Kissinger Contrasts Today’s World Affairs With the World on His Watch

Sitting in his 26th-floor Park Avenue office, Henry Kissinger looks out at a world drastically different from the one he shaped as America’s top diplomat.

“There is no recollection of what the Cold War was like,” Kissinger said. “I keep hearing about how tough foreign policy is now, but [in 1969] we had a thermonuclear adversary with 15,000 nuclear weapons. When we came into office--the administration under which I served--there were 400 dead a week” in Vietnam. “Now when we have one dead, or there is one prisoner taken, we have a national emotional breakdown.”

Whether it is U.S. relations with China and Russia, the peace process in the Middle East, ethnic conflict in Africa and southeastern Europe, or human rights abuses in Chile, Kissinger had a hand in all of it a quarter-century ago.

In his third and final volume of memoirs, “Years of Renewal,” Kissinger aims to remind the world of the role he played in 1973-76 as secretary of state for presidents Nixon and Ford and of the context in which he made decisions that still reverberate today.

Where U.S. policy was successful, Kissinger gives credit to Ford and himself. Where it failed, he blames the Democrat-controlled Congress or other outside forces.

In the book, Kissinger candidly assesses world leaders--Nixon (flawed), Ford (authentic), Mao Tse-tung (determined), Leonid Brezhnev (envious), Yitzhak Rabin (wise), Augusto Pinochet (necessary), Mobutu Sese Seko (ostentatious).

And he gives an insider’s view of detente with Russia, expanded relations with China, shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, the division of Cyprus and civil war in Angola.

Many of these issues remain major challenges for President Clinton and his administration.

The question of relations with China has been heated up by claims that its agents stole U.S. nuclear secrets, but China is now a major American trading partner. Such things must be kept in perspective, Kissinger said.

“When you are the world’s most advanced technologically, you are expected to be spied on,” he said. “The fundamental issue, whether we want to stop China from becoming a strong power, we don’t admit to ourselves. On this we need to debate, because if we go down that road, you are in an endless confrontation.”

On Chile, Kissinger denies allegations that the United States was behind Pinochet’s 1973 coup and says that although he welcomed the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s Marxist government, he told Pinochet the general’s record on human rights complicated relations with the United States.

Kissinger declined to comment on Spain’s criminal torture charges against the former Chilean dictator, who is currently under arrest in London fighting extradition.

“But I do think the procedure, where a magistrate in one country--where the alleged crimes did not occur--can issue an arrest warrant for a former leader of a country elsewhere and that they then become criminalized through the extradition procedure, is extremely dangerous,” Kissinger said.

“No senior American official would be safe if this became an accepted practice, because anybody can be accused of something.”

Nixon first appointed Kissinger to be his national security advisor in 1969 and then promoted him to secretary of state in September 1973. Kissinger remained in that post after Nixon resigned and served under Ford until President Carter took office in January 1977.

A refugee from Nazi Germany, Kissinger taught political science and international affairs at Harvard before entering public life and now runs an international consulting firm, Kissinger Associates.

The bookshelves in his office sag under the weight of thick autobiographies, many written by his contemporaries. Kissinger himself has been prolific; his two previous 1,000-page memoirs, “The White House Years” and “Years of Upheaval,” put his combined autobiography at more than 3,000 pages, or more than a page for every day in office.

He still carefully observes U.S. foreign policy and sees some parallels between the Vietnam War and the Kosovo crisis.

“The similarity is in the sense that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations went into Vietnam thinking that they could win with technological superiority, not assessing the element of endurance, and this is clearly true in Kosovo and the Balkans,” he said.

“If you use military force and you are not willing to suffer casualties, then you get into the dilemma we are now in in Kosovo,” he added. “And when the only way to win is to make the population of the adversary suffer for it, that is a strange definition of morality and of humanity.”

Kissinger said U.S. presidents must always remain focused on what is in the national interest, something he contends Nixon understood and Clinton does not.

“I do not accept this concept of humanitarian foreign policy. In specific, horrible cases like [the 1994 genocide in] Rwanda, I could say that the conscience of mankind is so offended that one really cannot be in a world where that happens,” he said. “In Kosovo, I believe we could have prevented the worst of ethnic cleansing by diplomacy, and I think we started down this path at least prematurely.”

Famous for improving relations with Russia, Kissinger said there is a danger in today’s Russia of communists and nationalists joining forces to oppose the United States.

“I think the war in Kosovo contributes to this, because it has created a public reaction [in Russia] that everyone agrees goes far beyond the Moscow elite,” he said. “So I think there is a danger of something similar to National Socialism in Germany, which is what the Nazis were.”