Henry Kissinger's greatest crime

http://www.georgejonas.ca/recent_writing.cfm?id=937

by George Jonas
National Post
January 5, 2011

I'm no fan of realpolitik. Although born and schooled in Europe, I prefer 
American style idealism to European-style pragmatism in international 
affairs. Paradoxically, I find idealism more realistic than pragmatism. 
Idealists notice the Pope's divisions, unlike confirmed pragmatists, such 
as Stalin.

I've never been an unreserved admirer of Dr. Henry Kissinger. Detractors 
who call him a war criminal are wrong, though. If anything, he's a peace 
criminal. I'd prefer to see him pilloried for his Nobel Peace 
Prize-winning diplomatic triumphs -- America's China policy and its rout 
in Vietnam -- rather than for his crude and insensitive, but not 
inaccurate, newly released exchanges with Richard Nixon.

"The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of 
American foreign policy," Kissinger said to Nixon on March 1, 1973." And 
if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an 
American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."

A person needs to be tone-deaf to say such things even in private. Saying 
them in public makes him unfit for office. Had Kissinger known he was 
being taped, would he have done it?

It's impossible to say, but he might have. Although last month he 
apologized for his choice of words, I doubt if the remark seemed anything 
but self-evident to him even in retrospect, let alone at the time.

These lines may affect Kissinger's legacy more adversely than any he ever 
uttered; yet substitute the word "minorities" for "Jews," and "massacres" 
for "gas chambers," and the observation will strike people as merely 
factual. "If they massacre minorities in the Soviet Union, it's not an 
American concern."

Outrageous? That's another word for history.

(1) All nations conduct their foreign policies in what they perceive as 
their own interest.

(2) Influencing the emigration practices of other nations is rarely among 
any country's policy objectives.

(3) International reaction to nations massacring their citizens seldom 
goes beyond diplomatic protests. (Mistreatment of minorities may serve as 
a casus belli to mask other reasons for intervention -- the U.S. Civil War 
being an example -- but that's a different story.)

Polemicists who feign outrage know this better than anyone. They're using 
Kissinger's remarks as their own casus belli against him.

Kissinger's comments to Nixon weren't even particularly Machiavellian. 
Putting national interest ahead of humanitarian concern has been the 
foreign policy of most powers throughout history. Nations may misperceive 
their interests and often do, but this doesn't alter the fact that it's 
their interest they try to pursue. Hypothetical Soviet gas chambers 
wouldn't be President Nixon's concern any more than actual German gas 
chambers were President Roosevelt's concern when policy choices had to be 
made. The priority went to what was seen, rightly or wrongly, as the war 
effort. Dresden was bombed; the railways to Auschwitz weren't.

Nixon's foreign policy maven has always been proud of his 
Metternich-influenced ideas and flaunted them freely. One can find more 
chilling examples of realpolitik in Kissinger's own books than in the 
newly released tape recordings of megalomaniacal presidential pathology.

The Nixon administration's geopolitical strategy was nothing short of 
grandiose. As Kissinger describes it in the concluding volume of his 
memoirs: "Our strategic objective was ... to transform the two-power world 
of the Cold War into a triangle and then to manage the triangle in such as 
way that we would be closer to each of the contenders than they were to 
each other, thereby maximizing our options."

The conventional view is that this policy fatally weakened Communism by 
dividing the monolith. My own view is that it may have had the opposite 
effect. Whatever harm Kissinger's rapprochement with the Forbidden City 
had done to the Kremlin, it has allowed Communism to survive in China, 
instead of perishing along with Soviet-style Communism 20 years later.

As I've written elsewhere, Kissinger's principal legacy has been America's 
ignominious withdrawal from Vietnam. His 1973 cease-fire, his "peace with 
honour," was in many ways the sacrifice of a principle (as well as a 
vulnerable ally) to realpolitik. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho shared a Nobel 
Peace Price (the Vietnamese negotiator at least had the good taste to 
refuse it) while thousands of South Vietnamese shared imprisonment, 
torture, death -- and ultimately a Communist system that persists to this 
day. In contrast, the naive American idealist Ronald Reagan's legacy has 
been the collapse of the Evil Empire: The demise of this century's 
deadliest tyranny that was the scourge of one-fifth of the world and a 
grave threat to the rest.

As the Evil Empire drowned in Europe, it might have dragged the Evil 
Empire in the Far East down with it, had clever Dr. Kissinger not helped 
to cut Beijing loose from Moscow. If so, saving a Mao-jacketed tyranny to 
fight another day may turn out to be the most insidious legacy of 
Kissinger's realpolitik. In the 21st century, the very success of 
Kissinger's strategy may come back to haunt us, as a gigantic and 
reinvigorated China emerges to threaten the Pacific region as well as the 
rest of the world. There is such a thing as being too clever by half.

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