Henry Kissinger, 97 years old: a historians's appraisal

Berkeley CA

Description

‘Asking whether Kissinger is either a realist or an idealist misses a more interesting aspect of Kissinger’s philosophy of history: his radical subjectivism.’ By Greg Grandin, professor of history at New York University and the author of Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesmen. Niall Ferguson is correct to identify Henry Kissinger as influenced by the idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant. But he misses how Kissinger revised Kant to embrace a relative, rather than an absolute, morality. The point is made in a story from Kissinger’s graduate schools days at Harvard that didn’t make it into Ferguson’s lengthy book. Kissinger’s adviser, William Elliott, often urged his protégé to live his life by Kant’s famous ethical imperative: “treat every human being, including yourself, as an end and never a means.” During one seminar in 1953, Elliott pushed Kissinger to acknowledge that “reality,” and hence ethics, must exist. “Well, now wait a minute, Henry,” Elliott said, in reaction to Kissinger’s argument that there was no such thing as truth, “There must be a metaphysical structure of reality which is the true structure.” Kissinger’s responded by quoting Kant’s moral imperative back to Elliott, with an addendum: “What one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one’s system, and on the concept one has of one’s self and one’s relationship to the universe.” This is a complete perversion of Kant, a standing of Kant on his head. Asking whether Kissinger is either a realist or an idealist misses a more interesting aspect of Kissinger’s philosophy of history: his radical subjectivism, his belief, first voiced as a young scholar and repeated throughout his career (including in his latest book, World Order), that there is no such thing as absolute truth, no truth at all other than what could be deduced from one’s own solitary perspective. “Meaning represents the emanation of a metaphysical context,” he wrote; “every man in a certain sense creates his picture of the world.” Humans create their truth, they come to understand their “purpose” (a very Kissingerian concept) though action. Such subjectivism had policy implications. For instance, Kissinger’s five year bombing of Cambodia (which, by credible estimates, killed 100,000 civilians), along with his “savage” (Kissinger’s word) bombing of North Vietnam, was motivated by the opposite of realism: to try to bring about a world Kissinger believed he ought to live in (one in which he could, by the force of military power, bend peasant-poor countries like Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam to his will) rather than reflect the real world they did live in: one in which, try as he might, he was unable to terrorize weaker nations into submission. “I refused to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point,” Kissinger once complained. It should be pointed out that Ferguson shares Kissinger’s relativism. Though Ferguson won’t deal with the many crimes Kissinger is accused of committing until the second volume of his biography, in the introduction to his first volume he concedes that Kissinger’s policies resulted in a high body count. But, Ferguson argues, any moral judgment one might make of Kissinger’s means must be balanced by the greater good of his ends, and by weighting the relative value of lives in “important” countries to those found elsewhere. Ferguson writes: “Arguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries—and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and as Timor—must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected U.S. relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major Western European powers?”