissinger was a professor at that university and attended some of his lectures, I never had a one-on-one meeting with him. My wife and I came to know his second wife Nancy who he married in 1974. She was a friend of the American couple who were our “host family” when my wife and I went to Harvard in 1967 and stayed on off-and-on until the spring of 1974.

Kissinger lived an extraordinary life. Long retired from public life, he retained his interest in foreign policy. His particular interest was in the large communist states, first Russia and then China. He was the author of what came to be known as the realist approach to foreign affairs. That meant taking what was in place as given and bringing about change at the margin to protect and advance America’s position in the world.

David E Sanger wrote a long obituary of Kissinger titled ‘A Strong-Willed Architect of the Cold War’. This was one of the many that appeared in the newspapers around the world. Sanger gave particular attention to the departed leader’s dealing with China. “For decades he remained the country’s most important voice on managing China’s rise,” wrote Sanger about Kissinger. “He was the only American to deal with every Chinese leader from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping. In China, even as relations with Washington turned adversarial, he was treated like visiting royalty.” At home in the United States, he advised 12 presidents — just shy of a quarter who have held the office — from John F Kennedy to Joseph R Biden Jr.

There were several scholars who were critical of some of what Kissinger did in his office. One of the more searing indictments came from Princeton scholar Gary J Bass who wrote a book published in 2013 under the title of The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide. The genocide that was the subject of the book was the killing of Pakistani citizens who lived in what was then the country’s eastern wing. The East Pakistanis — Bengalis — rebelled against the western part of the country and were encouraged by India, then governed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, to create an independent state to be called Bangladesh. Kissinger did not like Gandhi and he and Nixon, his president, decided to side with Pakistan in the conflict. Both needed Pakistan’s help to open to China. It was through Pakistan that Kissinger went to Beijing and met Mao Zedong. The meeting was arranged by Pakistan’s ambassador to China. Professor Bass has, in his book, bought the Indian propaganda that the Pakistani army in East Pakistan “set about slaughtering as many as 300,000 Bengalis in East Pakistan, most of them Hindus, while 10 million supporters of the Bangali independence movement crossed into India as refugees.”

Most scholarship about Kissinger was devoted to the role he played in Vietnam. Although he was of the opinion that the war in Vietnam was not for America to win, he widened the conflict to make it easier to pull out of the country. The journalist Willam Shawcross in his 1979 book, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia, argued that the United States could have pulled out of the country without the extensive bombing of Cambodia. But in his own books, Kissinger argued that the bombing convinced the North Vietnamese to sign a peace deal with the United States after negotiations in Paris. It was this deal that won Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize. The other recipient was Le Duc Tho, Kissinger’s North Vietnamese counterpart, who refused to accept the prize.

According to Sanger, “Perhaps the most important diplomatic contribution Mr. Kissinger made was his sidelining of Moscow in the Middle East for four decades, until Mr. Putin ordered his air force to enter the civil war in Syria.”

Kissinger wrote three volumes of memoirs that ran into 3,800 pages. The White House Years focused on President Nixon’s first term, 1969-73. It was after winning the presidency in 1968 that Nixon pulled out Kissinger from Harvard and brought him to the White House as his National Security Adviser. From that position he went on to become the United States Secretary of State while keeping the Adviser role. Years of Upheaval dealt with the next two years of the Nixon presidency while the third, Years of Renewal, covered the presidency of Ford. In addition to the memoirs, he continued to write on other subjects. The book On China could have been written only by a person who had first-hand experience of dealing with Beijing but also brought his knowledge of history to understand the way China works. History, he maintained, is very important for the Chinese policymakers. Those who at various points in time have led China are always aware of the humiliations their country suffered when foreign interventions extracted more from the country than the Chinese should have given.

What was once called the developing world has been renamed the Global South by the Indian leadership that has the ambition to lead the area but does not look favourably at the means Kissinger used to establish his country’s dominant position over the group of nations. “It was a world in which human rights, democracy, and justice were of little relevance; they were subordinate to the overarching goal of bolstering Washington and its allies in a balance of power with other great coalition, led by the Moscow,” wrote Eduardo Porter in an assessment published by The Washington Post. The competition now is with China which does not hide its ambition to lead the Global South. This is where India’s competition with China enters the picture. However, Washington does not have anybody like Kissinger in a policymaking position with the ability and ambition to lead the United States.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 11^th, 2023.

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