64 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
eyes. “I don’t see why we have to stand
by and watch a country go Commu-
nist because of the irresponsibility of
its own people,” Kissinger observed.
Gewen thinks this quip captures the
tragic dilemma of Kissinger’s relation-
ship to democracy and power. “The
statement looks a lot different if one
has the rise of Adolf Hitler in mind,”
Gewen writes, and suggests that so-
cialist Chile should be grouped with
the Weimar Republic as examples of
a people voting themselves out of a
democracy. Gewen lists the sins and
foibles of Allende—including “perni-
cious” wage increases for workers and
indoctrinating the young in the “val-
ues of socialist humanism”—but with-
holds such scrutiny from his successor,
the right-wing dictator General Au-
gusto Pinochet, whose power the U.S.
helped consolidate, and who, if one
has the rise of Hitler in mind, seems
rather more germane.
Similarly questionable is Gewen’s
assertion that “what cannot be dis-
missed is the Nixon/Kissinger worry
that Chile under Allende was a paving
stone on the road to Soviet hegemony.”
In fact, the Soviet Union had scaled
back its rivalry with the U.S. in the de-
veloping world, where countering China
now diluted its resources. The Cuban
missile crisis, in 1962, and a failed at-
tempt to establish a submarine base in
Cuba, eight years later, had soured any
hope for developing a true proxy state
in Latin America. The Kremlin lead-
ership was reluctant to increase the pit-
tance it sent to Chile, knowing that
Allende would spend it on badly needed
American imports.
If Allende did represent a threat, it
was almost certainly less to do with
any Soviet ambitions than with his
own powerful arguments for a global
distribution of resources far beyond
anything that Washington was pre-
pared to countenance. Unlike Mor-
genthau and Kennan, who saw the
non-industrial world as a backwater
not worth America’s attention, Kis-
singer considered Third World social-
ism a serious foe, capable of disturb-
ing the U.S.’s delicate face-off with
the Soviet Union. He and Nixon as-
sumed, correctly, that they could back
a coup against Allende with minimal
fuss, just as Eisenhower, two decades
before, had rid Guatemala of its dem-
ocratically elected President, Jacobo
Árbenz. Still, the spectacle of Allen-
de’s removal had one unintended con-
sequence: it lit the wick of one of Kis-
singer’s most durable annoyances, the
global human-rights movement.I
n 1972, when the Italian journalist
Oriana Fallaci asked Kissinger to ex-
plain his popularity, he said, “The main
point arises from the fact that I’ve al-
ways acted alone.” Critics and defend-
ers alike tend to accept this self-assess-
ment, but his record shows a more
mundane figure who assimilated pre-
vailing foreign-policy assumptions. His
most controversial moves have clear
precursors. President Johnson had se-
cretly bombed Cambodia, too, and, in
1965, he condoned Suharto’s genocide
in Indonesia, which in scale outstripped
the one Kissinger approved in East
Timor. The U.S.-backed interventions
prefiguring Allende’s removal include
dozens in Latin America and the Ca-
ribbean alone.
Since leaving office, too, Kissinger
has rarely challenged consensus, let
alone offered the kind of inconvenient
assessments that characterized the later
career of George Kennan, who warned
President Clinton against NATO ex-
pansion after the Soviet Union’s col-
lapse. It is instructive to measure Kis-
singer’s instincts against those of a true
realist, such as the University of Chi-
cago political scientist John Mear-
sheimer. As the Cold War ended,
Mearsheimer was so committed to the
“balance of power” principle that he
made the striking suggestion of allow-
ing nuclear proliferation in a unified
Germany and throughout Eastern Eu-
rope. Kissinger, unable to see beyond
the horizon of the Cold War, could
not imagine any other purpose for
American power than the pursuit of
global supremacy.
Although he has criticized the
interventionism of neoconservatives,
there is scarcely a U.S. military ad-
venture, from Panama to Iraq, that
has not met with his approval. In all
his meditations on world order, he
has not thought about how contin-
gent and unforeseen America’s rise as
global superpower actually was. Noth-
ing in the country’s republican tradi-tion prior to the Second World War
demanded it.
Although Kissinger may not have
originated the precepts for which he
is best known, it is hard to find discus-
sions of them that don’t refer to his
career. As Grandin has pointed out,
Vice-President Dick Cheney’s one-
per-cent doctrine—the idea that a state
has to act against enemies if there’s
even the merest chance that they can
harm it—is thoroughly Kissingerian,
and when Karl Rove reputedly said,
“We create our own reality,” he was
echoing words of Kissinger’s from forty
years before. In 2010, the Obama Ad-
ministration’s lawyers used the prece-
dent of Nixon and Kissinger’s incur-
sions into Cambodia as part of their
argument to establish the legal basis
for drone killings of American terror-
ist suspects who were outside the bat-
tlefield of Afghanistan. A Justice De-
partment memo argued that military
action in places like Yemen was justified
when recognized threats had already
spread there. The Trump Administra-
tion’s recent assassination of the Ira-
nian commander Qassem Suleimani,
apparently intended to terrify the Ira-
nians into ceasing Middle East oper-
ations, conforms to Kissinger’s obses-
sion with “credibility.”
“Historians could learn a great deal
about the years after World War II
simply by studying the vicissitudes of
Kissinger’s celebrity,” Gewen hazards
toward the end of his book. One could
go further: the main display of Kissin-
ger’s “realism” was in the management
of his own fame, his transformation
of a conventional performance into a
symbol of diplomatic virtuosity. It can
sometimes seem as if there has been
an unconscious compact between Kis-
singer and many of his detractors. If
all the sins of the U.S. security state
can be loaded onto one man, all par-
ties get what they need: Kissinger’s sta-
tus as a world-historic figure is assured,
and his critics can regard his foreign
policy as the exception rather than the
rule. It would be comforting to believe
that American liberals are capable of
seeing that politics is more than a mat-
ter of personal style, and that the rec-
ord will prevail, but the enduring cult
of Kissinger points to a less palatable
possibility: Kissinger is us.