Kissinger's Comeback Tour
Henry Kissinger, like an aging rock star who keeps
squeezing one more year out of the same old hits, has embarked on yet another
comeback tour. The former secretary of state has just released Years of
Renewal , a 1,079-page behemoth about his service to President Ford.
Meanwhile, Robert D. Kaplan has lionized Kissinger in this month's
Atlantic. This tribute--a bow from the great pessimist of the '90s to
the great pessimist of the '70s--revisits Kissinger's 1954 doctoral
dissertation and finds it "brave," a persuasive account of why realism keeps
the peace better than idealism. And Kissinger is popping up on TV screens with
alarming frequency, delivering his gloomy assessments of the Kosovo bombing and
the frost in U.S.-China relations.
Kissinger, of course, has never gone entirely out
of fashion. His press savvy, charm, and resolute courtship of the rich and
powerful have ensured that he always remains plenty visible. Like Richard
Nixon--to whom he is eternally yoked--Kissinger has spent his years out of
power spinning, endlessly spinning, his record (and revising it when
necessary). Like Nixon, Kissinger has been trying to escape a black mark on his
career (Vietnam rather than Watergate). And as with Nixon, this spinning
occasionally produces vindication, as it has for the past few months. Kissinger
is back in vogue not because he is saying anything new. He's only saying what
he has been saying for 45 years. He's back in vogue because his doleful realism
frames the debate for Republicans who oppose Clinton's foreign policy,
especially Clinton's China and Kosovo policies.
(Kissinger's vindication
isn't complete, because the current talk is silent on Vietnam. But Vietnam
vindication could be just around the corner. Click for more.)
Much of the current fascination with Kissinger grows out of
the journalistic debate over Years of Renewal . Years of Renewal ,
it must be said, does not seem a promising start for any kind of debate. The
third and final (thank God) volume of Kissinger's memoirs, it drones on about
an entirely forgettable period in American history. The Mayaguez
Incident. Quick, can you tell me what that was about? Or "Basket III"? I didn't
think so.
But beneath the welter of
details about Cyprus and Angola, Kissinger makes a surprising claim, arguing
that his tough-but-accommodating policy toward the Soviets in the mid-'70s led
directly to the confrontational Reagan tactics that won the Cold War in the
'80s. According to Kissinger, the breathing space created by détente gave the
United States time to recover from Vietnam without retreating into
isolationism, thus setting the table for Reagan.
Many commentators, including Kaplan, have embraced
Kissinger's interpretation. But others, especially Robert Kagan in the New
Republic, have savaged Years of Renewal for its self-serving
revisionism. Now that the U.S.S.R. has collapsed, they say, Kissinger is
pretending that he was much tougher on the Soviets than he ever was. In the
most telling example, Kagan slams Kissinger for taking credit for the 1975
Helsinki human rights provisions. (That's "Basket III.") These provisions
became a key weapon of Soviet-bloc dissidents in the '80s. In fact, Kagan says,
Kissinger was skeptical of Basket III and had virtually nothing to do with
it.
The fight over whether
détente helped win the Cold War is not simply academic. It especially matters
for current U.S.-China relations. If Kissingerian détente helped break the
Soviets, then presumably Kissingerian détente could help tame today's Chinese.
In the '70s, Kissinger downplayed ideological conflict with Soviet Communists
in favor of soothed relations, just as Sino-apologists (including Kissinger)
today ignore China's Communist authoritarianism, human rights violations, and
suppression of democracy. Idealistic conservatives such as Reagan despised
Kissinger's accommodationist policies during the '70s: The U.S.S.R. was an evil
empire, not simply a dance partner in the great geopolitical waltz. Likewise,
today's idealistic conservatives still despise Kissinger and detect in Years
of Renewal 's détente argument an excuse to coddle China. It is no
coincidence that Kagan, the sharpest critic of Years of Renewal , is also
the strongest China hawk around, author of many anti-Beijing articles for the
Weekly Standard .
The Kissinger comeback wouldn't be possible without the
spectacle of Republican foreign policy confusion. Since the end of the Cold
War, the GOP has divided itself into Wilsonian idealists, such as the folks at
the Standard , who believe the United States should be the global
crusader for justice, and the rest of the party, which isn't sure what it
believes but loathes Clinton. Kosovo, where the idealists favored intervention
and other Republicans didn't, has deepened this divide.
Kissinger seems an unlikely guide for the lost
Republicans. After all, he backed the Kosovo bombing on the grounds that NATO,
having started fighting, must win to preserve its credibility. But beneath
Kissinger's reluctant support was a larger principle: The United States has no
vital interest in Kosovo, so the United States never should have involved
itself there at all. U.S. interests, not U.S. ideals, should ultimately
determine our foreign policy.
It is this gloomy but coherent vision that has made
Kissinger a favorite of floundering anti-Kosovo Republicans. (It is this same
vision that Kaplan so admires.) Kissinger offers them a stiff foreign policy
framework, a set of principles sharply contrasted to Clinton's ad hocism. He
gives the Republicans intellectual window dressing to what would otherwise be
just more incoherent anti-Clintonism. This is not as glorious as another stint
as secretary of state, but the 1999 Kissinger will happily accept the
assignment.
