The Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy

2. Kissinger and Kissingerism

2 Kissinger and Kissingerism Most studies of Henry Kissinger tend to present him as the quintessential exponent of a continental European realism that became popular in Cold War America. According to this established interpretation, Kissinger ’s approach to world affairs was always distinguished by an attempt to oust the extreme moral and ideological traits, which had made the Cold War a peculiar and unique period in the history of modern international relations. The popular historian and pundit Walter Russell Mead has claimed that for Kissinger, “the United States and the Soviet Union” were simply “two great powers like Prussia and Austria.” According to one biographer , Kissinger adhered to a flexible and uninhibited realpolitik that rejected “moral absolutes.” Such an approach left little or “no room for idealism .” As a scholar, and even more so as a statesman, Kissinger has therefore been described (and sometimes stereotyped) as the last, great adept of a realist tradition that adapted to the changed structure of the world system but was careful to respect the basic rules of international politics. His “reliance on great power diplomacy, his assumption of unquestioned 44 The Eccentric Realist priority of international over domestic politics, his Weberian conception of the statesman’s personal responsibility for the ethical dilemmas of foreign policy—all these tenets of realism,” political scientist Michael Joseph Smith has argued, “informed Kissinger’s approach.”1 The Education of Heinz Kissinger This reading of Kissinger as an unreconstructed archrealist is one that needs to be challenged or at least qualified. Kissingerian realism has been (and still is) far from linear, coherent, and doctrinally orthodox. A good dose of opportunism and unscrupulousness induced Kissinger to adapt his realism to the spirit of the times and to U.S. Cold War political culture (if not to politics tout court). As underlined by one of the intellectual fathers of U.S. realism, political scientist Hans Morgenthau, one of Kissinger’s greatest skills has been his ability to “adjust” from time to time “intellectual conviction to political exigencies.” In government as well as in academia, Morgenthau critically maintained, Kissinger operated as a “many-sided” Odysseus, a “polytropos” with multiple faces, whose intellectual peripateticism was rarely disinterested. “Kissinger,” Morgenthau argued in 1975, “is a good actor who does not play the role of Hamlet today, of Caesar tomorrow , but who is Hamlet today and Caesar tomorrow.”2 Various elements contributed toward making Kissinger a supposed Metternich of the nuclear era and fueled his reputation as “the European mind in American policy,” capable of invoking and successfully determining a “Europeanization” of U.S. foreign policy: his biography and background ; his academic experience; his pressing, but never truly heretical or outside the zeitgeist, criticism of U.S. foreign policy; and his role in the administrations of Richard Nixon (1969–74) and Gerald Ford (1974–77), when for two years (1973–75) he was simultaneously secretary of state and national security advisor.3 Kissinger’s biography, even more than his scholarship and policy, was crucial to his image of a learned European who taught young and immature Americans how to act and behave in the international arena. Over time, Kissinger incessantly promoted himself as the sophisticated, historically cultured , and intellectual European guiding a naïve, optimistic, and superficial America, only to see it used against him during his last years in office. Kissinger and Kissingerism 45 A German Jew raised in the city of Fürth, Bavaria, Heinz Kissinger, in 1938 at age fifteen, fled Germany with his family to escape Nazi persecution . In the United States the Kissingers soon joined the large New York Jewish community, and Heinz became Henry. His full integration into American society would take a few years, however, and include a world war and a cold war before being completed. After attending secondary school and one year at the City College of New York, during which he also worked at a brush company, Kissinger was able to exploit the opportunities offered by World War II, as did many other young, talented members of religious and national minorities in the United States. In 1943 he was drafted and was soon made a U.S. citizen; no longer was he a German Jew living in New York’s Washington Heights, but an American of Jewish origin , European heritage, and a thick, unmistakable, German accent.4 His experience in the U.S. Army was crucial in many ways and...