{"id":1361428,"date":"2023-11-29T21:25:57","date_gmt":"2023-11-29T21:25:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2023\/11\/henry-kissinger-to-die-at-the-right-time\/"},"modified":"2023-12-02T16:02:39","modified_gmt":"2023-12-02T16:02:39","slug":"henry-kissinger-to-die-at-the-right-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/11\/29\/henry-kissinger-to-die-at-the-right-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Henry Kissinger: To Die at the Right Time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

From Rockefeller to Nixon, then on to Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, Kissinger\u2019s service tracked the metaphysical evolution of American power. We all live now in the Kissingerian void. What horrors await?<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Henry Kissinger delivers a eulogy for John McCain, 2018.\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n

Order <\/em>The Good Die Young<\/a>, Jacobin\u2019s book-length anti-obituary for Henry Kissinger, featuring contributions from Carolyn Eisenberg, Gerald Horne, Bancroft Prize\u2013winner Greg Grandin, and others. Available now from Verso.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

In 2015, I published a book, Kissinger\u2019s Shadow<\/em><\/a>, which argued that Henry Kissinger is good to think with. By this, I meant that his long career (as an early Cold War defense intellectual, top foreign policymaker, consigliere to the world\u2019s elite and hawkish pundit) and very self-aware philosophy of history help illuminate the contours of postwar militarism, tracing a bright line from the disastrous war in Southeast Asia to the catastrophic one in the Gulf.<\/p>\n

The book came out a year before the unanticipated election of Donald Trump to the White House, when I thought an autumnal Kissinger\u2019s last act would be to bask in the warmth of neoliberal accolades offered by Democrats such as Hillary Clinton<\/a> and Samantha Power. Its conclusion focused on the ways in which Barack Obama\u2019s pragmatic, managerial militarism<\/a> echoed Kissinger\u2019s earlier justifications for interventionism and war, and the way Kissinger used Obama\u2019s disregard of national sovereignty, in his reliance on drones and bombing campaigns, as an ex post facto absolution of his own past actions. Asked about his involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and his illegal bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger answered that Obama has behaved similarly, pointing to drone assassinations and the ouster of Gaddafi in Libya.<\/p>\n

It seemed a perfect expression of American\u00a0militarism\u2019s merry-go-round logic: Kissinger invokes today\u2019s endless, open-ended war to justify what he did in Cambodia, Chile and elsewhere nearly half a century ago, even as what he did half a century ago helped create the conditions for today\u2019s endless wars.<\/p>\n

It turns out Kissinger\u2019s Shadow<\/em> needed an epilogue, for the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency vindicated its argument in a different way.<\/p>\n

Kissinger idealized people very much like Trump nearly his whole life: great statesmen whose greatness resides in their spontaneity, their agility, who thrive on chaos, on, as Kissinger wrote<\/a> in the 1950s, \u201cperpetual creation, on a constant redefinition of goals.\u201d They need to avoid the paralysis generated by thinking too much about what might go wrong, about the \u201cpre-vision of catastrophes\u201d that often beset diplomats and regional specialists. \u201cThere are two kinds of realists,\u201d Kissinger wrote<\/a> in the early 1960s, \u201cthose who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.\u201d \u00a0And who better to create their own reality than the start of reality TV?<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

Freedom Over Ethics<\/h2>\n \n

In his postwar cohort of defense intellectuals, Kissinger was among the most self-conscious about the philosophical tradition undergirding his policies and counsels \u2014 a kind of German idealism drawn from the early twentieth-century philosopher\u2013historian Oswald Spengler<\/a>, who defined history according to\u00a0its subjective, pre-rational, and instinctual elements. That tradition stood in stark contrast to the empiricism, pragmatism, and positivism that dominated American Cold War social science, which held that reality is transparent, that the \u201ctruth\u201d of facts can be arrived at by simply observing those facts.<\/p>\n

At Harvard in the late 1940s and 1950s, when he did his undergraduate and graduate work before taking a position as assistant professor, Kissinger strongly criticized both moral absolutism and the idea of objectivity, that the laws that govern society are knowable through observation.<\/p>\n

Recently, Kissinger\u2019s authorized biographer, Niall Ferguson<\/a>, argued that Kissinger is a Kantian, which is both half right and fully wrong. Kissinger did embrace the part of Kantian thought that emphasized radical freedom, but he did so not to affirm \u2014 as Ferguson believes \u2014 but to undermine foundational ethics. \u201cWe can hardly insist,\u201d he said<\/a> in a Harvard seminar discussion, \u201con both our freedom and on the necessity of our values.\u201d We can\u2019t, in other words, be both radically free and subject to a fixed moral requirement. Quoting Kant\u2019s famous categorical imperative to treat people always as ends and never as means, Kissinger added an addendum: \u201cwhat one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one\u2019s system, and on the concept one has of one\u2019s self and one\u2019s relationship to the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, Kissinger early on declared himself in favor of what the modern New Right has denounced, until recently at least, as radical relativism: there is no such thing as absolute truth, he argued in his early writings, no truth at all other than what could be deduced from one\u2019s own solitary perspective. \u201cMeaning represents the emanation of a metaphysical context,\u201d he wrote<\/a>. \u201cEvery man in a certain sense creates his picture of the world.\u201d Truth, Kissinger said, isn\u2019t found in facts but in the questions we ask of those facts. History\u2019s meaning is \u201cinherent in the nature of our query.\u201d<\/p>\n

That line is from a thesis Kissinger submitted as a Harvard senior, a nearly 400-page journey through the writings of a number of European philosophers. \u201cThe Meaning of History,\u201d as Kissinger titled his thesis, is dense, melancholic and often overwrought, easy to dismiss as the product of youth. But Kissinger continued to repeat many of its premises and arguments, in different forms, throughout his life. Besides, by the time of his arrival at Harvard, Kissinger had extensive real-world experience thinking about the questions his thesis raised, including the relationship between data and wisdom, the material world and consciousness, and being and nothingness, confirming an often overlooked fact about our post-fact present: the experiential origins of the intellectual relativism that swept through the twentieth century are mass murder, militarism, imperialism and endless war.<\/p>\n

Kissinger had escaped the Holocaust, but at least twelve of his family members hadn\u2019t. Drafted into the US Army in 1943, he spent the last year of the war back in Germany, working his way up the ranks of the intelligence service. As military administrator of the occupied Rhine River town of Krefeld, with a population of 200,000, he purged Nazis from municipal posts. He also distinguished himself as an intelligence agent. Identifying, arresting and interrogating Gestapo officers and securing confidential informants, Kissinger won a Bronze Star for his effectiveness and bravery.<\/p>\n

In other words, the relationship between fact and truth, a central preoccupation of his thesis, was not an abstract question for Kissinger. It was the stuff of life and death, and Kissinger\u2019s subsequent diplomacy was, writes<\/a> one of Kissinger\u2019s Harvard classmates, a \u201cvirtual transplant from the world of thought into the world of power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kissinger was greatly influenced by Spengler\u2019s civilizational critique<\/a>, the idea that complex societies are born, mature and then fade. He was especially impressed with Spengler\u2019s notion that the moment of decline could be identified by the moment\u00a0when technique supersedes purpose, when the accountants, economists and bureaucrats take over from the priests, poets and warriors.<\/p>\n

It is the moment when the \u201ccausality men\u201d (Spengler\u2019s term) and the \u201cfact men\u201d (Kissinger\u2019s term) take over that a civilization is in most danger. As the dreams, myths and risk-taking of an earlier creative period fall away, intellectuals and political leaders become predominantly concerned with questioning not why<\/em>, but how<\/em>. \u201cA century of purely extensive effectiveness,\u201d Spengler writes<\/a>, referring to the bureaucratic rationalism of modern society, which strives for ever more efficient ways of doing things, \u201cis a time of decline.\u201d The intuitive dimensions of wisdom get tossed aside, technocratic procedure overwhelms purpose, and information is mistaken for wisdom.<\/p>\n

Western culture was history\u2019s highest expression of technical reason: it \u201cviews the whole world,\u201d Kissinger wrote<\/a> in 1950, \u201cas a working hypothesis.\u201d The \u201cmachine\u201d was its great symbol, a \u201cperpetuum mobile\u201d\u2014a perpetual-motion machine that asserts relentless \u201cmastery over nature\u201d (you can hear strong echoes of Adorno and Horkheimer\u2019s \u201ccritique of instrumental reason\u201d in Kissinger\u2019s thesis). And the vastly powerful and obsessively efficient United States was the West\u2019s vanguard. As such, it was especially vulnerable to becoming trapped in the \u201ccult of the useful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harvard was the Vatican of American positivism, filled with the country\u2019s high priests of social science (including a young pioneer in game theory, Daniel Ellsberg<\/a>). Kissinger looked around and asked: would American leaders command or fall slave to their own technique? \u201cTechnical knowledge will be of no avail,\u201d the twenty-six-year-old student-veteran warned, \u201cto a soul that has lost its meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kissinger wrote those lines before the US fully committed to Vietnam, but over the years he\u2019d return repeatedly to many of his thesis premises to explain why that war, along with others that followed, went wrong. \u201cWhen technique becomes exalted over purpose, men become the victims of their complexities,\u201d he wrote<\/a> in 1965.\u00a0His book World Order<\/em><\/a>, which he published at age ninety- one, cites TS Eliot\u2019s \u201cChoruses from The Rock\u201d: \u201cWhere is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? \/ Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?\u201d<\/p>\n

Kissinger accepted Spengler\u2019s critique of past civilizations. But he rejected its dreary determinism, instead leavening its pessimism with a variant of existentialism, the idea that history had no intrinsic meaning, and therefore couldn\u2019t be \u201cdeter- mined\u201d by anything. Humans possess free will, he wrote, and their actions enjoy a significant range of freedom. Decay was not inevitable. \u201cSpengler,\u201d Kissinger wrote in 1950, \u201cmerely described a fact of decline, and not its necessity.\u201d \u201cThere is a margin,\u201d he would write<\/a> after he left public office in the late 1970s \u2014 that is, after<\/em> Vietnam, after<\/em> his policies helped unleash the genocides in Bangladesh and East Timor, after<\/em> his brutal support for homicidal insurgencies in southern Africa and after<\/em> his illegal bombing of Cambodia set the conditions that gave rise to the Khmer Rouge \u2014\u201cbetween necessity and accident, in which the statesman by perseverance and intuition must choose and thereby shape the destiny of his people.\u201d Limits did exist, Kissinger wrote, but political leaders who hide \u201cbehind historical inevitability\u201d to justify their inaction are guilty of \u201cmoral abdication.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hence Kissinger was always on the hunt for the Great Statesman who rises above facts and bureaucracies, who can tap into the \u201csoul-sense\u201d of their culture and translate intuition into bold policy. \u201cOften enough a statesman does not \u2018know\u2019 what he is doing,\u201d Spengler wrote, \u201cbut that does not prevent him from following with confidence just the one path that leads to success.\u201d Kissinger thought Nixon was one such man, but, alas, he overplayed his hand. There was Reagan, whom Kissinger at first resisted (largely because Reagan and the first generation of neocons rose to prominence attacking Kissinger), but eventually came around to admiring. Reagan had \u201chis own exuberant way of communicating with the\u00a0American public,\u201d Kissinger said, defending Reagan calling Muammar Gaddafi a \u201cmad dog\u201d and supporting the bombing of Libya.<\/p>\n

And then there was Trump, a true son of Spengler, someone with his finger on the pulse of his culture. Sensing decline, Trump wouldn\u2019t be afraid to act to bend the curve upward. Unlike past presidents, he instinctively sensed the trap that was being laid for him by the bureaucracy, intelligence agencies and foreign service, and he refused to enter. Trump, according to Kissinger<\/a>, \u201chas no obligation to any particular group because he has become a president on the basis of his own strategy.\u201d He is a free man.<\/p>\n

That Trump followed Obama is significant, for in Kissinger\u2019s civilizational typology, the professorial Obama is a platonic ideal of the leader who appears just at the precipice. He\u2019s a \u201cfact man,\u201d paralyzed by a vision of history that sees the past as nothing more than a series of cause-and-effect relations, and the present as nothing more than the product of endless blowback. Obama, according to Kissinger, was less concerned with advancing American purpose than he was with \u201cshort-term consequences turning into permanent obstacles.\u201d And so he did nothing, believing that he vindicated American values by withdrawing rather than acting.<\/p>\n

We are living in time of extreme global crisis, Kissinger said, and Obama couldn\u2019t represent the West because he had no sense, no feeling, for the West. He, complained<\/a> Kissinger, \u201cbasically withdrew America from international politics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

The Willingness to Act<\/h2>\n \n

Kissinger, based on the philosophy of history described above, had over the course of his career insisted on the importance of creative and unexpected responses to crises \u2014 exactly the \u201cunpredictability\u201d that Trump both values and performs.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnpredictability\u201d is needed for a number of reasons. The greatest of great diplomats are the men who shake up their foreign-policy bureaucracies, which over time inevitably become ossified, beholden to past policies (like Washington\u2019s One China policy) and too dependent on \u201cexperts,\u201d who, deeply versed in the details of their particular region, inevitably recommend caution rather than action. \u201cThose statesmen who have achieved final greatness did not do so though resignation, however well founded,\u201d Kissinger once wrote<\/a>. \u201cIt was given to them not only to maintain the perfection of order but to have the strength to contemplate chaos, there to find material for fresh creation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUnpredictability\u201d is also needed to introduce the threat of irrationality into negotiations. Kissinger has long insisted that war and diplomacy are inseparable and that, to be effective, diplomats need to be able to wield threats \u2014 the more irrational, or \u201cunpredictable,\u201d the better to make the threat credible \u2014 and offer incentives in equal, unrestricted, measure. This was the logic that led Kissinger, as a rising defense intellectual trying to make a name for himself in the 1950s and 1960s, to advocate the use of both \u201climited nuclear war\u201d and low-intensity wars in areas of marginal significance, such as Southeast Asia. The goal was, as he wrote<\/a> in 1957, to convey the \u201cmaximum credible threat.\u201d To do so, nothing should be off the table (Trump made this exact argument during his campaign).<\/p>\n

\u201cHow can you conduct negotiations without a credible threat of escalation?\u201d Kissinger asked defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg on Christmas Day 1968, a month before Nixon\u2019s inauguration. Kissinger had asked Ellsberg to put together a position paper outlining possible alternatives for Vietnam, which Ellsberg did. But he didn\u2019t include a \u201cthreat option\u201d in the paper. \u201cPeople negotiate all the time without threatening bombing,\u201d Ellsberg said dryly<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Until recently, one could argue that it was Richard Nixon who best realized Kissinger\u2019s philosophy of history and\u00a0diplomacy. Upon winning the presidency in 1968 with a promise to end the war in Vietnam, Nixon wanted a tough line against North Vietnam (just as Trump wanted a tough line against China, and ISIS, and Mexico, and Cuba, and Iran…), believing it would force Hanoi to make the concessions necessary to bring the conflict to a face-saving conclusion.<\/p>\n

Even before the November 1968 election, Nixon had shared with his advisor, Bob Haldeman, this plan, which became known as the \u201cmadman\u201d theory. Walking along a Key Biscayne beach, Nixon told<\/a> his future chief of staff that he wanted the North Vietnamese \u201cto believe I\u2019ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We\u2019ll just slip the word to them that, \u2018for God\u2019s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communists. We can\u2019t restrain him when he\u2019s angry \u2014 and he has his hand on the nuclear button\u2019 \u2014 and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kissinger obliged. \u201cToughness\u201d was a leitmotif that ran through much of his statecraft, and the madman theory was a logical extension of Kissinger\u2019s philosophy \u2014 the idea that power isn\u2019t power unless one is willing to use it. Kissinger and Nixon\u2019s mad bombing of Southeast Asia was driven by motives that were the opposite of Machiavellian realism: it was executed to try to bring about a world Nixon and Kissinger believed they ought<\/em> to live in \u2014 one in which they could, by the force of their material power, bend peasant-poor countries like Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam to their will \u2014 rather than reflect the real world they did<\/em> inhabit: one in which, try as they might, they had been unable to terrorize these weaker nations into submission.<\/p>\n

Vietnam revealed the moral emptiness at the center of Kissinger\u2019s philosophy of history, which, judging from his keen embrace of Trump, has never been filled. Over the years, Kissinger repeatedly urged America\u2019s leaders to state their vision and make clear what they meant to accomplish with any given policy or action\u2014to not, as he put it, exalt\u00a0technique over purpose. Such advice makes liberals swoon, since it seems so, well, serious. But Kissinger could never define what he meant by purpose.<\/p>\n

At times, he appeared to mean the ability to play a long geostrategic game, to imagine where one wants to be, in rela- tion to one\u2019s adversaries, in ten years\u2019 time and to put in place a policy to get there. At other times, purpose might\u2019ve referred to the need to create \u201clegitimacy,\u201d demonstrate \u201ccredibil- ity,\u201d or establish a global \u201cbalance of power.\u201d But these are all instrumental definitions of purpose. They all still beg the question: why?<\/em> If the projection of power is the means, what is the end? It was not to accumulate more objective power, for Kissinger had consistently argued that there was no such thing. Kissinger was perhaps most well-known for the concept \u201cbalance of power.\u201d But there\u2019s a fascinating and rarely cited passage in his 1954 doctoral dissertation in which he insists that what he means by this is not \u201creal\u201d power: \u201ca balance of power legitimized<\/em> by power would be highly unstable and make unlimited war almost inevitable, for the equilibrium is achieved not by the fact<\/em> but by the consciousness<\/em> of balance\u201d (Kissinger\u2019s emphasis). As he went on to write<\/a>, \u201cthis consciousness is never brought about until it is tested.\u201d<\/p>\n

In order to \u201ctest\u201d power \u2014 that is, in order to create an aware- ness of power \u2014 one needs to be willing to act. And the best way to produce that willingness is to act. On this point, at least, Kissinger was unfailingly clear: \u201cinaction has to be avoided\u201d in order to show that action is possible. Only \u201caction,\u201d he wrote<\/a>, could void the systemic \u201cincentive for inaction.\u201d Only \u201caction\u201d could overcome the paralyzing fear of the \u201cdrastic consequences\u201d that might result from such \u201caction\u201d (such as nuclear war). Only through \u201caction\u201d \u2014 including wars, he justified, in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq \u2014 can America become vital again, can it produce the consciousness by which it understands its power, breaks the impasse caused by an over-reliance on nuclear technology, instills cohesion among allies\u00a0and reminds an increasingly petrified foreign policy bureaucracy of the purpose of American power.<\/p>\n

In the 1950s, drawing on Spengler\u2019s civilizational diagnostic, Kissinger critiqued the idea of projecting power for power\u2019s sake, believing that is what happens when the technicians and bureaucrats take over, those who know how but forget why. But at the end of the day, that is always where Kissinger winds up, embracing the object of his own criticism.<\/p>\n

Kissingerism is a perpetual motion machine: the purpose of American power is to create an awareness of American purpose. Put in Spenglerian terms, power is history\u2019s starting and ending point, history\u2019s \u201cmanifestation\u201d and its \u201cexclusive objective.\u201d And since Kissinger held to an extremely plastic notion of reality, other intangible concepts such as \u201cinterests,\u201d \u201cvalues,\u201d \u201ctradition\u201d and \u201cimagination\u201d were also pulled into the whirlpool of his reasoning: we can\u2019t defend our interests until we know what our interests are and we can\u2019t know what our interests are until we defend them. We can\u2019t be motivated to act on our values unless we know what our values are, but we can\u2019t know what our values are until we act.<\/p>\n

The perpetual motion machine has been made flesh in Donald Trump, who, like Kissinger\u2019s philosophy of the deed, is hollow at his core, who performs power for power\u2019s sake, dominance for dominance\u2019s sake, whose projections of unpredictability collapse tactic and purpose, means and ends \u2014 who creates his own meaning, his \u201cpicture of the world\u201d with every tweet.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

“You Are the Right”<\/h2>\n \n

Kissinger began his young adult life fleeing German fascism and started his career as a defense intellectual warning about fascism. In 1964, he attended, as an advisor to the moderate Nelson Rockefeller, the Republican National Convention, held\u00a0in San Francisco\u2019s Cow Palace, and was appalled by the \u201cthe frenzy, the fervor and the intensity\u201d of the young white men who supported Barry Goldwater.<\/p>\n

In describing the Goldwater movement, Kissinger used terms that could easily be applied today to Trumpism. He condemned mainstream Republicans for accommodating, rather than confronting, Goldwaterites, acting much as German democrats did \u201cin the face of Hitler.\u201d \u201cA revolution was clearly in the making,\u201d Kissinger cautioned, equating the racist, anti-Semitic, conspiratorial, anti-NATO Goldwater delegates who had taken over the convention with the \u201cEuropean Fascism\u201d he witnessed in Germany in the 1930s.<\/p>\n

In San Francisco, however, Kissinger was not looking backward at his Nazi-tormented youth, but forward to his future. Over the subsequent years, with each lurch of American politics to the right, Kissinger lurched with it. At every single one of America\u2019s postwar turning points, moments of crisis when other defense intellectuals of his stature, be they political liberals or conservatives, expressed doubts about American power \u2014 Hans Morgenthau, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, George Kennan, Thomas Schelling, Reinhold Niebuhr \u2014 Kissinger broke in the opposite direction.<\/p>\n

Having started as an advisor to the centrist Nelson Rockefeller, he made his peace with Nixon, whom he at first thought unhinged. As Nixon\u2019s national security advisor, he used a bellicose foreign policy, including the bombing of Southeast Asia and support for white supremacy in southern Africa, to placate the New Right. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t have had Laos,\u201d he told Ronald Reagan<\/a>, \u201cwe wouldn\u2019t have had Cambodia,\u201d had Hubert Humphrey been elected president in 1968.<\/p>\n

When Watergate began Nixon\u2019s downfall, Kissinger repeatedly told liberals that he remained in the administration to prevent the country from moving further to the fringe, to prevent \u201csome real tough guys,\u201d the \u201cmost brutal forces in the society,\u201d from taking over. \u201cWe are saving you from the\u00a0Right,\u201d he told National Security Council (NSC) staffers who had resigned in protest over his 1970 invasion of Cambodia. \u201cYou are<\/em> the Right,\u201d they answered<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the early 1970s, he thought it \u201cinconceivable<\/a>\u201d that Reagan might become president. But in 1981 he lobbied the Reagan administration for a job, and then criticized Reagan from the right throughout the 1980s, especially urging the further militarization of his Middle East and Central American policies. The neoconservatives who coalesced around George W. Bush after September 11 rose to power attacking Kissinger, derailing or rolling back many of his diplomatic achievements; but Kissinger supported their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and exhorted them to go forward, to attack Yemen and Somalia.<\/p>\n

Intellectually, as well, Kissinger moved quickly from a worried observer of the Goldwater insurgency to a sympathetic chronicler of revolutionary conservatives, offering what might be an apt historical precedent for Donald Trump: Otto von Bismarck<\/a>, the nineteenth-century Prussian chancellor who united Germany in 1871. Kissinger had meant to include a section on Bismarck in his 1954 doctoral dissertation, which, by focusing on Klemens von Metternich and Viscount Castlereagh, the foreign ministers of Austria and Great Britain who imposed a conservative peace on Europe after winning the Napoleonic Wars, established Kissinger\u2019s reputation as a realist. But Kissinger cut the material to save space.<\/p>\n

He returned to the topic, though, publishing an essay on Bismarck in the summer of 1968, at a moment when political conservatives like Kissinger were searching for effective ways to counter an ascending new left movement and a world in revolt. Kissinger found hope in Bismarck, whose \u201cgenius\u201d was his ability to \u201crestrain contending forces, both domestic and foreign, by manipulating their antagonisms.\u201d\u00a0Biographers have said that the main thing Kissinger took from Bismarck was realpolitik, an \u201cability to exploit every\u00a0available option without the constraint of ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Kissinger\u2019s essay, titled \u201cThe White Revolutionary<\/a>,\u201d makes clear that what he admired most admired in the Iron Chancellor was his revolutionary instinct, his \u201cwill to impose\u201d a vision that was \u201cincompatible with the existing order.\u201d \u201cHis was a strange revolution,\u201d Kissinger wrote. \u201cIt appeared in the guise of conservatism\u201d and \u201ctriumphed domestically through the vastness of its successes abroad.\u201d In so doing, Bismarck proved that liberals were not the only agents of world history, seizing the initiative from revolutionaries, equaling their e\u0301lan, and adopting the dialectical imagination for himself. \u201cNot every revolution begins with a march on the Bastille.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kissinger offered that observation about Bismarck, but he could have been talking about the \u201cintense, efficient, curiously insecure\u201d young conservatives who attended the 1964 Republican Convention, who were indeed learning to adopt the style, tactics and rhetoric of the Left \u2014 launching a long march through the institutions that has now resulted in control of the legislature, the courts, most state governments and, with Trump\u2019s election, the White House and the nuclear codes. And based on his remarks, Kissinger apparently believed he had found in Trump his \u201cwhite revolutionary\u201d: a political conservative in possession of insurgent qualities, able to, as Kissinger put it elsewhere, dissolve \u201ctechnical limitations,\u201d break free of traditions, and shatter conventions, protocols and bureaucracies.<\/p>\n

From Rockefeller to Nixon, then on to Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, Kissinger\u2019s service tracks the metaphysical evolution of American power, from a time when spectacle mediated the relationship between interest and ideology to now, when foreign policy is completely subordinated to spectacle. We all live now in the Kissingerian void. What horrors await?<\/p>\n

Who knows, but whoever does Kissinger\u2019s eulogy\u00a0\u2014 and it would be fitting if it were Trump himself\u00a0\u2014 they should consider using these words from Kissinger\u2019s\u00a01950 thesis: \u201cWe cannot require immortality as the price for giving meaning to life. The experience of freedom enables us to rise beyond the suffering of the past and the frustrations of history. In this spirituality resides humanity\u2019s essence, the unique which each man imparts to the necessity of his life, the self-transcendence which gives peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump was the transcendence that gave Kissinger peace.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n

Excerpted from\u00a0<\/i>The Good Die Young<\/a>, Jacobin and\u00a0<\/em>Verso Books\u2019s book-length anti-obituary for Henry Kissinger.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2015, I published a book, Kissinger\u2019s Shadow, which argued that Henry Kissinger is good to think with. By this, I meant that his long career (as an early Cold War defense intellectual, top foreign policymaker, consigliere to the world\u2019s elite and hawkish pundit) and very self-aware philosophy of history help illuminate the contours of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3946,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361428"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3946"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1361428"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1367582,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361428\/revisions\/1367582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1361428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1361428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1361428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}