The world of Henry Kissinger

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 05/12/2023

Rivers of ink have been deployed in the wake of Henry Kissinger's death in the attempt to capture the essence of his talent, a rather complex task because he possessed one of the most complex intellects of the quite complex 20th century.

For starters Henry Kissinger was a child of reason. His passion for balances of power was the product of his understanding that human beings need to be controlled to prevent the unleashing of their passions when taking decisions that affect society. In his view, emotions cloud the sense of reality, inspiring decisions that bear negative impacts upon those who make them and those who suffer them. Passion based decisions launch a cycle of wrong decision making that leads to further deterioration of any given situation while opening the door to chaos.

Thus, national, and international orders must be preserved as an absolute priority. Indeed, when order breaks down, each actor in the decision-making framework takes initiatives that, when not shared or understood by the rest of the universe of decision-makers, inevitably lead to chaos, and chaos is destruction and death.

Hence his thesis of realpolitik, which is based on the premise that each state pursues in the international order the protection of its interests, defined as the preservation of statehood and economic progress.

Moral principles and values are not part of the decision-making sphere of states, but of the individual practice of the members of each society, who must stamp these elements on their individual decisions and in their relations with other individuals.

Thus, the protection of U.S. interests, defined as the maintenance of the West's political and defense leadership, demanded the establishment of controls on developments that could gradually pierce the democratic systems and the set of understandings between states that are the pillars of the liberal order that rescued his home country Germany from sutoritarianism.

Kissinger thus concentrated a good deal of his public life on identifying states and leaderships capable of sustaining a global balance of power that would advance the cause of democracy and economic progress. His keen intellect knew that both these goals could only be achieved with the liberation of economic forces and the establishment of the rule of law. And these are tasks to be undertaken by domestic leaderships.

The achievement of stability sometimes requires the use of force to confront radicalism. But, as Kissinger was able to attest to -as he lived the days of occupied Germany-, the best antidote to authoritarianism is the establishment of the rule of law. Because it is the condition that allows the aspirations of a people to be channeled towards the formulation of a collective vision of any given country with clear political and economic goals. And once this is achieved, it is the community itself that sets the limits on the conduct of individuals. Anything that advances the achievement of the collective vision will be supported by the community. Everything that destroys it will be subject to limitations set by the community itself.

Many point out that the problem in this intellectual scheme is that it opens the room for alliances with entities that violate human rights and decisions that imply death and destruction. The problem with this reasoning is that it does not consider the process of establishing equilibrium itself or the particular circumstances of decision-making. When societies are affected by anarchic processes, it is difficult for them to move towards stability without forceful measures. And such measures must be taken by the national leadership. Any participation of foreign entities in the process worsens the situation or changes the decision’s course , making the process of achieving equilibrium more difficult, complex, and distant.

Similarly, the restoration of balances within a violent conflict often requires the adoption of drastic measures that bring victory closer and put an end to armed conflict.

It is within this context that the work of great leaders who have built or perfected the international system, such as Kissinger, must be analyzed. And that analysis must be anchored in the properties of the international system under which the decision was made, the circumstance of the main actors and the existing alternatives. Otherwise, we will never understand Churchill's decision not to order the evacuation of Canterbury even though he knew that the city was going to be razed by German fire. It is under this theoretical framework, for instance, that one must analyze tools of governance such as the Hammurabi Code to appreciate their civilizational value.

Kissinger certainly erred in the deployment of his realpolitik scheme. These mistakes had to do with his lack of knowledge of the prevailing conditions among local elites within the local elites of what is now called the Global South. To think that in Latin America the military would fight the Soviet Union backed terrorism within a framework of legality was to ignore the feudal character of Latin American societies. His failure to put pressure on the Indonesian military to fight communism within a framework of the rule of law revealed his little knowledge of the tribal character of Indonesian society, whose leaders interpreted the United States' disengagement with the observance of human rights as a signal to exterminate rival tribes. In short, Kissinger's grave mistake was to assume that the entire world was in a post-Westphalian stage when in fact many nations had not abandoned tribal society or the Middle Ages.

But we will all remember as his great successes not only the immense and stimulating intellectual legacy that he leaves us through his books, but also his geopolitical moves that led to the terminal weakening of the Soviet Union, with which liberal democracy began to spread to Central Asia and the nation created by Mao Tse Toung entered the arcadias of modernity, creating the largest middle class on planet earth. Both achievements will serve to advance freedom in the world in an unstoppable way. With pauses and even with reverse gears. But no one can deny that our twentieth-century world is divided into before and after Kissinger.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».