The Infernal Triangle: Kissinger Revisited

Last year, upon agreeing to do this column, I started saving string for the year ahead—for instance, drafting out an obituary of Henry Kissinger, just like the newspaper guys do when a public figure starts showing decrepitude. This past November 29, the Grim Reaper took that project off my plate.

I’ve decided to return to it.

Some of the Kissinger obits were scathing, others obsequious. But with only one partial exception, none scooped what I wanted to say, and the most important thing to know about the man: that his every major geostrategic initiative was a failure on his own terms, each failure seeding a separate epochal ordeal for American foreign policy, lasting us into the present.

Take the Iranian Revolution. The revolutionaries, shrewd political semioticians, pursued it by borrowing an Islamic custom: mourning periods lasting 40 days. Every 40 days following September 8, 1978, they would stage a violent uprising, weaponizing the memories of the massacre that September day of dozens of protesters in Jaleh Square in Tehran, supervised directly by the Shah, sitting up above in a helicopter. By the fourth 40-day marker, the revolutionaries had won.

February 17 marked 80 days since Henry’s passing. Call this essay a memorial to that.

The Shah’s rule, you’ll surely know, was a joint British-American creation brought into being in a 1953 coup staged by the CIA. Iran was a key American client state in the Cold War because of its roughly 1,000-mile border with the Soviet Union, soon dotted with American radar and signal-monitoring devices. Some 19 years later, the commitment of hundreds of thousands of American troops to Vietnam had proved a debacle the American people would not allow to be repeated. So Nixon and Kissinger decided to shower proxies with weapons and cash, to do the work of checking the Reds on our behalf, instead. It was known as the “Nixon Doctrine”—more accurately, the Nixon-Kissinger Doctrine.

Iran was the keystone. The two men traveled there together in 1972, winning the Shah’s agreement to serve as America’s “protector” in the Persian Gulf—in exchange for all the American weapons he liked. Forthwith, the Shah “began spending money on U.S. armaments,” I wrote in Reaganland, “like a kid in a candy store.”

Except popular anger at an American puppet exploded in Iran. That brought ever greater repression. Leaders in both American political parties looked the other way. The dynamic reached an apotheosis with the toast President Jimmy Carter delivered on New Year’s Eve 1977 on a state visit to Tehran, in which he described Iran as “an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world.”

“Stability” is a key Kissingerian term of art. Mark it well as our story continues.

Jimmy Carter was the one left holding the Kissingerian bag, alas, when the Shah fell in February of 1979—and then, as you also surely know, when America was punished for its sins that November by militant students who held 52 American hostages for 444 days. One of the more astonishing things I learned researching Reaganland was that the hostage crisis was more Henry Kissinger’s fault than Jimmy Carter’s.

Kissinger had been leading a massive bipartisan pressure campaign to give the Shah refuge in the United States, ostensibly for the humanitarian reason of receiving medical treatment. (Experts judged he could have received adequate care where he was, in Mexico.) Carter thought that a crazy idea, barking to his national-security team, “Does somebody here have an answer as to what we do if the diplomats are taken hostage?”

They were silent.

“I gather not. On that day we will all sit here with long, drawn, white faces and realize we’ve been had.”

They had been had by Henry Kissinger. Us, too.

A brilliant book by Christian Caryl of The Washington Post argues convincingly that the Iranian Revolution, with its subsequent successful humiliation of the U.S. by taking hostages, was a global watershed, catalyzing (along with the mujahideen resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) the greatest step backward for world peace and stability in modern history: the rise of militant Islamism. September 11, ISIS, Iran’s current work spreading chaos-by-proxy across the Middle East—all of it Henry Kissinger’s fault, almost directly.

THE SECURITY ESTABLISHMENT, WITH KISSINGER IN THE LEAD, was so limited by their Cold War tunnel vision that the gathering storm of militant Islamism was completely ignored. It was an index of the awesome influence this ghoul retained among movers and shakers in both parties that his reputation survived that. Indeed, had he died in his sixties instead of his dotage, we would have seen almost all obsequious obits. They’d resemble the opening chapter of The Making of the President 1972, where one of the most obsequious elite agenda-setting political journalists of them all, Theodore White, wrote:

Nixon had come into office, said Kissinger, with that necessary new concept, which he, Kissinger, shared: “What the world needed was a self-regulating mechanism” … Not since I had talked with George Marshall long ago, and Dean Acheson during the dynamic days of American hegemony, had I heard the use of American power so carefully explained … We came off the beach after a three-mile walk, climbing up the eroded duneland, and Kissinger began to notice that people were waving at him … A middle-aged man with gray fuzz on his chest asked if he could shake Kissinger’s hand—he wanted to say simply he was grateful for peace. Kissinger became very boyish and shy … He had come to the United States a refugee … Under the GI Bill he had gone through Harvard, where he studied the structure of American power … and then he had helped a President use that power as well as it had ever been used in the world.

Bad timing. In The Atlantic, Gary Bass marked Kissinger’s passing by wondering “how many of his eulogists will grapple with his full record.” Bass listed a series of human rights horrors, from the carpet-bombing of Cambodia to Bangladesh, the subject of his own scouring study The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide. Except Bass was wrong: All these horrors were thoroughly rehearsed, for example in David Sanger’s New York Times obituary.

But still: nothing on the smoking ruins of his entire geostrategic project, as judged on its own terms.

“Stability”; the “self-regulating mechanism”: These were supposed to be the hallmarks of Kissinger’s diplomatic framework. By setting force against force, perfect equipoise could be achieved, controlled by us, simultaneously achieving America’s desired strategic aims. The opening to China, alongside simultaneous détente with the Soviet Union, was to be this model’s apotheosis. It was supposed to set off a rivalry in which China and the USSR raced to impress America by becoming the first to withdraw their sponsorship of the Communist belligerents in Vietnam, which would in turn allow America to settle the war on militarily favorable terms.

The plan had been gestating in Kissinger’s mind for a long time: “In a subtle triangle with Communist China and the Soviet Union,” as Kissinger wrote for his then-patron Nelson Rockefeller in 1968, “we can ultimately improve our relations with each, as we test the will for peace of both.”

Instead, America lost in Vietnam. Then, the entire region fell to nearly anarchic instability, a genocide and two regional wars within four short years.

Meanwhile, on the China side of the ledger, if you believe the entirety of the American foreign-policy establishment that economic rivalry with China is just about the most dangerous long-term challenge America now faces—well, maybe blame Henry for that, too.

Just like with the missed rise of militant Islamism, it owes to his incredible narrowness of vision: To Kissinger, economic considerations were a matter of complete indifference. Advisers would try to warn him of the danger of Arab nations using their control of petroleum reserves as a strategic weapon. He would grow downright hysterical: “Don’t talk to me about barrels of oil. They might as well [be] bottles of Coca-Cola.” Likewise, negotiating in China on the terms of America’s future relationship, he just skipped trade and commerce altogether: “The maximum amount of bilateral trade possible between us, even if we make great efforts, is infinitesimal in terms of our total economy.”

At the time, even New Yorker cartoonists knew enough to trump America’s wizard of geostrategy when it came to that. As one fat cat says to another in a 1972 doodle: “I’m as aware of the evils of Communism as anyone, but good God, when you think of eight hundred million Chinese in terms of franchises …”

When it comes to the Soviet Union, the very reason Kissinger believed America could afford to make concessions in arms talks was the determination that the Bolshevik foe had matured from a “revolutionary” to a “status quo” power. A double whammy of wrongness there. That meant, first, that Russia need no longer be seen as dangerously expansionist—a notion that rather came a cropper in 1979 when the USSR invaded Afghanistan. Second, that its internal politics and human rights record were irrelevant when it came to strategic terms, because the Soviet empire would always be there, and never, in the foreseeable future, could change.

Another great call. By the end of Kissinger’s tenure in government, a human rights revolution within the USSR was already sowing the seeds of its demise.

It caused quite a stir when Biden administration officials Jake Sullivan, Kissinger’s successor as national-security adviser, and Samantha Power, the USAID administrator, feted Kissinger at one in a series of 100th birthday parties. Also Hillary Clinton, a successor secretary of state, was buddies with him. One hopes this admiration from the Democratic foreign-policy elite does not owe to Kissinger’s remarkable ability to cause the deaths of millions without any visible remorse—statecraft being an ugly business and all. But really, beyond that, there’s just not all that much there to grab onto.