There will hardly be another diplomat who is so remarkable and powerful. He was the most read and followed expert on diplomacy and international relations in the world. Wise and cold, encyclopedic and detail-oriented, he was respected by enemies and feared by those close to him, in an apparent reversal that typified his unique ability to play with poise and sensitivity.
Henry Kissinger, who died yesterday at the age of 100, was a contradictory character: charismatic but advisor, vain but discreet, brilliant but shadowed, dominant but flexible. Self-centered but (when he wanted to be) magnanimous.
Simultaneously praised by Putin, Xi Jinping and Antony Blinken (who else in this world would achieve such a feat, even at the moment of death, in 2023?), he leaves a legacy of lasting successes and transversal recognition, but is also tarnished by wrong, sometimes dangerous and almost tragic decisions. “Architect of relaxation” (with the “relaxation” with the USSR and rapprochement with China) or “war criminal” (by encouraging dictatorships in South America and promoting the Indonesian invasion of East Timor)? Both perhaps. And much more.
He personified the virtues and vices of realpolitik (whose true formulation is attributed to him): To many he was hypocritical, treacherous and heartless. Cold and cockroach-blooded, as a political decision-maker of a great power so often must be. But to many more, he was a genius in diplomacy, the art of negotiation, of building bridges with so-called enemies and compromising the interests of those on our side. Never naive, never innocent. Always strategic, almost always consistent. Often wrong, almost never ignored.
He exuded an attractive combination of profound wisdom, strategic cunning and singular style, in his apparently controlled manner of speaking slowly, with a Bavarian accent that he retained from adolescence. He was a Jew who fled Nazi rule, born in 1923, of German descent and became an American through conviction.
How many lives are there in 100 years? How many more will be the case with a man who, to this day, has been the only one to have had the privilege and burden of simultaneously being Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to two American Presidents: Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford ?
No one has amassed so much power and so much influence in foreign policy and national security in the United States of America. It wasn’t even close. In addition to his official positions with Nixon and Ford (who supported him almost blindly), Kissinger had been a foreign relations advisor to several American presidents since Eisenhower.
The Chinese call him ‘wise’ and ‘prudent’. The Russians appreciate his ‘vision’ and ‘insight’, in contrast to the behavior of his successors. In Washington, politicians on both sides of the fence are finding an increasingly rare point of agreement by placing Kissinger on the Olympus of diplomats.
Republican and Jewish, he would earn – hours after his death – strong praise from his Democratic successor at the State Department, Antony Blinken (also Jewish, also of Eastern European descent, also dealing with, in the officewith threats of aggression against the international system from Moscow and the Middle East): ‘Henry established a standard in leading diplomacy in the United States of America. After him, the bar became so high that his successors began to regard him as a leader. benchmark to achieve. Very few were better students of history than he. Even fewer succeeded in shaping history as he changed it.”
In one of the quintessential ironies of great American foreign policy, Blinken learned of Kissinger’s death in Tel Aviv, during yet another trip to try to influence the course of the war between Israel and Hamas. Half a century earlier, in 1973, Kissinger would have a decisive intervention in the peace negotiations between Israel and the neighboring Arab states, after the Yom Kippur War, with his very skillful and original shuttle diplomacy for the region, which consisted of separating the main Arab states. states of its Soviet “boss,” making the US the fundamental mediating actor and principal agent for promoting security in the Middle East. Fifty years later, it is remarkable (and at the same time troubling) how the current panorama maintains the same need for this role that Kissinger revealed for the United States in Israel’s security.
The same year he would win the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in obtaining a ceasefire in the Vietnam War. The distinction was to be shared with his Vietnamese counterpart, but Le Duc Tho refused it.
The relationship with China will be his greatest legacy. So many years later, they still haven’t forgotten this in Beijing: last July, President Xi Jinping would receive him, in a kind of final recognition, a month and a half after Henry had completed a century of life.
And now your dark side. It is also noticeable: together with President Suharto, he designed ‘Operation Lotus’, that is, the invasion of East Timor in 1975, under the pretext of stopping communism in the region. To achieve Nixon’s goal of extricating the US from the Vietnam disaster, Kissinger promoted secret bombings in Cambodia and Laos, to cut off Vietnamese supply lines – hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, although there is no consensus on the actual extent of the disaster. these operations.
More objective are his responsibilities in supporting coups in Chile (against Salvador Allende, by Pinochet, on September 11, 1973), in Uruguay and Argentina (“Plano Condor”, military coups that imposed brutal right-wing dictatorships and stopped left-wing dictatorships). attempts with Soviet support in South America). Henry Kissinger’s extradition was requested for years following the alleged involvement of Nixon’s then Secretary of State and then Ford in these coups.
Judging Kissinger would be a futile exercise: because of the pretentiousness and especially the complexity of the subjective sense. It will therefore be much more appropriate to attempt to take stock of its main advantages and greatest shortcomings.
For better or worse, for supporters and opponents, allies and enemies, Henry Kissinger was a great influencer. The US’s rapprochement with China will be the country’s greatest legacy. His policy of détente and disarmament paved the way for the end of the Cold War.
At the time of his death, they remembered him in Beijing and Moscow with nostalgia. And that almost says it all.
* Germano Almeida is the author of five books on American presidencies
Source: DN
