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Americans understand it far too well
to talk about it.”
America has never been short of
statesmen capable of communicating
their vision of the national interest to
the public. If Kissinger was a realist, it
was in this sense—of making the im-
age-management aspect of foreign pol-
icy a priority. Morgenthau, though also
fixated on the reputation of a state’s
power, believed that that reputation
could not diverge too much from a
state’s ability to exercise its power. If
the U.S. upset this delicate equilib-
rium, as he believed it was doing in
Vietnam, other states, more realist in
their assessment, would take advan-
tage. The best a realist could do was
adapt to situations, working toward a
narrowly defined national interest,
while other nations worked toward
theirs. Idealistic notions about the ad-
vancement of humanity had no place
in his scheme. For Morgenthau, Gewen
writes, “war was not inevitable in in-
ternational affairs,” but “the prepara-
tion for war was.” Wars waged by re-
alists would be less destructive than
ones waged by idealists who believed
themselves to be fighting for univer-
sal peace.
Morgenthau was disappointed
when Kissinger defended the Viet-
nam War in public, despite having
privately admitted to him that the U.S.
could not win. It took Kissinger’s close
contemporary the political theorist
Sheldon Wolin—another son of Jew-
ish émigrés who fought in the war
and studied at Harvard with William
Yandell Elliott—to fully dissect Kis-
singer’s careerist instincts. On the sur-
face, Wolin observed, Kissinger would
have appeared a mismatch for the anti-
élitist Nixon. But the pairing was per-
fect: Nixon needed someone who could
elevate his opportunism to a higher
plane of purpose and make him feel
like a great figure in the drama of his-
tory. As Wolin wrote, “What could
have been more comforting to that
barren and inarticulate soul than to
hear the authoritative voice of Dr. Kis-
singer, who spoke so often and know-
ingly about the ‘meaning of history.’”
Later, Kissinger liked to mention his
qualms about taking the job with
Nixon: he’d been so successful at mo-
bilizing his academic pedigree in
Washington that he might well have
been appointed to the same position
even if the Democratic candidate, Hu-
bert Humphrey, had become Presi-
dent instead.A
s early as 1965, on his first visit to
Vietnam, Kissinger had concluded
that the war there was a lost cause,
and Nixon believed the same. Yet they
conspired to prolong it even before
reaching the White House. During
the Paris peace talks, in 1968, Kissin-ger, who was there as a consultant,
passed information about the negoti-
ations to the Nixon campaign, which
started to fear that Johnson’s progress
toward a settlement would bring the
Democrats electoral victory. Nixon’s
campaign then used this information
in private talks with the South Viet-
namese to dissuade them from taking
part in the talks.
Having won the election promis-
ing “an honorable end to the war,”
Nixon wanted to appear to be in pur-
suit of peace while still inflicting
enough damage on North Vietnam
to achieve concessions. In March, 1969,
he and Kissinger began a secret bomb-
ing campaign in Cambodia, which
was a staging ground for the Vietcong
and the North Vietnamese. In four
years, the U.S. military dropped more
bombs on Cambodia than it had in
the entire Pacific theatre during the
Second World War. The campaign
killed an estimated hundred thousand
civilians, hastened the rise of Pol Pot,
and irrevocably ravaged large tracts of
countryside. It also fell so far short
of its strategic aims that more than
one historian has wondered whether
Kissinger—who personally tweaked
the schedules of the bombing runs
and the allocation of planes—had some
other motive. But, as Grandin writes,
“he had built his own perpetual mo-
tion machine; the purpose of Amer-
ican power was to create an awareness
of American purpose.”
Gewen occasionally defends Kis-
singer’s record more strenuously than
Kissinger himself has done. He argues
that the claims about the need to main-
tain “credibility” were rooted in legit-
imate concerns about securing a U.S.-
led global order. But, as Morgenthau
saw, Kissinger’s argument rested on a
disastrous miscalculation of America’s
capacities. How would the credibility
of the United States be enhanced by
dragging out a war against a fourth-
rate power? How, to paraphrase John
Kerry, do you ask thirty thousand Amer-
ican soldiers to die so that the thirty
thousand soldiers before them will not
have died in vain?
As it was, each successive Ameri-
can initiative eroded credibility rather
than reinforced it. Not even the Christ-
mas bombing of North Vietnam, in“Someday all this could be yours.”