The ruthless realpolitik of Henry Kissinger – spiked
Henry Kissinger, the most significant statesman of the 20th century, has died at the age of 100.
A consummate practitioner of realpolitik, he was a diplomat very much in the tradition of such 19th-century figures as Klemens von Metternich and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. Like them, he possessed formidable clarity about the pursuit of the national interest in a complicated world.
Kissinger came to the fore as a national-security adviser and secretary of state under US presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in the late-1960s and 1970s. And he continued to advise later presidents, too.
Kissinger played a significant role during the Cold War. His major achievement was to oversee America s diplomatic engagement with China. He also contributed to the US-Soviet arms-control negotiations; to the building of ties between Israel and its Arab neighbours; and to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords between North and South Vietnam, which helped America save face when it withdrew its troops from Vietnam.
Kissinger combined pragmatism with a ruthless pursuit of the American national interest. He was a passionate Cold Warrior, committed to eradicating Communist influence in the Western hemisphere. This led him to engage in many morally objectionable actions. In 1970, he collaborated with the CIA to destabilise and eventually overthrow Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile. Later, he enthusiastically supported Argentina s bloody coup in 1976, urging Argentina s armed forces to quickly destroy their opponents before Western outcry over human-rights abuses could take hold. Unsurprisingly, he could count numerous military dictators as his friends.
I read A World Restored as an undergraduate and really did not see why it was styled as a great book. Perhaps I’d like it more now. A history professor of mine did not like it either, but she was a complete lefty, although a nice woman.