The Legacy of Henry Kissinger

“If, as President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger rightly believed, it was in America’s interest to extract itself from the mess their predecessors had created in Vietnam, it was not necessary for them to keep fighting the war for so long.”

In the summer of 2001, as I was turning 16, I fancied myself a budding global thinker. I had fared well in Model UN, had gotten high grades in Western and Eastern Civilization classes, and was becoming comfortable reading, writing, and speaking in French. Before my junior year of high school, I had visited seven foreign countries. That summer, I read former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s 2001 book Does America Need a Foreign Policy? I remember reading part of it in the passenger seat of a car on the way to John F. Kennedy International Airport, while listening to U2’s 2000 album All That You Can’t Leave Behind. The opening song, “Beautiful Day,” with the image it created in my mind of globalization’s wonders, helped me further flatter myself that I was destined to be a globe-traveling problem solver.

I do not remember gleaning any great insights from the book, but the mere fact that I was reading it at a young age helped me indulge the illusion that I was worldly and sophisticated beyond my years. I did not know nearly enough about the legacy of Secretary Kissinger, who died on November 29th at age 100, as National Security Advisor (1969-1975) and then Secretary of State from (1973-1977), and what he had done while serving as the right-hand man of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. If I had, I would have been much less likely to associate his writing with my dreams of future geopolitical influence.

Interest vs. Necessity

Among other things, I had not yet learned the distinction between realism, the school of foreign policy thought of which Secretary Kissinger was perhaps the ultimate embodiment, and alternative schools like liberal internationalism, neoconservatism, and isolationism, a distinction I would begin learning a couple of years later while studying political science in college. The core insight of realism is the importance of power in international affairs. Moral sentiments, like those expressed by Western liberals with cosmopolitan instincts, are all very well, but they are pointless without political power to back them up. While they are not politically homogenous, realists have much more faith in nation-states, rather than institutions like the United Nations, to keep order in a frequently disordered world. Far better for states to pursue their own interests and find ways in which their interests align with those of other states—security being the greatest concern of all—than to launch crusades in the service of ideological agendas.