Ashok Ogra
Before Henry Kissinger assumed the key role in Richard Nixon’s cabinet, the US had the legendary John Foster Dulles who who guided the nation’s foreign policy during President Eisenhower’s presidency.
He carried out the “containment” policy during the Korean War and designed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization providing for collective action against aggression. However, he denounced India’s nonalignment policy as “an immoral and shortsighted conception.”
After Henry Kissinger’s innings ended in the 1970s, it was George Shultz who during his tenure with Ronald Reagan convinced the president that Gorbachev was a man with whom he could do business. His efforts paved the way for the peaceful end to the four-decade Cold War.
During his visit to India in 1983, he openly endorsed arms sales to India and resolved the long pending spare parts for two American-built nuclear reactors.
Therefore, the question that arises is what distinguishes Henry Kissinger from both Foster and Shultz and the ilk. Perhaps, the answer lies in the long innings that Kissinger played on the world stage, and the influence he enjoyed till his death.
Known for his realpolitik approach to foreign policy, the diplomat in Kissinger emphasized practical and realistic considerations over ideological or moral concerns. He is lauded for his strategic insights and his role in establishing diplomatic ties with Communist China.
Yet for many, Kissinger will be remembered a war criminal. While never found guilty, or even tried, for war crimes his links to policies that led to many thousands of civilian deaths (Vietnam, Chile and Cambodia) are an indelible part of his legacy. That is quiet surprising considering that he fled Germany as a kid to escape Nazi genocide.
Henry Kissinger passed away early this week at age100.
In his day, Henry Kissinger was the world’s most powerful diplomat. He did not derive all his authority from the US President Richard Nixon, whose NSA and Secretary of State he was. He contributed in no small measure to Nixon’s dominance. Kissinger’s influence grew during the turmoil of Watergate, when the politically attuned diplomat assumed a role akin to co-president to the weakened Nixon.
In India he is remembered for his controversial role during the1971 India-Pakistan war. In his memoirs-THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS- Kissinger admits the initial fumbling by the American government over its proposed reaction to the rapidly escalating conflict. The US overtures to Mrs. Gandhi, the then prime minister, were frostily rebuffed. “We can’t afford to listen to advice that weakens us,” Mrs.Gandhi told the American Ambassador Keating.
With China supporting Pakistan and the Soviets backing India, the US indecision was further compounded by the fact that Kissinger and the State Department, headed by William Rogers, were always at variance with each other.
In the book, Kissinger deals with the US decision to cut off aid to India, the US resolution in the Security Council calling for a ceasefire, and withdrawal of Indian forces. However, he admits “events in the sub-continent overtook us.” Nixon was known for his fiercely anti India views.
To be sure, millions of refugees had imposed enormous strain on the Indian economy. But what had caused the war, in the view of both Nixon and Kissinger, went beyond the refugee problem; it was India’s determination to use the crisis to establish its pre-eminence on the subcontinent.
The Soviet Union could have restrained India; it chose not to. It had, in fact, actively encouraged war by signing the Friendship Treaty, giving diplomatic support to India’s maximum demands, airlifting military supplies, and pledging to veto inconvenient resolutions in the UN Security Council.
“The Indians are bastards,” Kissinger told Nixon, after the president had hosted Indira Gandhi, at the White House in 1971. “They are the most aggressive goddamn people around.”
Kissinger is supposed to have sneered at Americans who “bleed” for “the dying Bengalis.”
The American ordered Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal from waters off Vietnam, on the pretext of evacuating US citizens from the war zone.
However, the ordering of the US 7th fleet into the Bay of Bengal did not really impact the war as the Russians quickly sent their own fleet to counteract this chess move by the west.”
After Dhaka was liberated, Kissinger told Nixon he had saved ‘West Pakistan’
At a time when East Pakistanis were seeking independence from Pakistan, Kissinger emerged on the world stage as a great strategist, opening backchannel talks between the U.S. and China in the early 1970s, leading to the establishment of formal diplomatic relations and Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972.
His style, to quote one State Department official, was “secret diplomacy, secretly arrived at”. It was largely this craving for shrouding his negotiations that led him to use the then Pakistan President, Yahya Khan, as a conduit to Peking. Two days before he was scheduled to leave Karachi, he faked a “severe attack of flu” and was “unavailable” to visitors. In fact, he had boarded a Pakistani plane and was on his way to Peking.
Kissinger’s historic Peking (Beijing) trip signified not only a new era in the history of Sino-US relations, but also proved a great personal triumph.
A former minister of Israel described Kissinger’s negotiating tactics in these words: “If he wanted to sell us a car with a wheel missing, he would achieve his purpose by an eloquent and cogent eulogy of the three wheels that remained.”
He was instrumental in achieving Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam that earned him the controversial Nobel Prize for peace in 1973 that he shared with his Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho.
Rewind to the winter of 1972 that saw heavy bombing carried out over Hanoi by US B-52 bombers. All over the world, thousands took to the streets in protest. He supported the U.S. carpet-bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam War, which killed thousands of civilians and helped enable the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.
Not surprisingly, Le Duc refused to accept the prize, and two members of the Nobel committee resigned.
His “shuttle diplomacy” also helped improve relations between Israel and Arab nations, and contain the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. But his influence on other conflicts around the globe has been more controversial. He drew fierce criticism for other positions he deemed to be in American interests, including undermining a democratically elected government in Chile, which lay the groundwork for a military coup.
He became the first US secretary of state to visit South Africa in three decades, delivering prestige to the apartheid regime in the aftermath of the Soweto massacre in 1976, when scores of demonstrating school children and others were gunned down by police.
One of the most persistent criticisms leveled at Kissinger was that he sacrificed morality in American foreign policy on the altar of pragmatism. As a student of international relations he believed that ‘a nation has no friends, only interests.’
Voluble on policy, Kissinger was reticent on personal matters, although he once told a journalist he saw himself as a cowboy hero, riding off alone. Kissinger acquired a reputation as ladies man. He called women “a diversion, a hobby.” He enjoyed the attention he would receive and is reported to have remarked “the nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it’s their fault.”
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Germany, on May 27, 1923, and moved to the United States with his family in 1938 before the Nazi campaign to exterminate European Jewry. Anglicizing his name to Henry, Kissinger served in the Army in Europe in World War 2, and attended Harvard University and was a faculty member for the next 17 years.
In 1968, Nixon chose Kissinger to be his national security adviser and during his second term appointed him as secretary of state.
In the course of his tenure as Secretary of State, he flew 565,000 miles, making 213 visits to foreign countries. He once visited 17 countries in 18 days, and after the October 1973 war, Kissinger spent 33 consecutive days in the Middle East negotiating disengagement between Israel and neighbouring Arab states.
After leaving government in 1977, Kissinger remained a prominent presence in foreign policy circles for decades. Even into his late 90s, he continued publicly weighing in on global events, consulting for business clients and privately advising American presidents.
Recently, he courted controversy for proposing a cease-fire and a restoration of the pre-invasion borders, suggesting that Russia should withdraw all its troops from the areas of Ukraine that it has captured this year – but not from Crimea Russia annexed in 2014.
Lately, he participated in several summits, hosted by Indian media houses.”I have very high regard for the way the Indians conduct their foreign policy now, because it shows balance.”
Asking whether Kissinger was either a realist or an idealist misses a more interesting aspect of Kissinger’s philosophy of history: his radical subjectivism, his belief that there is no such thing as absolute truth, no truth at all other than what could be deduced from one’s own solitary perspective.
The challenge people like Kissinger pose are how to remember them. One thing is clear: Henry Kissinger was an outstanding diplomat who fell short of being a true world statesman. A great negotiator but was no Saint. His remarks “a country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security,” truly sums up what his mental makeup was like. Therefore, it is fair to say that his legacy is still up for debate.
(The author works for reputed Apeejay Education, New Delhi)
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