December 19, 2023

A couple of weeks ago I did a Kissinger piece on China and realism in foreign policy. But now, despite our present plagiarism pickle, I have just finished his Last Word before death at the age of 100, and I have more to say about this great American. In Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, published in 2022, Kissinger reviews the lives and careers of six nation-state leaders personally known to him. Each of these leaders, somehow, rose above the ruck of mindless politics-as-usual to deliver just what their peoples desperately needed at the time.

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For Konrad Adenauer, Kissinger tells us, the need was to obtain forgiveness for Germany’s sins in what Kissinger rightly calls the Second Thirty Years War. For Charles de Gaulle it was to revive the spirit of France after a century of shame. For Richard Nixon it was to break the Cold War confrontation with an opening to China. For Anwar Sadat it was to find a way to peace with Israel and, not incidentally, make Egypt independent after a couple thousand years of colonization by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans, and Brits. For Lee Kuan Yew it was to create a First World Singapore fit to be a credible location for Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, the trilogy and the movie. For Margaret Thatcher it was to clean up the mess Labour had made of postwar Britain.

None of these leaders came from the upper crust, by blood or intellectual pedigree. Five of the six came from traditional middle-class religious origins. Lee Kuan Yew’s claim to fame is that he married the girl he competed with in high school for the college scholarships, and at the end of her life, when she was bedridden after a stroke, recited classical Brit Lit to her

Finally, at the end of the book, we get Kissinger’s real Last Word: that in our modern online world we have lost the tradition of “deep literacy.” I am sure he was not — repeat, NOT — referring to the you-go girls presidenting at the Ivy League.

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But he certainly spoke to me with his comment on “deep literacy.” Because you know, cupcake, unless you veer off the NPR Narrative Memorial Highway and wander along the intellectual by-ways, you are not going to get the deep knowledge that enables you to make a contribution to this crazy world. You are just going to end up jabbering current stupidities in an echo chamber.

But you know what? When you’ve read deeply and widely your unconscious mind starts to synthesize all the ideas you’ve read about, and occasionally, at about two in the morning, you have an aha moment. Maybe once or twice in a lifetime. Of course, this only happens if you’ve read your Jung and half anticipate some sort of miracle to occur when you least expect it.

Kissinger also had something to say about Ukraine. He writes that if Ukraine were to join NATO, the border between Russia and Europe would be “within 300 miles from Moscow.” But if the border were on the west of Ukraine then “Russian forces would be within striking distance of Budapest and Warsaw.” Hmm. I wonder what Kissinger meant by that. More to the point I wonder if Antony Blinken or Joe Biden have thought about it. And when is someone going to come up with the solution to the Russia problem, of a land and a people with no easily definable borders.

I’ve read quite a few obituaries about Kissinger over the last few weeks. There’s a tendency to marginalize him, as a liar, or a war criminal, or something. Well, of course, he was a man, and a clever man, and an ambitious man, with all the faults that flesh is heir to. But I would say, as Archie Bunker almost sang:

We could use a man like Henry Kissinger again.

Faults and all, Henry Kissinger was an immigrant American, the son of a German schoolteacher. Because of his talent and education and intellectual drive he rose to the heights of American political and intellectual leadership. His great achievement was probably to split China off from the Soviet Union in his opening to China and then end the era of confrontation with the Soviets to start a process of negotiation.