At 100, the former secretary of state remains the great teacher of statesmen, including the recent president of a small post-Soviet country.
Henry Kissinger, who turns 100 on May 27, has led a momentous and consequential life. His actions as a statesman and diplomat have earned him the implacable contempt of many critics. But those who examine his career more dispassionately would see that Kissinger’s unsparing realism, forged by his childhood experience in Nazi Germany and his adult belief in American possibility, was essential to averting a global calamity during the Cold War. As secretary of state to President Richard Nixon, he helped to fashion an international order underwritten by a constellation of competing states. Some found this attitude unacceptably cynical. All that mattered to Kissinger was the stability it assured.
My own career, like that of so many statesmen around the world, was often guided by Kissinger. As a scientist-turned politician, tasked with opening Armenia’s first international mission in London after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, I apprenticed myself to Kissinger’s work. I first met him in the late 1990s, after serving as my country’s prime minister. Kissinger was 75 at the time, but the generosity and suppleness of his intellect were still enviable.
When I was later elected president of Armenia, in 2018, I frequently turned to his writings to help steer my small post-Soviet country out of the intractable challenges imposed by war in a volatile neighborhood. Over the last quarter-century I have gotten to know Kissinger very well personally, and I’ve learned that his critics’ hostile caricature is seriously misleading.
The author (right) with Kissinger in New York, October 2018. PHOTO: DAVID HAKOPIAN
Kissinger’s complex worldview was molded by his early encounter with the evil of Nazism. He was born as Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Furth, Germany, in 1923, a decade before Hitler consolidated his rise to power. In the first 15 years of his life, he witnessed firsthand the rise of a genocidal Nazi regime, which went on to inaugurate a world war and annihilate millions of his fellow European Jews. Though as a statesman he rejected romantic ideas, he revered America in an almost sentimental way: “Nowhere else is there to be found the same generosity of spirit and absence of malice,” he once wrote of his adopted country.
After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Kissinger went to Harvard, where he applied his mind to the study of power in international relations. His 1957 book “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” established him as a leading geostrategist. In “The Necessity for Choice,” published in 1960, he elaborated the idea of a “flexible response” to Soviet arms, emerging as one of the most important outside influences on the Kennedy administration’s foreign policy.
In 1969, Kissinger was recruited by President Nixon to be the head of the National Security Council, a role he redefined and made more powerful. Nixon appointed him secretary of state in 1973, and he remained in office until the end of Gerald Ford’s presidency in January 1977. Today the Kissinger-Nixon partnership, immortalized by audiotapes of controversial conversations between the two, is often remembered as a sinister alliance. But as Barry Gewen has demonstrated in his outstanding recent study of Kissinger, “The Inevitability of Tragedy,” his policy of realpolitik was instrumental in preserving American power, while keeping at bay a great-power conflagration that might have consumed the world.
Kissinger accurately saw that an exclusive reliance on hard power was becoming untenable in the late 1960s. The Vietnam War, the violent Soviet crackdown in Czechoslovakia and raging conflicts in the Middle East had produced an appetite for meaningful dialogue and compromise. He recognized that this shift created new possibilities, allowing the U.S. to bring the Vietnam War to an end while initiating rapprochement with the Soviet Union and establishing relations with China.
Newly appointed Secretary of State Henry Kissinger with President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office, September 1973. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Power is a theater of messy trade-offs; it constrains more than it liberates. To achieve one goal, the wielder of power must often sacrifice another. Was Kissinger wrong to do business with the repressive Soviet regime? Many Americans thought so at the time, but by pursuing detente, Kissinger pushed Moscow toward ratifying disarmament treaties that secured peace between the two hostile superpowers. I was a teenager in the Soviet Union at the time, and I remember distinctly the optimism bred by the warming relations between Moscow and Washington.
Kissinger’s commitment to gaining the deepest possible insight into other countries—not just their politics but their culture and philosophy—was the secret strength of his diplomacy. It made him one of the few American statesmen to appreciate the fundamental distinction between Western and Chinese worldviews. The former strives for complete victory at any cost, while the latter is content with achieving a relative advantage.
Kissinger illustrated this difference by comparing the Chinese game weiqi with chess. A chess player seeks to destroy his opponent’s pieces with a series of frontal blows, while a talented player of weiqi strives to create empty places on the board, gradually reducing the strategic potential of the opponent’s stones. Chess, for all its seeming complexity, develops simplicity of thinking; weiqi, despite its simple appearance, promotes strategic flexibility.
Kissinger’s outreach to the pariah regime of the People’s Republic of China in 1971, timed to exploit a rift between Beijing and Moscow, has been justly criticized for coming at the expense of the Bengali people. To achieve an opening with China, Washington supported the military dictatorship of Pakistan, a Chinese ally that acted as a conduit to Beijing, even as it carried out a genocide in what is today Bangladesh.
Knowing Kissinger, I more than suspect that he ranks his support for Pakistan among the greatest regrets of his career. At the time, however, the possibility of drawing China closer to the U.S. must have seemed too important a prize. In exercising power, as the great international-relations theorist Hans Morgenthau once noted, “the very act of acting destroys our moral integrity. Whoever wants to retain his moral innocence must forsake action altogether.”
Kissinger’s record in Bangladesh, Cambodia and other countries has led to his being reviled by the left. But while he was in office, his policy of detente with Moscow and his outreach to Mao’s China, combined with his aversion to domestic populism, also made him the target of conservative critics. Some accused him, in an antisemitic swipe, of being a “rootless cosmopolitan” who was soft on communism and indifferent to American values.
Today we are seeing a resurgence of toxic populism around the world and the emergence of a new Cold War between the U.S. and China. The geopolitics of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, characterized by deadly but relatively predictable players and venerable institutions, has given way to what can be called a “quantum era,” defined by unpredictability.
This makes it easy to dismiss Kissingerism as an obsolete school of thought, but that would be a grave mistake. His diplomacy, rooted in an unrelentingly realistic assessment of the world and all its unbeautiful complexities, isn’t just applicable to the challenges we face today. It may well save us from the kind of calamitous conflict he devoted himself to fending off as secretary of state. As Henry Kissinger turns 100, it is time for the world, for its own sake, to rediscover him.
Armen Sarkissian served as the fifth prime minister and fourth president of Armenia. His next book, “The Small States Club: How Small Smart States Can Save the World,” will be published later this year.