Kissinger’s legacy for international relations
IN the arena of international relations and diplomacy, there are a few names whose intellect has reserved the aplomb of universality.
The former US Secretary of State, Dr Henry Kissinger now a nonagenarian, is amongst those names.
Being one of the greatest political scientists and a Nobel Peace Laureate Kissinger owes a dynamic credit with regard to his services to defend American national interests.
He is ‘’one of the towering figures of the 20th Century American foreign policy’’, the architecture of the US foreign policy in the Cold War period.
He is the founder of the Kissinger Institute, as well as of the World Order Project in America.
Kissinger served as National Security Advisor (NSA) and Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon, and continued as Secretary of State under Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford.
The start of his career: Born in 1923 in Germany, Kissinger migrated to America during Hitler’s third Reich.
Yet interestingly, as fate would have it, in June 1944, Kissinger joined the 84th Infantry Division at Camp Claiborne (Louisiana) which had moved eastward across Germany.
Consequent upon the demobilization in 1946, he remained in Germany as a civilian instructor at the European Command Intelligence School in Oberammergau where he taught German history to Army personnel who outranked him in age, position and expertise.
Kissinger was respected among his Army comrades as a soldier, and now he also garnered admiration for his instructional capabilities.
He got his admission at Harvard, where he completed his undergraduate degree in history, summa cum laude, in 1950.
He remained at Harvard to earn his graduate degree. On completing his doctorate in 1954, he joined the faculty of the Department of Government and the new Centre for International Affairs.
His doctoral dissertation was titled Peace, Legitimacy and the Equilibrium (A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich)
Kissinger’s realpolitik: Though Kissinger has been an ardent advocate of realpolitik, is no stranger to controversy.
When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Vietnam, critics complained, pointing to the devastating US bombing campaign in Cambodia during his tenure.
Two members of the Nobel Committee resigned in protest. Writing in 1983, Kissinger’s former Harvard colleague Stanley Hoffmann depicted Kissinger as a Machiavellian “who believe[s] that the preservation of the state … requires both ruthlessness and deceit at the expense of foreign and internal adversaries.
” Many writers have simply assumed that Kissinger modelled himself on his supposed heroes, the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich and the Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck, the standard-bearers of classical European realpolitik.
Kissinger’s books: Kissinger’s doctoral research on the diplomacy of post-Napoleonic Europe provided the ideological weltanschauungs of his first book, A World Restored: Castlereagh, Metternich and the Restoration of Peace, 1812-1822, published in 1957.
It was the same year he wrote his first book on current affairs, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.
Henry Kissinger’s outstanding fidelity to the Realist tradition can be gauged through his various works on American foreign policy.
As far his books on international relations are concerned that richly serve the core of international relations policy making.
A few of them are noteworthy: The anatomy of two major foreign policy crises; Does America need a foreign policy?
Ending of the Vietnam War; Years of Upheaval; Years of Renewal; World Order; On China; Diplomacy; and the current one—Leadership: Six studies in world strategy
Kissinger and China: While giving an interview to the Wilson Centre, Kissinger said, “We are two countries that have considerable destructive capabilities.
We are two countries that believe they have an exceptional nature in the conduct of policy: We on the basis of the political system of democratic constitutionalism; China on the basis of an evolution that goes back at least to Confucius and centuries of unique practice’’.
Kissinger believes that China has consistently honoured the position of mutual respect for sovereignty that is in the written principles of its foreign policy.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put a wedge in the partnership between Russia and China as it would be against China’s strategic interests and operating principles to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
If the two countries can use this opportunity to develop high-level diplomatic communication, we could see an improvement in US-China relations in the future.
The significance of his diplomatic role: Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the ME did not immediately result in a peace agreement between the Egyptians and the Israelis, his incremental approach to diplomacy did lay much of the groundwork for the settlement between Egypt and Israel embodied in the 1978 Camp David Accords.
On the other hand, the manner in which Kissinger manipulated the step-by-step negotiations undermined the Arab World’s trust in this strategy, causing them to insist upon an overall package settlement which has, thus far, remained impossible to achieve.
As per the finding of the renown American historian Niall Ferguson: ‘’Kissinger’s record in office remains the subject of multiple historical controversies, echoes of the bitter debates of the 1970s, not least on the subject of Vietnam.
Yet even his harshest critics cannot deny the skill with which Kissinger managed the most important of all the foreign relationships of the United States at that time, the one with the Soviet Union.
He was responsible—to name only his most obvious achievements—for negotiating the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviets.
While he held office, the United States ratified the nuclear arms Non-Proliferation Treaty’’, the international convention banning biological weapons, and the Helsinki Final Act.
‘’ It was Kissinger who, with Zhou Enlai, opened diplomatic communications between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, arguably one of the turning points in the Cold War.
It was Kissinger, who negotiated the end of the Yom Kippur War between the Arab states and Israel and whose shuttle diplomacy paved the way for the Camp David Accords’’.
His views on Russia-NATO relations: If we treat Russia seriously as a great power, we need at an early stage to determine whether their concerns can be reconciled with our necessities.
We should explore the possibilities of a status of non-military grouping on the territory between Russia and the existing frontiers of NATO.
(The National Interest, 08.19.15) Though one could differ with the thoughts and views of Kissinger that I did in my writings published in the Dawn newspaper (2004-5 wherein I intermittently penned my rebuttal of a few articles that were published in the Washington Post, yet one can not deny the significance of his intellectual legacy imbedded in his writings, presentations and policies vis-a-vis the statecraftship.
—The writer, an independent ‘IR’ researcher-cum-international law analyst based in Pakistan, is member of European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on IR, Critical Peace & Conflict Studies, also a member of Washington Foreign Law Society and European Society of International Law.
