亨利·基辛格与美国精英的道德破产

亨利·基辛格与美国精英的道德破产

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BMdMWBXRw&ab_channel=

民主现在！ 2023年11月30日

亨利·基辛格去世，享年 100 岁。这位美国前政治家在冷战最激烈的时期担任国家安全顾问和国务卿，并在之后的几十年里对美国外交政策产生了影响。 他的行为导致了屠杀、政变甚至种族灭绝，在拉丁美洲、东南亚及其他地区留下了血腥的遗产。 卸任后，基辛格一直到去世为止一直为美国总统和其他高级官员提供建议，他们称赞他是一位有远见的外交官。 耶鲁大学历史学家格雷格·格兰丁表示，这些热情洋溢的讣告只是揭示了“政治机构的道德破产”，而忽略了基辛格的行为可能导致全球至少 300 万人死亡。 格兰丁是《基辛格的影子：美国最具争议政治家的影响深远》一书的作者。

Henry Kissinger and the Moral Bankruptcy of U.S. Elites

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BMdMWBXRw&ab_channel=

Democracy Now! 2023年11月30日 

Henry Kissinger is dead at the age of 100. The former U.S. statesman served as national security adviser and secretary of state at the height of the Cold War and wielded influence over U.S. foreign policy for decades afterward. His actions led to massacres, coups and and even genocide, leaving a bloody legacy in Latin America, Southeast Asia and beyond. Once out of office, Kissinger continued until his death to advise U.S. presidents and other top officials who celebrate him as a visionary diplomat. Yale historian Greg Grandin says those glowing obituaries only reveal "the moral bankruptcy of the political establishment" that ignores how Kissinger's actions may have led to the deaths of at least 3 million people across the globe. Grandin is author of "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman."

基辛格的影子：美国最具争议政治家的影响力

https://www.amazon.ca/Kissingers-Shadow-Americas-Controversial-Statesman/dp/1627794492

作者：Greg Grandin (作者) 2015 年 8 月 25 日

对美国最具争议的外交官的新描述，超越了赞扬或谴责，揭示了基辛格是美国当前帝国立场的缔造者

著名历史学家格雷格·格兰丁在他引人入胜的新书《基辛格的影子》中指出，要理解当代美国的危机——无休止的海外战争和国内的政治两极分化——我们必须理解亨利·基辛格。

格兰丁审视了基辛格自己的著作以及大量新解密的文件，揭示了理查德·尼克松的最高外交政策顾问如何在主持越南战败和柬埔寨灾难性的秘密非法战争时帮助复兴 以帝国总统职位为中心的美国例外论的军事化版本。 基辛格相信现实可以屈从于他的意志，坚持认为在决定政策时直觉比确凿的事实更重要，并发誓过去的错误永远不会阻碍未来的大胆行动，基辛格预见到，甚至促成了带领美国的新保守主义理想主义者的崛起。 陷入阿富汗和伊拉克的严重战争。

格兰丁超越了关注基辛格的罪行或成就的叙述，对这位外交官对美国如何看待其在世界上的角色的持续影响提供了令人信服的新解释。

Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman 

https://www.amazon.ca/Kissingers-Shadow-Americas-Controversial-Statesman/dp/1627794492
by Greg Grandin (Author)  Aug. 25 2015

A new account of America's most controversial diplomat that moves beyond praise or condemnation to reveal Kissinger as the architect of America's current imperial stance

In his fascinating new book Kissinger's Shadow, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin argues that to understand the crisis of contemporary America―its never-ending wars abroad and political polarization at home―we have to understand Henry Kissinger.

Examining Kissinger's own writings, as well as a wealth of newly declassified documents, Grandin reveals how Richard Nixon's top foreign policy advisor, even as he was presiding over defeat in Vietnam and a disastrous, secret, and illegal war in Cambodia, was helping to revive a militarized version of American exceptionalism centered on an imperial presidency. Believing that reality could be bent to his will, insisting that intuition is more important in determining policy than hard facts, and vowing that past mistakes should never hinder future bold action, Kissinger anticipated, even enabled, the ascendance of the neoconservative idealists who took America into crippling wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Going beyond accounts focusing either on Kissinger's crimes or accomplishments, Grandin offers a compelling new interpretation of the diplomat's continuing influence on how the United States views its role in the world.

'Kissinger's Shadow,' by Greg Grandin

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/books/review/kissingers-shadow-by-greg-grandin.html?

Henry Kissinger

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By Mark Atwood Lawrence  

“Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes!” Thus chanted protesters as they disrupted a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in January. One demonstrator brandished handcuffs within inches of Kissinger’s head just after the former secretary of state, who had been invited to appear before the committee, took his seat. Once the Capitol police restored order, though, the event gave way to a frenzy of praise for the grand old man of American foreign policy. George Shultz, another former secretary of state scheduled to testify, inspired a standing ovation in the hearing room by praising Kissinger’s “many contributions to peace and security.”

Such is life for one of America’s most polarizing figures, and so it has been for as long as Kissinger has walked the national stage. The competing narratives are familiar, even stale: Kissinger’s champions hail him as a great statesman whose bold initiatives ended the Vietnam War, bolstered world peace and helped restore American power in an era of national decline. His detractors — members of a “hate Henry industry,” as the New York Times columnist William Safire once put it — view him as an immoral cynic who coddled dictators and enabled appalling bloodlettings on three continents.

Greg Grandin’s “Kissinger’s Shadow” decidedly belongs to the second category. A professor of history at New York University and an eloquent voice of the political left, Grandin hits all the topics that one might expect to see in a sharp indictment of Kissinger’s work as national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Drawing on bits of new evidence but mostly synthesizing long-available sources, Grandin revisits, for example, Kissinger’s tolerance of Pakistan’s brutalization of civilians during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, his support for Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s murderous regime in Chile and his endorsement of Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor and the bloody occupation that ensued.

Grandin delves most deeply into Cambodia’s tortured history, accusing Kissinger of waging an illegal war on the country between 1969 and 1973 and, by wreaking havoc on it through a huge bombing campaign, creating conditions that helped bring the genocidal Khmer Rouge to power. Especially disturbing are passages detailing Kissinger’s efforts to keep the bombing secret by, among other things, conniving with military officers to falsify records.

But to Grandin’s credit, he aims to do much more than merely rehash these and other depressing episodes that journalists and scholars have been working over for years. The book’s main agenda is to develop a fresh argument that, although more provocative than convincing, amounts to one of the most innovative attacks on Kissinger’s record and legacy.

Grandin challenges the conventional wisdom that Kissinger should be categorized as a “realist” — as a statesman driven by hardheaded calculation of national interest and calibration of the balance of power. Instead, Grandin contends that Kissinger is best understood as an existentialist who believed that in a world without objective truth or inescapable historical patterns, great statesmen distinguish themselves through spontaneity and resolute action rooted in intuition rather than rational thinking. Kissinger’s “philosophy of the deed,” as Grandin puts it, treated reality not as a constraint but as something to be created by individuals courageous enough to overcome inertia and break the shackles of mindless bureaucracy, political opposition and legalistic concepts like the inviolability of national sovereignty.

Describing Kissinger in this way enables Grandin to attack Kissinger’s decisions on Cambodia, Chile and elsewhere as expressions of a warped worldview that willfully ignored human ­consequences. But Grandin’s indictment goes further, contending that Kissinger’s philosophy laid down patterns that subsequent policy makers embraced in staging questionable interventions in the following decades. In this way, the book assigns Kissinger, who has held no major government position in nearly four decades, a central role in everything that Grandin despises about American policy-­making in those years, stretching from the Iran-contra scandal in the late 1980s to the recent war in Iraq and President Obama’s drone campaign, as well as underlying acceptance among American leaders of “endless war as a matter of course.”

Grandin writes with engaging passion — a tone well suited to what is clearly intended as an extended essay rather than a definitive reworking of Kissinger’s life and times — and an admirable desire to view Kissinger within the broad sweep of history. Still, there are problems. For one, Grandin’s description of Kissinger’s worldview is debatable at best. Undoubtedly, Grandin deserves credit for calling attention to underappreciated aspects of Kissinger’s philosophical musings. But he curiously ignores voluminous writings that point toward a more conventional appreciation of Kissinger as an arch-realist.

Grandin also has little to say about the arenas where Kissinger displayed his realist tendencies most obviously: Soviet-­American and Sino-American relations. Kissinger’s efforts to ease tensions with the Soviet Union and to open relations with China may, it is true, reflect a craving for grand gestures. The Cold War provided few moments as breathtaking as President Richard Nixon and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signing arms control treaties or Nixon toasting Mao Zedong. Yet Grandin does almost nothing to undo the old idea that these initiatives sprang mostly from careful and probably shrewd assessments of American interests at a moment of geopolitical and economic crisis. Nor does he refute the possibility that Kissinger’s excesses in the third world were the flip side of his desire to improve superpower relations, a delicate process that he believed required stability elsewhere, even if it came at the expense of democracy and human rights.

As for Kissinger’s “shadow” over recent events, Grandin arguably pays his subject a backhanded compliment by exaggerating his significance since his departure from office. Did later leaders really require Kissinger’s precedent to wage secret wars, violate foreign nations’ sovereignty and prioritize grand displays of power?

The history of American foreign relations is replete with such behavior, and it is not difficult to imagine recent events playing out as they have even if Kissinger had never held office. To be sure, Grandin shows that Kissinger, a man renowned for his monumental ego, has long sought the ear of powerful statesmen and aspired to contribute to national debates. Yet the book deploys little real evidence of a later leader crediting Kissinger with influence, citing Kissinger’s example or even behaving in ways that straightforwardly parallel Kissinger’s actions in the earlier period.

On the whole, “Kissinger’s Shadow” raises questions that Grandin does not intend but might indicate a success of sorts in stirring new thought. Could it be that Kissinger is less, not more, of a transformative figure than we, and Kissinger himself, are accustomed to think? Could it be that Kissinger stays in the limelight less by dint of his historical importance than because of his sheer persistence, the bitterness of the controversies that surround him and the singularity of his rise from Jewish refugee in the 1930s to the highest echelons of power, a life story that enables admirers to behold an embodiment of the American dream and critics to see someone outside the nation’s intellectual and political traditions? These are possibilities worth pondering.

Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman

https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1953

Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman
Greg Grandin
Reviewer: Dr James Cameron
 
Dr James Cameron, review of Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman, (review no. 1953)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/1953
Date accessed: 8 December, 2023

It is hard to write a genuinely new and intellectually stimulating book about Henry Kissinger, one of the most studied and debated figures in the history of American foreign relations. That Greg Grandin has done so is to his great credit. Kissinger’s Shadow should be required reading, alongside more favourable works, for students, academics and policymakers seeking to understand one of the United States’ most high-profile diplomats.

Recapitulating many of the allegations against Kissinger, stretching from Southeast Asia, to Africa and Latin America, Grandin goes beyond previous accounts by using them as a plank for a genuinely new interpretation of Kissinger’s place within the history of American foreign policy. While highly influential during his time in office, most argue that Kissinger’s style of realpolitik was definitively rejected by subsequent administrations. Drawing on his pre- and post-government writings, Grandin posits that ‘Kissinger’s shadow’ stretches much further. In doing so, he questions the nature of Kissinger’s realism, which, Grandin argues, is far more relativistic than generally considered. Kissinger’s belief that ‘hunches, conjecture, will, and intuition are as important as facts and hard intelligence in guiding policy’, Grandin claims, helped to defend executive dominance of national security policymaking during the 1970s, served as a guide for neoconservative arguments in favour of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and continue to resonate in Barack Obama’s conduct of the global war on terrorism. In doing so, Grandin points to parallels in language between Kissinger and his supposed neocon antagonists, including the famous quotation from an anonymous George W. Bush administration aide asserting that, ‘when we [the United States] act, we create our own reality’. Grandin points out that Kissinger seemingly endorsed such an approach when he argued, ‘The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality’, in a 1963 Foreign Affairs essay (p. 16).

Grandin’s book is a very creative problematisation of Kissinger’s legacy that all future historians must take into account. Anyone witnessing Hillary Clinton positively name-checking Kissinger during the 2016 Democratic primary race may wonder whether his legacy is indeed far more enduring than we generally acknowledge. Nevertheless, this reviewer has a number of reservations regarding the thesis of Kissinger’s Shadow. Such a short review can hardly do justice to Grandin’s argument, so a few doubts and questions that might serve as bases for future exploration will have to suffice.

Firstly, in making the case for Kissinger’s legacy, Grandin may underplay the extent to which his continuous self-reinvention has been a response to, rather than a cause of, changes in US national security thought. Kissinger has authored 16 books, including three bulky volumes of memoirs, as well as countless articles, op-eds and chapters. Over seven decades of output, stretching from the 1950s to the 2010s, one element of Kissinger’s writing shines through: his ability to marshal a huge amount of specialist knowledge, distil it with admirable clarity and place it in a broader context in a way that can reach a generalist readership of the Foreign Affairs type.(1) This was a skill Kissinger deployed to great effect, both in his public writings and as Nixon and Ford’s national security advisor and secretary of state.

This ability made Kissinger an influential figure, but meant that, in Lawrence Freedman’s words, he was more ‘a weather vane for changes in the intellectual climate’ than an initiator of new departures in foreign-policy thinking. In the early 1960s Kissinger focused on the demonstrative aspects of US national security policy, including need ‘to “test” power’ by acting in extra-European conflicts. This, Grandin argues, drew Kissinger ‘into a whirlpool … we can’t defend our interests until we know what are our interests are and we can’t know what our interests are until we defend them’ (p. 29).(2) Yet this circularity was not unique to Kissinger, but totally of a piece with broader developments in the logic of containment that drew the Kennedy and Johnson administrations into Vietnam, a decision in which Kissinger played no part. In this context, it is not surprising that Kissinger’s writing on ‘men able to create their own reality’ in 1963, on the cusp of US escalation in Southeast Asia, would be echoed by a White House staffer 40 years later, just after the United States’ hubristic plunge into Iraq. The phrase encapsulates certain structural failings in the logic of American national security policy that waxes and wanes in positive correlation with the United States’ sense of its own power, but also goes beyond one man, however influential.

With his mixture of public support and private doubts regarding the conduct of the war in Southeast Asia, Kissinger’s penchant for the centre ground continued to make itself evident throughout the 1960s. His double-dealing during the Johnson administration’s 1968 negotiations to end the war in Vietnam surely facilitated his move to the White House. Yet such manoeuvrings would not have been possible unless Kissinger was politically middle-of-the-road enough to be acceptable to both presidential candidates. This is not to exculpate Kissinger for his personal role in attempts to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations, prosecuting the secret bombing of Cambodia, or any of his other actions. Yet a focus on the national security advisor has somewhat obscured the fact that it was Nixon who made the fundamental political calls – including those for the aerial assault on Cambodia in 1969 and its invasion a year later, but also the summitry with the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union in 1972. Kissinger grew in influence over the first Nixon administration, but he only really got into the driving seat once Watergate took on power-threatening proportions in 1973. Kissinger pulled off a few major achievements essentially on his own, making best use of the October 1973 Yom Kippur War to solidify American influence in the Middle East. However, in general US grand strategy stalled without Nixon’s presidential imprimatur and hardly regained much lustre under Gerald Ford. As with many accounts that focus on Kissinger, Grandin plays down the centrality of Nixon, who was ultimately responsible for what went on in the White House, for both good and bad, between 1969 and 1974 – and indeed took the leading role in deciding the fundamentals of policy. Again, Kissinger was a central figure, but nevertheless acted in a broader context that shaped him as much as he shaped it.

The revolt of the new right during the Nixon-Ford term complicates Grandin’s story further. Far from being staunch defenders of executive dominance during those years, as they would later become, figureheads of the nascent neoconservative movement sought to undermine the White House through congressional action. This is clearest in the case of Henry Jackson’s assault on détente through the Jackson amendment to the joint congressional resolution on SALT of 1972 , that future strategic arms limitation negotiations be conducted on the basis of equality with the USSR, and the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1974 Trade Act, which tied freedom of emigration to the granting of Most Favored Nation status for the Soviet Union. Far from cementing executive dominance, Nixon and Kissinger did a very poor job of shielding the White House from extensive scrutiny during these years. Nixon’s ignominious resignation left those outside the executive branch dissatisfied with the direction of détente in an even stronger position to attack the administration, not only on strategic but moral grounds. At root, there was a real tension between Nixonian conservatives and their opponents over the extent to which the United States should compromise with the Soviet Union. The personal animosity that existed between the Nixon-Ford administrations and their neoconservative antagonists was so deep that Kissinger could not quite disguise it in the final volume of his memoirs, written more than 20 years after the events they describe.(3)

In this context, Grandin’s case regarding Kissinger’s shadow after leaving Foggy Bottom in January 1977 should be treated with some caution. Now out of office, Kissinger shifted yet again, criticizing key planks of his own détente policy, such as strategic arms limitation, which his successors pursued in much the same way that he had done. He became a staunch supporter of Ronald Reagan and spoke at the 1980 Republican Convention. By the publication of 1999’s Years of Renewal, the final volume of his memoirs, Kissinger had reinvented himself as a statesman grappling not only with the Cold War, but with the ‘overture to … the “new world order”’, including ethnic strife, the Middle East and human rights during the Ford administration.(4) After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he became a strong supporter of the Global War on Terror. As that crusade ran into the ground and new centres of power appeared to be on the rise, the familiar practitioner of pragmatic great power politics has re-emerged in On China and World Order. To borrow Grandin’s metaphor, a shadow is strongest when it is cast in one direction. With light shining on him from so many different positions, the multiple shadows cast by Kissinger have become diluted to the extent that it is difficult to know where his legacy truly lies.

What drove this series of changes in Kissinger’s position? It is hard to escape the conclusion that a continuing desire to be readmitted to the heart of government lay at the root of many of them, even to the point of making his peace with his erstwhile neoconservative antagonists. Despite a highly successful business career – itself somewhat of a template for many of his successors – Kissinger has never been invited back into the inner circle of decision-making, relegated to a chairman of commissions, covert and overt advisor to multiple administrations.

Perhaps ironically for a book that has made the case for Kissinger’s influential legacy in shaping American foreign relations, Grandin probably comes closest to the truth in his conclusion, in which he quotes Hannah Arendt on the officers of the British Empire:

… once he has entered the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion, he will, as it were, cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process, identify himself with anonymous forces that he is supposed to serve in order to keep the whole process in motion; he will think of himself as mere function, and eventually consider such functionality, such an incarnation of the dynamic trend, his highest achievement (p. 229).

Concluding that Kissinger has identified himself with the process of exercising power at the expense of a consistent position should give little comfort to those worried about the way policy is formulated in Washington. What does it say about the national security debate in the United States if even one of its most important contributors has spent much of his career shifting with its prevailing trends? Placing Kissinger in this context makes one question exactly who or what drives US foreign policy as it barrels along, further into the 21st century.

Again, these questions should not detract from what is a highly ambitious, very stimulating and extremely readable work. Grandin has done a great service by raising these broader issues through his attempt to come to a cohesive view of Kissinger’s life across the seven decades of his career as a major figure in American foreign policy. While this reviewer may differ on the interpretation, Grandin’s book should help to reignite an important debate on Kissinger’s legacy and the questions it raises for US national security policy today.

Notes

  1. Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (3rd edition, Basingstoke, 2003), p. 324.Back to (1)
  2. Ibid, p. 324.Back to (2)
  3. Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York, NY, 1999), pp. 106–9.Back to (3)
  4. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, 14.Back to (4)
June 2016

The Life and Death of Henry Kissinger

The most powerful U.S. secretary of state of the postwar era, who was both celebrated and reviled for his role in global politics, died at age 100.

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