Henry Alfred Kissinger (1923-2023)

Henry Alfred Kissinger, the renowned United States diplomat, passed on last month, leaving the world with mixed reactions borne out of diverse characteristics of his person.

Kissinger, a political scientist, geopolitical consultant, politician, and author lived for a century. That he was an outstanding intellectual is an undisputed fact. It was in the field of diplomacy that he most excelled.

As a diplomat, he served under President Richard Milhous Nixon, who was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974 and Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., who was the 38th President of the United States from 1974 to 1977 as the United States secretary of state and national security advisor respectively. The periods fell within bipolarity underlined by the Cold War between the East and West blocs.

In death, Kissinger matters, because of the realist diplomatic positions he crafted and pursued for the U.S. The positions were salubrious to U.S. national interest but deleterious to the interest of the Third World. It is the reason for the varied reactions to his mortal passage. President George W. Bush, noted that “America has lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices…I have long admired the man who fled the Nazis as a young boy from a Jewish family, then fought them in the United States Army…When he later became secretary of state, his appointment as a former refugee said as much about his greatness as it did America’s greatness.”

It was Kissinger, in his global reach, who brought China into the world stage. He shuttled to China twice before President Nixon’s pioneering visit to Beijing in 1972 to meet with China’s Communist Party chairman, Mao Zedong. It was during the visit that both countries formalised diplomatic relations after a break of 23 years. Little wonder that Xie Feng, the Chinese Ambassador to the U.S., noted that Kissinger’s death was “a tremendous loss for both our countries and the world. History will remember what the centenarian had contributed to China-U.S. relations, and he will always remain alive in the hearts of the Chinese people as a most valued old friend.”

In Latin America, Kissinger inspired rapid dictatorship in paranoid fight against left-wing governments. As Francisco Bustos, a human rights lawyer and professor at the University of Chile, rightly noted, “At least here in Latin America, what I perceived in Henry Kissinger’s vision is very negative because it’s a kind of anything goes mentality. No matter how brutal the dictatorship is that must be supported, it doesn’t matter.”

In Asia, especially in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, Kissinger inspired U.S. policies that left a bloody imprint in those countries. This fact was echoed by Larry Berman, a professor emeritus at the University of California, who said, “If we just focus on the region … Kissinger’s decisions in these areas, no matter how brilliant he may have been, no matter how skilful a negotiator he may have been, were disastrous for hundreds of thousands of innocent people.”

For Africa, he is remembered for fostering racist and dictatorial regimes. While anti-colonial struggles raged in much of the continent, Kissinger sought to reinforce white settler’s domination in Southern Africa in pursuit of U.S. national interest. According to the National Security Study Memorandum 39, U.S. direct investment in Southern Africa, largely in South Africa, was about one billion USD at a time UK’s investment was about three billion USD. Both the U.S. and the British were against sanctions that would halt their economic interest. Also, Southern Africa was geographically important to the U.S. because of the need to control the Indian Ocean, where the Soviets were active and the need to protect its over-flight and landing military facilities in South Africa, its gold, and the regular use of ports in Mozambique and Angola. Thus, it was in her interest to undermine the independence struggles of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

Kissinger, a German Jew, who fled Hitler’s Germany for the U.S., served the U.S. national interest till his death. In his diplomatic forays, morality was relegated to the background in favour of realpolitik.  His writings on international affairs will continue to influence contemporary diplomacy and scholarship.

The Guardian