Opinion
By Dr. Bisi Olawunmi
WITH the death of Dr. Henry Kissinger , America’s former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, on Wednesday, November 29, 2023, it was sun-down on the life and times of a colossus of American diplomacy . He was aged 100. Longevity runs in his family – his father, Louis Kissinger, a school teacher, died at 95; mother, Paula, a homemaker, died at 97 while younger brother, Walter, a businessman, also died at 97 in 2021. It was fitting that the most prominent Kissinger attained the most prominent age of 100, making him a centenarian ! Figure 3 has magical resonance in Kissinger’s life – he was born a German-Jew in Furth, Germany in 1923 ( May 27 ) and died in 2023. In between, he attained two milestones : American citizenship in 1943 and was appointed U.S. Secretary of State in 1973.
Dr. Kissinger, canonized in the media as ‘ Henry , The k’, and invested with charisma, bestrode the global diplomatic arena with pomp and pageantry in the 1970s when he served as Secretary of State to two American presidents. He was appointed by President Richard Nixon in 1973 and retained ( 1974-77 ) by President Gerald Ford who succeeded to the Presidency when Nixon was forced to resign his office in 1974 over the Watergate scandal. Nixon had appointed him National Security Adviser in January 1969 , a position he combined with that of Secretary of State, giving him dominance of American foreign policy. On 7 October 1973, less than three weeks after his appointment as Secretary of State, war broke out in the Middle East between Israel and her Arab neighbours, known as the Yom Kippur war. Israel was about to be overwhelmed by the Arab forces in the surprise attack, when America, led by a gung-ho Kissinger , came to Israel’s rescue, handing the Jewish nation an eventual, outstanding victory.. His Jewish nativity at play ? That war consolidated Israeli military superiority in the Middle East and launched Kissinger’s global visibility as he engaged in frenetic diplomatic shuttles among the various capitals of the warring nations – Cairo, (Egypt) ; Tel Aviv, (Israel); Aman ( Jordan) and Damascus, (Syria) – to broker ceasefire in the fighting and eventual restoration of peace. He was dubbed the father of Shuttle Diplomacy.
In physical appearance, a pudgy Kissinger with his guttural Bavarian German accent lacks personal charisma and mesmerizing speech. But that was no hindrance to American mainstream media – they simply went ahead to create a public persona of flamboyance , swagger and diplomatic wheeler-dealer for him and it stuck. He assumed the role with aplomb, making touchdowns in world’s trouble spots with a pool of a doting press in tow !!
Kissinger had also been pivotal in driving President Nixon’s doctrines of rapprochement with China and détente with the Soviet Union to ease the tensions of the Cold War, reduce the arms race and promote global economy with the United States in the saddle. In the course of negotiations leading to summit meetings between President Nixon and the leaders of Soviet Union and China, Kissinger had to make several trips to Moscow and Beijing, making such trips into media events with adulatory reporting of his diplomatic skills and reinforcement of his super diplomat aura. Détente and rapprochement were long term strategic plans of Nixon to seduce Soviet Union and China into a fatal embrace with the U.S., intended to lead to the unraveling and eventual collapse of the two countries. The Soviet Union suffered that fate with its collapse and dissolution into several countries while China emerged stronger from the embrace, to the consternation of America !! The ultimate goal for President Nixon and Kissinger was the emergence of America as the world’s Sole Superpower, not an altruistic world peace. In all of these, Kissinger became larger than life , virtually consumed about projecting the Kissinger Brand. In his heydays, he was projected as a diplomatic legend.
However, Kissinger’s media projection as a can-do, avuncular, glamour diplomat masks his hard line, dogmatic ruthlessness as a doctrinaire warrior, for whom lives – thousands of lives – are expendable. For President Nixon and Kissinger, justice and morality count for nothing in foreign policy and international power play. Addressing the press at his inauguration as Secretary of State on September 22, 1973, Kissinger had sold the media a dummy by claiming that America’s foreign policy commitment , under his watch, would be to ‘’ a world based not upon strength but upon justice’’. He had, however, been reminded by President Nixon, in a phone call the following day, of their mutual position on international power relations : ‘’ This idealism (justice) in policy is good. (But) You and I know, Henry, that a lot of that is malarkey’’. Malarkey is ‘nonsense; meaningless talk’ as defined by Oxford American dictionary. So, American foreign policy, under Nixon and Kissinger, made nonsense of justice and morality as war hawks went on a global rampage of destabilising democratically elected governments, considered not kowtowing to American dictates, while supportive of dictatorships which are deemed friendly.
Three instances will avail us here. In Chile, after the failure of its financially mobilized political parties to defeat Salvador Allende in the 1970 elections, Kissinger , with CIA backing, continued support for destabilization of the democratically elected government of President Allende because of his Marxist ideology. Allende was found dead after coupists’ bombing of the Presidential Palace on September 11, 1973. Ironically, years later , September 11, ( 9/11 ) was to become a day of horror for America when thousands were killed as terrorists plane-bombed the Twin Towers in New York and attempted crashing into The Pentagon, the U.S. Defense Ministry, in Washington D.C. Kissinger became an apologist for the more brutal Chilean military junta of Gen. Augusto Pinochet under whose regime thousands were killed or disappeared. When the military junta’s move against the anti-Allende opposition democratic parties which had encouraged the coup and started detention of civilians in their thousands became ‘’ a source of much anguish’’ ( Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, page 411) to many Americans, Kissinger dismissed such emotion as resulting from memory loss about Allende’s many anti-American policies and actions !
In Cambodia, when the U.S.-supported regime that deposed Prince Norodom Sihanouk could not contain the Communist insurgents, the Khmer Rouge, backed by North Vietnam ( Viet Cong ), America extended the Vietnam war to Cambodia . It engaged in carpet-bombings of what it described as Viet Cong ‘’sanctuaries ‘’ inside Cambodia leading to thousands of Cambodian casualties, a development that drew public outrage in the U.S. and for Congress to pass a law stopping the bombings. Kissinger was not moved by the casualties , but was rather miffed by the action of Congress . He had fumed : ‘’Everything is just going to come apart in Cambodia if we stop bombings’’, in defence of continued bombings. The incident remains one of the major black spots in Kissinger’s career.
Vietnam was America’s most horrific foreign policy engagement and ultimate disaster – both for American servicemen and American tax payers who funded the war bill and the Vietnamese people whom the Yankees sucked into their ideological war with Communism. In three decades ( 1950 – 1975 ) of war in Vietnam, America lost 58,220 military personnel, more than 150,000 were wounded, with 21,000 of them permanently disabled , while the total cost of the war was put at $352 billion . In spite of these sacrifices in men and material, a humiliated super power had to cut and run like scared crows, in chaotic evacuation of the embassy staff, other Americans and South Vietnamese support staff when the Viet Cong swept into Saigon, capital of South Vietnam, on April 30, 1975, effectively ending America’s military misadventure in Vietnam. Predictably, Kissinger laid the blame on the U.S. Congress that rejected a $300 million in military aid package for South Vietnam to stem the tidal wave of the Viet Cong southwards. The Vietnamese , in North and South, suffered an estimated 1.1 million dead.
It is a measure Kissinger’s vanity that he gleefully accepted the award of the 1973 Noble Peace Prize, announced by the Nobel Committee on October 16, 1973 for the jointly negotiated Paris Peace Agreement with North Vietnamese delegate,
Le Duc Tho, signed on January 27 of that year but which had not brought North and South Vietnam closer to peace as at the time of the Nobel award. Tho had prudently rejected the award, citing violations of the Peace Agreement. When U.S-supported South Vietnam was overrun by the Communist North Vietnam on April 30, 1975, an apparently humbled Kissinger offered to return the Peace Prize and the cash award, both of were rejected by the Nobel Committee.
A major lesson to learn from Dr. Henry Kissinger’s global engagements is that foreign policy goals are better achieved when the back-up diplomacy is intellectually driven, as in the cases of rapprochement with China and détente with the Soviet Union that eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet communist behemoth, without firing a shot. On the contrary, when America as a global power, allows its foreign policy to be driven by power drunkenness and the illusion of its invincibility , then the outcome is disaster, as witnessed in Vietnam , and repeated recently in Afghanistan where it lost the war to the Taliban and had to exit Kabul in chaotic circumstances.
These failed foreign forays project the all powerful America, according to a Yoruba saying , as ‘’ alagbara ma me ro, baba ole ‘’ – a powerful man who rushes into a fight without exercising discretion ending up in defeat by a less powerful but discerning opponent.
Going forward, America must heed the advisory in the title of former President Nixon’s second book, post Vietnam defeat : ‘ No More Vietnams ‘. (1985). Apparently, Nixon wrote with the benefit of hindsight !!! But are the successors in The White House listening ?
Dr. Bisi OLAWUNMI, Senior Lecturer, Department of Mass Communication, Adeleke University, Ede. Osun State, is a former Washington Correspondent of the News Agency of Nigeria. Email : bisi.olawunmi@adelekeuniversity.edu.ng PHONE ( SMS ONLY ) 0803 364 7571.
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-December 19, 2023 @ 05:12 GMT|
Tags: Dr. Henry Kissinger Dr. Bisi OLAWUNMI
