by Greg Grandin
Kissinger’s existentialism laid the foundation for how he would defend his later policies. If history is already tragedy, birth death, and life suffering, then absolution comes with a world-weary shrug. There isn’t much any one individual can do to make things worse than they already are.
* * *
Yet before it was an instrument of self-justification, Kissinger’s relativism was a tool of self-creation and hence self-advancement. Kissinger, who admittedly believed in nothing, was skilled at being all things to all people, particularly people of a higher station: “I won’t tell you what I am,” he said in his famous interview with Oriana Fallaci, “I’ll never tell anyone.”12 The myth about him is that he disliked the messiness of modern interest-group politics, that his talents would have been better realized had they been unencumbered by the oversight of mass democracy. Really, though, it was only because of mass democracy, with its near endless opportunities for reinvention, that Kissinger was able to climb the heights.
A product of a new postwar meritocracy, Kissinger quickly learned how to use the media, manipulate journalists, cultivate elites, and leverage public opinion to his advantage. And within a remarkably short period of time and at a stunningly young age (he was forty-five when Nixon named him his national security adviser in 1968) he had seized the national security apparatus from the establishment “Eastern men.” The gentile Wasps with their inner-directed egos, like Nixon’s first secretary of state, William Rogers, whom Kissinger eventually pushed out, had no idea what they were up against. “What amazed” his colleagues, David Halberstam once wrote, was “not the dishonesty or ruthlessness, but the fact that what was at issue was frequently stunningly inconsequential.”13
This book, though, focuses not on Kissinger’s outsized personality but rather on the outsized role he had in creating the world we live in today, which accepts endless war as a matter of course. Since the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, there have been many versions of the national security state, a quasi-covert warfare establishment that the political theorist Michael Glennon has recently described as a “double government.”14 But a transformative moment in the evolution of that state occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Henry Kissinger’s policies, especially his four-year war in Cambodia, hastened its disintegration, undermining the traditional foundations—elite planning, bipartisan consensus, and public support—on which it stood. Yet even as the breakup of the old national security state was proceeding apace, Kissinger was helping with its reconstruction in a new form, a restored imperial presidency (based on ever more spectacular displays of violence, more intense secrecy, and an increasing use of war and militarism to leverage domestic dissent and polarization for political advantage) capable of moving forward into a post-Vietnam world.
America’s failed war in Southeast Asia destroyed the public’s ability to ignore the consequences of Washington’s actions in the world. The curtain was being drawn back, and everywhere, it seemed, the relationship of cause and effect was coming into view—in the reporting by Hersh and other investigative journalists on US war crimes, in the scholarship of a new questioning generation of historians, in the work of documentary filmmakers like Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig and Peter Davis’s Hearts and Minds, among apostate former true believers, like Daniel Ellsberg, and in the forensic logic of dissident intellectuals like Noam Chomsky. Worse, the sense that the United States was the source of as much bad as good in the world began to seep out into popular culture, into novels, movies, and even comic books, taking the shape of a generalized, even if not always political, skepticism and antimilitarism—a “critical disposition,” as one writer put it, that “has become a cultural belief, entirely taken for granted and now part of conventional wisdom.”15
There are many ways Kissinger helped the national security state adapt to what the first generation of neoconservatives began, by 1970, to identify as an entrenched, permanent “adversary culture.”16 But key was the restoration of a denial mechanism, a way to neutralize the torrent of information becoming available to the public regarding US actions in the world, and the often unhappy results of those actions. What we could call Kissinger’s imperial existentialism helped pull the curtain closed once more, blinding many to the monster outside. Reporters and academics might have been obsessively digging up facts that proved the United States overthrew this democratic government or funded that repressive regime, but he persevered in insisting that the past shouldn’t limit the country’s range for options in the future.
In doing so, Kissinger provided a new generation of politicians a template for how to justify tomorrow’s action while ignoring yesterday’s catastrophe. The present can learn from the past, he said, but not through an obsessive reconstruction of “cause and effect.” Kissinger dismissed “causal” reasoning as a false, or lower-order and deterministic, form of comprehension. Rather, history teaches “by analogy.” And each generation has the “freedom” to “decide what, if anything, is analogous.”17 In other words, if you don’t like the lesson Richard Nixon and Vietnam teaches, don’t worry about it. There’s always Neville Chamberlain and Munich.
America’s exceptional sense of itself depends on a similarly ambiguous relationship to the past. History is affirmed, since it is America’s unprecedented historical success that justifies the exceptionalism. Yet history is also denied, or at least what is denied is an understanding of the past as a series of causal relationships. That is, the blowback from any given action—arming anti-Soviet jihadists in Afghanistan, for example, or supplying Saddam Hussein with the sarin gas he used on Iran—is rinsed clean of its source and given a new origin story, blamed on generalized chaos that exists beyond our borders.
This evasion has been on full display of late, as the politicians who drove us into Iraq in 2003 tell us that decisions made at the time that facilitated the rise of Islamic State militants shouldn’t hinder America from taking bold action in the future to destroy Islamic State militants. “If we spend our time debating what happened eleven or twelve years ago,” former vice president Dick Cheney today says, “we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face.”18 The United States, Cheney insists, needs to do “what it takes, for as long as it takes.”
Kissinger perfected this type of dodge. He was a master of advancing the proposition that the policies of the United States and the world’s violence and disorder are entirely unrelated, especially when it came to accounting for the consequences of his own actions. Cambodia? “It was Hanoi,” Kissinger writes, pointing to the North Vietnamese to justify his four-year bombing campaign of that neutral nation. Chile? That country, he says in defense of his coup-plotting against Salvador Allende, “was ‘destabilized’ not by our actions but by Chile’s constitutional President.” The Kurds? “A tragedy,” says the man who served them up to Saddam Hussein, hoping to turn Iraq away from the Soviets. East Timor? “I think we’ve heard enough about Timor.”19
* * *
Obituaries, already on file and waiting to run, will mention how conservative hostility toward Kissinger’s policies—détente with Russia, opening to China—helped propel Ronald Reagan’s first real bid for the presidency in 1976. And they will draw a distinction between his brand of supposed hardheaded power politics and the neoconservative idealism that led us into the fiascos of Afghanistan and Iraq. But they’ll likely miss the way Kissinger served not just as a foil but as an enabler for the New Right. Over the course of his career he advanced a set of premises that would be taken up and extended by neoconservative intellectuals and policy makers: that hunches, conjecture, will, and intuition are as important as facts and hard intelligence in guiding policy, that too much knowledge can weaken resolve, that foreign policy has to be wrested out of the hands of experts and bureaucrats and given to men of action, and that the principle of self-defense (broadly defined to cover just about anything) overrules the ideal of sovereignty. In so doing, Kissinger played his part in keeping t
he great wheel of American militarism spinning ever forward.
Henry Kissinger is, of course, not singularly responsible for the evolution of the United States’ national security state into the perpetual motion machine that it has become today. That history, starting with the 1947 National Security Act and running through the Cold War and now the War on Terror, is comprised of many different episodes and is populated by many different individuals. But Kissinger’s career courses through the decades like a bright red line, shedding spectral light on the road that has brought us to where we now find ourselves, from the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia to the sands of the Persian Gulf.
At the very least, we can learn from Kissinger’s long life that the two defining concepts of American foreign policy—realism and idealism—aren’t necessarily opposing values; rather, they reinforce each other. Idealism gets us into whatever the quagmire of the moment is, realism keeps us there while promising to get us out, and then idealism returns anew both to justify the realism and to overcome it in the next round. So it goes.
Back in 2004, the journalist Ron Suskind reported a conversation he had with a top aide to George W. Bush who many now believe was Karl Rove. Studying “discernible reality” was not the way the world worked any more, Rove said: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.”20 The quote circulated widely, interpreted as the blind ideology of the Bush administration taken to its conceited conclusion, the idea that reality itself could bend to neocon will.
But Kissinger said it four decades earlier. Inspired by John F. Kennedy’s facing down of the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis, Kissinger, then still a Harvard professor, urged foreign policy experts to escape the restraints imposed by reality and embrace a similar élan: An “expert,” he wrote in 1963, “respects ‘facts’ and considers them something to be adjusted to, perhaps to be manipulated, but not to be transcended.… In the decades ahead, the West will have to lift its sights to encompass a more embracing concept of reality.… There are two kinds of realists: those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.”21
Nothing so much as Henry Kissinger.
1
A Cosmic Beat
History [is] an endless unfolding of a cosmic beat that expresses itself in the sole alternatives of subject and object, a vast succession of catastrophic upheavals of which power is not only the manifestation but the exclusive aim; a stimulus of blood that not only pulses through veins but must be shed and will be shed.
—Henry Kissinger
You can almost hear Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in the background. Henry Kissinger wrote the above passage in his 1950 Harvard thesis, submitted at nearly the exact moment Harry Truman announced that the United States would support the French in Vietnam and send troops to Korea, thus putting the country on the road to war in Southeast Asia. “The Meaning of History” focused almost exclusively on European philosophy, but reading through its pages knowing the role its author would later play in expanding the conflict into Laos and Cambodia, one can’t but think of napalm and cluster bombs and wonder whether America’s catastrophe in Southeast Asia was inevitable, if there was something in the very life-being of the United States, a will-to-infinity, for example, that drove it toward ruin in the jungle. Was there an inner historical logic that would manifest itself at My Lai, a bloodline that traced back to the first Puritan massacres of Native Americans?
Kissinger doesn’t believe in historical inevitability. So were he to be asked this question, he would surely answer no. More importantly, Kissinger was offering the above definition of history—as a reflexive, pulsating projection of power without any intelligible objective other than the projection of power—not as a recommendation but as a warning, a cautionary description of the fate that often befalls great civilizations when they lose their sense of purpose, when they forget why they are projecting their power and only know that they can project their power. He was urging statesmen not to succumb to history’s cosmic beat, not to fall into a “repetition” of the kind of unforced “cataclysmic wars” that brought down past great civilizations. It was advice more easily given than followed.
* * *
Many have pointed out the influence of the Prussian historian Oswald Spengler’s best-selling The Decline of the West on the future statesman. Kissinger, Harvard’s Stanley Hoffmann remarked, “walked, in a way, with the ghost of Spengler at his side.”1 “Kissinger was a Spenglerian,” another Harvard colleague, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said.2 Spengler, like Kissinger, is often associated with political realism, his deep pessimism regarding human nature reflected in the realpolitik of a number of prominent postwar intellectuals and policy makers such as George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and Samuel Huntington.
But Spengler also waged a relentless assault on the very idea of reality. He insisted that there existed a higher plane of experience that was inaccessible to rational thought, a plane where instinct and creativity reigned. “We have,” Spengler thought, “hardly yet an inkling of how much in our reputedly objective values and experiences is only disguise, only image and expression.”3 To get behind image and expression, to penetrate perceived material power and interests and grasp what Spengler called destiny, one needed not information but intuition, not facts but hunches, not reason but a soul sense, a world feeling. “Often enough a statesman does not ‘know’ what he is doing,” Spengler wrote, “but that does not prevent him from following with confidence just the one path that leads to success.”4
Kissinger was captivated by this metaphysical and quasi-mythological Spengler, more so than other postwar defense realists such as Kennan, Morgenthau, and Huntington. “All of life is permeated by an inner destiny that can never be defined,” Kissinger wrote. “History discloses a majestic unfolding that one can only intuitively perceive, never causally classify.”5 Spengler, he said, “affirmed that there are certain ultimate goals, which no hypothesis can prove, and no sophistry ever deny, expressed in such words as hope, love, beauty, luck, fear.”6
Most of Kissinger’s thesis stayed at that level of romantic abstraction. But at different points in “The Meaning of History,” and then later throughout his scholarly and public career, he fixed his sights on a specific target: the growing influence of positivism on postwar social science. Increasingly, at Harvard (as well as at other universities and think tanks, like the RAND Corporation), political scientists, economists, and international relations scholars were applying mathematics, formal logic, and methods associated with natural science to assess human behavior. Economistic formulas such as rational choice and game theory were used to describe and predict everything from individual behavior to nuclear strategy.
It would be an overstatement to say that Kissinger rejected these methods. Game theory calculations, especially those worked out by Kissinger’s Harvard colleague Thomas Schelling, influenced both his dissection of Eisenhower’s nuclear defense strategy and conduct of the Vietnam War. At the same time, however, Kissinger strongly criticized the idea of objectivity, that society is “governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature” and that these laws are knowable through observation.7 Kissinger was particularly drawn to Spengler’s criticism of the “causal principle” as applied to historical interpretation. Spengler believed that cause-and-effect analysis was (as Spengler’s intellectual biographer Stuart Hughes wrote) a “ridiculous simplification of the inextricable medley of converging elements that went to make up even the least important item of history.”8
Kissinger too dismissed what he called “mere causal analysis” as a kind of superstition akin to primitives trying to explain what causes a steam engine to move forward. Such a “magic attitude,” he said, is an effort to escape the meaninglessness o
f existence by finding meaning in “data.”9 Causal reasoning focuses on the “typical” and the “inexorable,” affirming the false doctrine of “eternal recurrence”—that is, the belief in historical inevitability. If something happened once it was bound to happen again, and again. Kissinger rejected this idea. Instead, he affirmed the existence of a realm of consciousness that superseded the material world, a realm that Spengler called “destiny” but Kissinger preferred to describe as “freedom.” “Reality that is subject to the laws of causality,” Kissinger wrote, represents only the outer, surface appearance of things. But “freedom is an inward state” and “our experience of freedom testifies to a fact of existence which no thought-process can deny.”
According to Spengler and Kissinger, it is at the moment when the “causality-men” (Spengler’s term) and the “fact-men” (Kissinger’s 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, political leaders, and even priests become predominantly concerned with the question not of why but of how. “A century of purely extensive effectiveness,” Spengler wrote (referring to the rationalism of modern society, which strives for ever more efficient ways of doing things), “is a time of decline.” The intuitive dimensions of wisdom get tossed aside, technocratic procedure overwhelms purpose, and information is mistaken for wisdom. “Vast bureaucratic mechanisms,” Kissinger said, develop “a momentum and a vested interest of their own.”
Western culture was history’s highest expression of technical reason: it “views the whole world,” Kissinger wrote, “as a working hypothesis.” The “machine” was its great symbol, a “perpeteum mobile”—a perpetual motion machine that asserted relentless “mastery over nature.” And the vastly powerful and obsessively efficient United States was the West’s vanguard. As such it was especially vulnerable to falling prisoner to what Spengler called the “cult of the useful.” At Harvard, the Vatican of American positivism, filled with the country’s high priests of social science, Kissinger looked around and asked: Would American leaders command or fall slave to their own technique? “Technical knowledge will be of no avail,” the twenty-six-year-old student-veteran warned, “to a soul that has lost its meaning.”*