“In September 1974, Mário Soares, foreign minister of the interim government and leader of the Portuguese Socialist Party, met with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Washington. Kissinger rebuked Soares and other moderates for not acting more decisively to prevent a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship.
‘You are a Kerensky,’ Kissinger told Soares, ‘I believe your sincerity, but you are naive.’
To which Soares replied: ‘I certainly don’t want to be a Kerensky.’
And Kissinger shot back: ‘Neither did Kerensky.'”
The conversation between Henry Kissinger, now turned 100, and Mário Soares, who after the Carnation Revolution in 1974 feared that his country would fall into the hands of revolutionaries led by the Portuguese Communist Party and officers sympathetic to communism, is narrated by Samuel Huntington, author of the infamous ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. Europe looked set for another October 1917, not only in Portugal, but also in Greece and Italy in those years. Outside Europe, in the ‘third world’, especially in Vietnam, the US, the leading power of the world capitalist system, was being defeated; imperialism as a whole seemed to be in the process of collapse. On top of that, the economic depression shook all the developed countries in the 70s. Not only the optimistic and rational revolutionaries, but also the administrators and ideologues in charge of the system’s functioning thought that the end was imminent.
Huntington says with a sigh of relief that in 1974 the revolutionary crises all along the Southern European line ended with the ‘victory of the Kerenskys’. With this period, the ‘third wave of democratization’ had begun. At the intermediate stop, the world socialist system, headed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was also dissolving.
Henry Kissinger certainly had the lion’s share in this ‘liberation’ of imperialism. Kissinger’s name should be inscribed among the likes of George Kennan, the sharp ideologue and practitioner of the Cold War, and perhaps even higher. Kissinger was a brilliant imperialist administrator and ideologue who managed to be both realistic, calculating and cold-blooded, and at the same time sneaky, ruthless and above all anticommunist. In any case, without the combination of all these things, it would have been much more difficult for imperialism in crisis in the 1970s and seemingly doomed to collapse to emerge victorious from a new period of aggression, even though it is not possible for individuals to change the course of history on their own.
Kissinger, known today, and rightly so, as the architect of China’s integration into the world system, was also one of the architects of the atrocities in Cambodia and Vietnam. And these were not mutually exclusive: Anyone who has read Kissinger’s Diplomacy cannot conceal the imperialist arrogance of an eternal belief in the intertwining of American national interests and ‘global’ domination. Realism is the complementary element of this arrogance.
In fact, this ‘realism’ explains how the imperialist doctrine of ‘manifest destiny’, as passed down from the American founding fathers, has also turned into a support for fascist dictatorships. Chilean documents from the US National Security Archive provide us with evidence we do not really need: In a meeting in Santiago in June 1976, Kissinger praised the head of the military dictatorship, Augusto Pinochet, saying exactly the following: “We want to help, not undermine you. We are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here. You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende. My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.”
Later, however, he informed the general that he had postponed a speech he was to deliver at a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Chile, in which he was to address ‘human rights violations’ under Pinochet. Kissinger explained that he had to do this to prevent the US Congress, which had ‘problems’ with human rights, from approving sanctions against Chile, saying: “I wanted you to understand my position. We want to deal in moral persuasion, not by legal sanctions.” Kissinger adds that ‘announcing’ the measures taken on human rights would indeed ‘help’, and Pinochet replies that Chile is ‘returning to institutionalization step by step’. And that’s it.
There is no need to recall the role played by the same Kissinger in the covert operations and acts of violence launched to overthrow Allende. It is only necessary to know this to illustrate the moral standards of the American foreign policy gurus who believe that they have been given the right to remake the world in their image. Kissinger also deserves attention for his mastery of the ‘diplomatic virtuosity’ and ‘global values’ of protecting the imperialist hierarchy through military means and defending American interests by going on the offensive at a time when US hegemony was showing signs of decline.
Indeed, this shrewd administrator himself frankly admits this in his book cited above:
“Had America not organized resistance when a self-confident communist empire was acting as if it represented the wave of the future and was causing the peoples and leaders of the world to believe that this might be so, the Communist Parties, which were then already the largest single parties in postwar Europe, might well have prevailed. The series of crises over Berlin could not have been sustained, and there would have been more of them. Exploiting America’s post-Vietnam trauma, the Kremlin sent proxy forces to Africa and its own troops into Afghanistan. It would have become far more assertive had America not protected the global balance of power and helped to rebuild democratic societies. That America did not perceive its role in terms of the balance of power compounded its pain and complicated the process, but it also served to bring about unprecedented dedication and creativity. Nor did it change the reality that it was America which had preserved the global equilibrium and therefore the peace of the world.”
It is all the more significant that the two countries that this brilliant and brutal imperialist administrator never concealed his disgust, contempt, fear and, surprisingly, his crush when describing their representatives were the Soviet Union and Vietnam. ‘Good bargaining’, which should be one of the most important qualities of a diplomat, is ‘tiresome’, ‘retail bargaining’ (whereas the Chinese ‘want to reassure their counterparts’) in the case of Molotov and Gromyko; when it comes to Xuan Thuy and Le Duc Tho, speaking on behalf of the Vietnamese during the negotiations, they either explain the Vietnamese position in ‘a long speech that everyone knows’ or ‘with impeccable politeness, cold demeanor to show moral superiority, and words taken from a Marxist lexicon incomprehensible to ignorant imperialists,’ while it is a blessing for the Vietnamese to even negotiate with the US for their country.
There is no need to recount Kissinger’s entire career, which is now well documented. The reader who wishes and has the time to search the archives in English can access the declassified documents here. Moreover, this brilliant and conversely ‘class-conscious’ executive has more to say to his enemies than to his friends. “He confuses politics with intrigue,” a biographer wrote some thirty years ago, quoting Napoleon as saying of Metternich: “Kissinger was a master of both.” He was a child of the imperialist epoch, when capitalist politics became intrigue. It is not therefore unfair to this master diplomat to characterize him in the same biography as a tactician who planned the necessary steps to fulfill a mission rather than a strategist who formulated grand goals. In an age when economics is shrinking into international relations, politics and military preparations, it corresponds to his lack of understanding of the international economy. “This is a minor economic issue,” Kissinger said in a debate with Nixon’s Secretary of Commerce, Peter Peterson, to which his interlocutor had to reply, “Henry, that’s verbiage for you because you despise any economic assessment.” Nixon himself admits that he never thought Kissinger could fill that role because they were planning to put someone with economic expertise in the State Department.
Thus, eternal and unconditional commitment to the national and world domination of his class is the clay from which this resourceful man is formed. Those who know him and those who have negotiated with him (including his enemies) acknowledge his intellectual capacity. If saving the world from communism and doing it in a way that suited American interests is the greatest achievement of a US diplomat in the 20th century, Kissinger should be at the top of the ‘honor list’.
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