The Lessons of Henry Kissinger
The legendary and controversial statesman criticizes the Obama Doctrine, talks about the main challenges for the next president, and explains how to avoid war with China.
.. He told me that he was expecting other nations, particularly the great powers, to enter a period of intense study, in order to understand how they should respond to a Trump presidency. He also said he expected the Islamic State, or other similarly minded jihadist organizations, to test Trump early by launching attacks, in order to provoke a reaction (or, he suggested, an overreaction).
.. “Nonstate groups may make the assessment that Trump will react to a terror attack in a way that suits their purposes,” Kissinger said.
.. JG: Do you think Trump is a Putin apologist?
HK: No. I think he fell into certain rhetoric because Putin said some good words about him—tactically—and he felt he had to respond.
.. I think most of the world’s foreign policy has been in suspense for six to nine months, waiting for the outcome of our election. They have just watched us undergo a domestic revolution. They will want to study it for some period. But at some point, events will necessitate decision making once more. The only exception to this rule may be nonstate groups; they may have an incentive to provoke an American reaction that undermines our global position.
.. JG: Why do you think this happened?
HK: The Trump phenomenon is in large part a reaction of Middle America to attacks on its values by intellectual and academic communities.
THE LESSONS OF HENRY KISSINGER
“ ‘Though Kissinger has been out of government service for several decades, I found his egomania to be undiminished by time.’ ”
.. Finally we came to an agreement. I would record our conversation, and transcribe it, and then show it to him, and he would, he promised, make changes only in order to clarify points or expand upon his arguments
.. I have never met someone as old as Kissinger who is so keen to impress semi-random strangers, including semi-random 19-year-old strangers. Over lunch, he was relentless in his attempt to win my daughter over to his understanding of the world, and his role in it. This quality makes him exasperating and mesmerizing, and it launches him on flights of self-exculpatory analysis. There is no issue—not the bombing of Cambodia, or his activities in Chile or Argentina, or his role in the Pakistani civil war, which gave birth to Bangladesh and resulted in mass death—that he is not eager to relitigate.
.. He laments that history is not taught consecutively, and that historical incidents are often decontextualized beyond recognition. His argument was compelling, but also self-serving: His core contention, when it comes to the greatest controversies in his career, is that postwar American support for anti-Communist allies is impossible to understand or rationalize without both proper historical context and a baseline sympathy for a pro-Western narrative. Universities, he said, “like to teach history as a series of discrete problems. And they above all don’t want to teach Western history. They believe that the West has committed so many crimes that they are not entitled to single it out. That is a thought that would never occur to a Chinese.
.. “A puzzling aspect about Obama is how someone so intelligent could treat his peers with the disdain he did in your article,” he said. “Someone of that stature usually develops a sense of humility.”
.. “The uncertainty of Clinton is whether the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party would permit her to carry out what she believes.”
.. JG: What are America’s perpetual, eternal interests?
HK: I would begin by saying that we have to have faith in ourselves. That is an absolute requirement. We can’t reduce policy to a series of purely tactical decisions or self-recriminations.
.. It seems to me that in the Western world, after the Second World War, we had a vision of a peaceful order. There was no question that we would sacrifice for it. We sent a large army to Europe. We spent a lot of money. We need to rediscover that spirit and adapt it to the realities that have emerged since then.