The Monty Python team sang of Henry Kissinger, who died a couple of weeks ago: 'I know they say that you are very vain / And short and fat and pushy, but at least you're not insane.' He may not have been insane, but he was a divisive character, reviled by many and revered by others. While his ego caught the attention of comics, it was his political realism that detractors denounced.
Whatever one thought of him, he has left a significant legacy in international affairs. Even in his hundredth year he was received by world leaders and sought out for advice. His death coincided with a watershed moment in the Russia-Ukraine war, one from which the realism he embodied will emerge weaker or stronger depending on the decisions made by western leaders in the coming weeks. Many of Kissinger's own views on Ukraine may have alarmed liberal politicans, yet those same politicians have much to do to if they wish to prove his realist perspective wrong.
Kissinger and realpolitik
Kissinger is closely associated with realpolitik, which I would define as a foreign policy principle whereby material interests take priority over values. It extols selfish pragmatism and that is why it is a form of political realism. It does not mean neglecting human rights, as Kissinger's critics often hold, but it does mean putting material/power considerations first in the short term and sometimes acting in an unscrupulous manner. For this reason realpolitik, seen by many as Kissinger's trademark, is routinely labelled 'Machiavellian'.
What struck me reading the newspaper obituaries recently was how his childhood shaped his worldview. Born in interwar Germany, and Jewish, his family fled from Nazi persecution; many of his relatives had already been killed. Is it so unexpected that he took a dim view of human nature after his childhood experiences? It seems difficult not to think that the harassment and injustice he experienced as a child were formative experiences.
A case can (just about) be made that Kissinger's policies had an ethical dimension. He was Richard Nixon's National Security Adviser during the last phase of the Vietnam war and his role negotiating a ceasefire in that conflict led to him controversially receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. The chairperson of the prize committee said that Kissinger's realism was 'rooted in a considered conviction, a fundamental ethical attitude' about the responsibilities of statesmanship in striving for a safer world.
Moreover, Kissinger was closely associated with the era of détente. He was US Secretary of State during the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which resulted in the Helsinki Accords in which the Soviet Union committed itself to certain human rights principles. It was an important step towards the ending of the cold war, even though Soviet-US tensions ratcheted up again in the early 1980s.
There were other achievements. Kissinger's 'shuttle diplomacy' in the Arab-Israeli conflict reaped rewards, and he played the key role in Nixon's visit to China in 1972. From a strategic perspective, the opening to China was a masterstroke that capitalised on the Sino-Soviet split (albeit an unfortunate development for the Taiwanese).
The case against him focuses on less savoury American policy during the Vietnam war, such as bombing Cambodia and Laos, and US support for dictatorships round the world during the cold war. A strong case was made that he was instrumental in the overthrow of Chile's democratically elected leader Salvador Allende. The longer term consequences of these foreign policy decisions are far harder to defend. They are why his critics on the political left saw only a moral vacuum and accused him of war crimes.
Western academics tended to sneer at his prolific written output as outdated and simplistic. His ideas found an audience instead among America's rivals: Kissinger visited China's President Xi Jinping earlier this year and Russia's Vladimir Putin was another fan. Kissinger met Putin ten times befween 2001 and 2017. You are the company you keep, it is said.
Realpolitik and Russia's invasion of Ukraine
Kissinger's liberal critics, believers in human progress, tend to prioritise human rights and democracy in foreign policy over 'great power politics' and selfish calculations of brute power. Liberals tend to argue that all states have a right to join the institutions they see as advancing human progress; anything else is unjust and ignoring these states' agency is, liberals argue, anything but 'realistic'. By contrast, those in the realist tradition have tended to argue for a US foreign policy based on restraint towards Russia, which usually meant objecting to NATO enlargement and allowing Moscow a tacit sphere of influence, or else, the realists argued, conflict with Russia would follow. Kissinger, the pragmatist, did change his mind though.
In line with realism and its foreign policy guise of realpolitik, Kissinger once argued against NATO enlargement. He thought that Ukraine was part of a Russian sphere of influence and in May last year he called for a settlement that would see Ukraine cede territory to Russia. That, inevitably, drew a backlash. Earlier this year, however, he conceded that he had altered his viewpoint: 'Before this war, I was opposed to the membership of Ukraine in NATO because I feared that it would start the very process that we are seeing now. Now that this process has reached this level, the idea of a neutral Ukraine makes little sense.'
At heart, Kissinger's detractors dislike his realist worldview. Today, many people denounce one of the preeminent realist scholars, John Mearsheimer, for his views on the war in Ukraine. Mearsheimer has a questionable grasp of Ukrainian politics, history and identity, but his critics might acknowledge that he was among the few arguing in the early 1990s that Ukraine should keep its nuclear weapons as a way of fending off Russian revanchism. I expect most liberals, committed to notions of progress in human affairs, would have disagreed and argued that one nuclear state was preferable to two or more. On the other hand, if Ukraine had kept its nuclear weapons as a defence against Russia, so too might have Belarus and Kazkahstan kept theirs... Would we really have wanted that?
Among the many problems of political realism is its indeterminancy. As well as those, such as Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, arguing that US foreign policy hubris bears responsibility for the war in Ukraine, there are realists such as historian Niall Ferguson convinced of the opposite – that a firmer hand has been needed to deter Putin's Russia. Ferguson's views are a more suitable reply to the imperialistic language that Putin displayed again yesterday: in his annual phone-in event, Putin spoke of south-eastern Ukraine, Crimea and Odesa as 'historically Russian territory' as he tried to defend his annexation and occupation of these lands; he said Russia's war aims had not changed (ergo: he is not prepared to withdraw troops or negotiate an end to the war).
Putin's wager has always been that Ukraine's supporters will tire. Volodomyr Zelenskyy worries about this, too: why else did he visit the US this week, cap in hand? Why else did he then address the European Union and appeal for more support? After all, Congress is mired in infighting, with a new package of military aid to Ukraine worth €55bn stuck in the middle. The EU's latest funding package (worth €50bn) has also been blocked for now.
Putin may be mistaken in thinking the tide is turning in his favour: the situation today is a stalemate rather than one of Russia advancing. He has raised the stakes, though, by signing off on a massive increase in Russia's defence budget for next year. The ball is therefore currently in the West's court to show that its support to Ukraine is lasting. Its leaders need to continue their military and financial support for Ukraine. They need, too, to bring Ukraine into NATO and the EU which they maintain are parts of the liberal international order.
Kissinger's realism remains an important contribution to healthy debates about international affairs. Realism's critics (liberals and others) need to show, ironically, that they share Kissinger's ultimate view that a neutral Ukraine makes little sense and prove that it is possible for Ukraine to choose its future.
Cover image: Henry A. Kissinger, from U.S. Department of State from United States - public domain image, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=942275.
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