Kissinger, China, Cambodia, and morality

There is a certain symbolism in the fact that Henry Kissinger, the man whose career helped shape so many events in the 20th century, lived to be exactly a century old.

Few public figures have been so polarizing. He has been hailed as a wise elder statesman and reviled as a war criminal. While he did not coin the word “realpolitik” — politics based on pragmatism and not ideology or morality — he was seen as one of its chief practitioners. What his realpolitik accomplished is a question on which the jury may never deliver a unanimous verdict.

As national security adviser and secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, Kissinger found himself at the center of international crises that rocked the world. Those who see him as a villain point to his collusion with brutal anti-communist dictatorships in Chile and Argentina that he saw as resisting Soviet expansion, as well as his role in the secret carpet bombing of Cambodia which resulted in the deaths of as many 150,000 civilians Those who see him as a wise man point to his role in the normalization of relations with the Soviet Union and, especially, with China. Kissinger’s anticommunism was pragmatic when necessary.

Some anti-Kissinger rhetoric on the left has been hyperbolic, sometimes seeming to blame his Cambodia policies for the Khmer Rouge atrocities more than the Khmer Rouge themselves. But American involvement with anti-communist dictatorships in Central and South America probably did hurt the anti-communist cause by linking it to regimes that engaged in horrific reprisals against political opponents.

Kissinger’s “pragmatic” overtures to China and the USSR, often praised even by those who otherwise vilify him, may have been no less morally compromised. Detente with the USSR did little to stop Soviet expansionism and finally crashed against the invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979. In the 1980s, it was Ronald Reagan’s seemingly more…