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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27454 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Henry Kissinger died today. I knew he was a popular punching bag for the left, but seeing the barrage of over-the-top reactions gives me the feeling that I’m missing something. My impression is that Kissinger was a brilliant diplomat who laid the foundation for total American victory in the Cold War. Even if you’re a bleeding-heart internationalist who thinks he’s bad for killing foreigners in Indochina, his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed. What is the steelman “Kissinger is evil” position? What am I missing?

Nothing about Kissinger was particularly impressive apart from his longevity and his post-tenure PR team. He's galactically overestimated by both his proponents and his critics. He just didn't do that much that any other normal StateSec wouldn't have done.

A lot of these comments in trying to steelman "Kissinger is Evil" are focusing on the question "Should Kissinger be hated?" I'm going to focus on what I think is your real question, the much more circumstantial "Why is Kissinger hated so much more aggressively than other ghouls and swamp creatures like a Donald Rumsfeld or a Paul Wolfowitz?" To answer this I'm going to tell a couple of personal stories, passed down to me by my elders, because hatred of Kissinger among people under 50 is largely a meme passed down to us by leftist elders.

My father was raised in a deeply conservative christian community that was religiously anti-war. So while he was far from a hippy, he was against the war in Vietnam and avoided the draft. His best friend from high school joined the marines, went to Vietnam, served for years in multiple tours in combat, received a pile of medals. His friend was back in town on leave and crashed at my dad's place, he had changed from high school, told my dad that he just liked killing at this point, that he and his squadmates would shoot children and try to stand them up with machine gun fire, that they had burned villages full of women and children, that if they ended the war there was no chance he'd come back to the USA and get a factory job he'd go fight wherever anyone would hire him. He went back to Vietnam, and was one of the very last US soldiers killed, in the last months before US forces were pulled out.

What I think examining Kissinger's record on the merits ignores is a lot of context:

-- Kissinger had an outsized personality, known to cavort with blondes and flirt with women, he appeared in the news constantly, was a "public intellectual." He had much more of a public presence than, say, Blinken or Kerry. He was identified with the era's policies in a way that other SoS's weren't. His book Diplomacy is magisterial, a masterwork, but it is also massively self-glorifying, he ranks himself next to Metternich and Bismarck, and this self-perception oozes from every speech he ever gave.

-- The war in Vietnam was the defining trauma for a generation. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were killed, crippled, or traumatized and their families' lives were derailed by the war. Hundreds of thousands more were arrested, prosecuted, fled the country, or restructured their lives to oppose the war or to avoid the draft. Cultural conflict over the war was brutal, so much more brutal than anything we see today. There really were thousands of Americans, marching in the streets, chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh is gonna win!" And then, worse, it turned out the obnoxious unpatriotic faggots chanting for the VC were right, Ho Chi Minh did win. It tore America apart from 1965-1975.

-- Following the Watergate scandal, the Nixon administration was dragged into the public view in Congress. Every aspect of the operation of the administration was questioned on the news. Conveniently, Nixon had hidden voice-activated microphones in the oval office, and hours upon hours of recordings were made public. People heard how Kissinger really talked, how sanguine he was about what he was doing. The people heard how the sausage was made, and the very worst grinder was Kissinger. Neither Kissinger, nor Nixon, believed the war was winnable when they took office in 1969. Kissinger, and Nixon, were publicly exposed as absolutely believing that every bombing and every troop surge and every expansion of the war to a neighboring neutral country was not for the purpose of "saving" South Vietnam but for the purpose of putting on a diplomatic front, of showing "the world" that the USA was tough. Every kid that died in Vietnam after Nixon and Kissinger took office, like my dad's best friend, died for his country only in the most attenuated sense. Kissinger was the reason that thousands of American boys died, or were crippled, or had their souls ripped apart killing innocent Cambodians, for nothing. It was one thing to suspect that the American government was throwing lives away over nothing, or to think that they were extremist but mistaken true believers, it was quite another to hear Kissinger state frankly that Americans were dying for some vague concept of "Credibility."

-- This loss of innocence was part of the Vietnam experience for America, and that was pinned on Nixon and Kissinger. After Watergate, Nixon was in permanent exile, removed from public office, public intellectual life, public view. Kissinger hung around, advising, teaching, lecturing, consulting. So Nixon-Kissinger's mutual crimes were easy to pin on the still-present Kissinger. He never got any comeuppance, never got any public shaming. He was never punished, and the rage only grew.

TLDR: It's the combination of his crimes and his public visibility that made him a villain, and the very clear evidence of those crimes convicted him. That villainy is compounded to make him the primary bad guy behind everything the CIA every did between 1950 and last week.

One of my scoutmasters was an old timer, a Vietnam veteran who came home and became a hippie and bought a VW Minibus and lived out of it. Whenever we did the classic skit "A politician, a priest, and a boyscout are on a crashing plane," he would have us change the "politician" to "Secretary of State Henry Kissinger." The kids didn't get it, but the old scoutmasters laughed and laughed. For those unfamiliar the skit goes like this:

There's a small plane, represented by four dining hall chairs in a row. The pilot and three passengers, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, an elderly priest, and a boy scout. The pilot turns to the passengers and says "We've lost our engine. There's only three parachutes. Well, I've got a family, and I need to fill out the paperwork with the FAA, so I'm taking one parachute, good luck!" He takes a parachute, and jumps out of the plane. The remaining passengers look at each other. Henry Kissinger stands up and says "I'm the smartest man in the world, I'm vital to the operation of international diplomacy, I'm important to history, I'm taking one parachute." He takes a parachute and jumps. The priest turns to the boy scout and says, "Young man, I've lived a good life, a long life, you take the last parachute, I'll pray a rosary as I go down." The boy scout says "Don't worry padre, there's two parachutes left. Henry Kissinger took my backpack."

We always had a Boy Scout, the pope, and a greedy convenience store owner…

After Watergate, Nixon was in permanent exile, removed from public office, public intellectual life, public view. Kissinger hung around, advising, teaching, lecturing, consulting.

I think that's it. I wasn't old enough to know about Kissinger, and only had a very vague idea of Watergate and Nixon as it happened when I was a child.

But Nixon got punished, and vilified. Kissinger, who was a major part of the administration, skated. As you say: he continued going around as a public intellectual. He was still influential. He was respected (by some, and it's not a simple left-right split on that). So while a lot of guilty (or assumed guilty) parties even did jail time, Kissinger just kept on flying around the world, attending conferences, giving interviews, etc. without - seemingly - a shadow of care that he would ever be affected by any fallout.

But Nixon got punished, and vilified. Kissinger, who was a major part of the administration, skated.

Makes sense. Nixon was punished for Watergate and the subsequent coverup. I don't believe that Kissinger was implicated in Watergate at all.

I'm going to focus on what I think is your real question, the much more circumstantial "Why is Kissinger hated so much more aggressively than other ghouls and swamp creatures like a Donald Rumsfeld or a Paul Wolfowitz?"

I'm not sure even that's a necessary question: I'm pretty sure a lot of the progressive movement would like an advent calendar of all of the people they disagree with politically.

"Why is Kissinger hated so much more aggressively than other ghouls and swamp creatures like a Donald Rumsfeld or a Paul Wolfowitz?"

One reason might simply be that unlike Rummy and Wolfy, who have featured in the media fairly rarely after the Bush admin, Kissinger remained active as a writer and a visitor to various countries up until the very end. News stories of Kissinger visiting China or opining on whether US could have done something differently vis-a-vis Russia to avoid the Ukraine war etc. provided easy impetus for commenting "Why isn't this ghoul dead yet?" or running through the standard litany of complaints from the 70s.

There's a small plane, represented by four dining hall chairs in a row. The pilot and three passengers, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, an elderly priest, and a boy scout. The pilot turns to the passengers and says "We've lost our engine. There's only three parachutes. Well, I've got a family, and I need to fill out the paperwork with the FAA, so I'm taking one parachute, good luck!" He takes a parachute, and jumps out of the plane. The remaining passengers look at each other. Henry Kissinger stands up and says "I'm the smartest man in the world, I'm vital to the operation of international diplomacy, I'm important to history, I'm taking one parachute." He takes a parachute and jumps. The priest turns to the boy scout and says, "Young man, I've lived a good life, a long life, you take the last parachute, I'll pray a rosary as I go down." The boy scout says "Don't worry padre, there's two parachutes left. Henry Kissinger took my backpack."

I've recently considered out this old classic with Elon Musk as the jumper, Greta Thunberg as the schoolchild and pope Francis as the priest. You could even have the attending an environmental conference or whatever.

He is one of the people who pushed globohomo on the world. He was a key architect in creating a global order that is a giant airport terminal, bland, placeless, multicultural and generic with mass surveillance and shopping. The world order he pushed makes national sovereignty impossible as we are all subject to an imposed world order by the US. The US milks us by rigging trade and acting as a financial hub while barking orders at us and occasionally killing hundreds of thousands of people in a war of aggression and leaving us with the migrants.

The world order he pushed makes national sovereignty impossible as we are all subject to an imposed world order by the US.

American FoPo before the Kissinger era was much more self-conciously about America being the hegemon and not being able to tolerate rival power centers. Nixon and Kissinger were unique partially because they believed there not only could but should be multiple great powers.

The President is proceeding not only to establish a rapprochement with Peking but to work out specific accords with China's main adversary, the Soviet Union, and to encourage new trade with the restive Communist nations of Eastern Europe, all the while trying to stabilize a non‐Communist Government in South Vietnam. Without repudiating U.S. commitments, he hopes to avoid new ones. He keeps out of disputes whenever he can, wary of U.S. intervention in such explosive situations the India‐Pakistan conflict and the Middle East. In short, postwar U.S. foreign policy has been turned upside down...

His approach to world politics is to see a pattern of relationships involving five major power centers: the United States, Russia, China, Japan and, eventually, Western Europe (including Britain). In this pentagonal world each power center will be constrained by the others. The President first made this vision explicit last summer in Kansas City, when he explained the passing of the cold war. “Twenty‐five years ago,” he said, “we were No. 1 in the world militarily, with no one who even challenged us, because we had a monopoly of atomic weapons. Now, 25 years having passed we see five great economic superpowers: the United States, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, China and, of Japan"...

Nixon has articulated a concert of great powers that resembles in some respects the balance of power in Europe during much of the 19th century. “We must remember,” he has said, “the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been a balance of power. I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have strong, healthy United States. Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan — each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance.”

Don't forget printing megabucks as the US$ is reserve currency. That's an inflation tax on all other countries that need to use the petrodollar to trade. Must be nice.

his role in normalizing relations with China

I'm sort of confused about exactly what this means. I'll admit my knowledge of history for this era is very weak, but I'm still genuinely confused about this sort of statement.

Some assumptions I have:

  1. China had nukes
  2. "normalize" means to not be on a war footing against them, or maybe even be trading with them.
  3. China was poor
  4. China's military was unimpressive for offensive purposes, but defensively could bury an attacker in bodies
  5. China was mostly internationally isolated. They were just coming out of their shell. Russia was the main Empire force in Asia.

This leads me to believe that:

  1. No possible war between the US and China could ever be beneficial for either country. They'd nuke each other. If they didn't use nukes, either side would lose an offensive war and win a defensive war against the other one.
  2. China had lots to gain from trade with the US, because more wealth.
  3. The US had lots to gain from china, because raw resources and more consumers.
  4. China couldn't afford an empire back then.

Therefore it was in both countries best interest to have a "normalized" relationship. The fact that they didn't have a normalized relationship was probably a result of internal politics on the part of one or both countries. If it was internal politics, do you get to call yourself an impressive diplomat for getting two countries to not be dumb about their foreign policy towards each other? Maybe I am insufficiently cynical about the capabilities of state departments, but that seems like they were due for normalized relationships just due to changing circumstances.

No possible war between the US and China could ever be beneficial for either country.

"The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9,600,000 square kilometers. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system."

"If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist; in a number of years there would be 2,700 million people again and definitely more."

Both of those quotes are attributed to Mao Zedong. Yes, I firmly believe nuclear war was a tactic Mao would have implemented; this was a man whom had experienced WW2 through China's eyes, with all it's horrific casualties on the Chinese people.

There's a reason Nixon and Mao coming together to hash stuff out face to face was a huge deal. Don't fall into the historian trap of thinking that 'Great Men of History don't matter, greater factors come into play that determine how history plays out.'

There's also a number of nuclear history books that describe early meetings between US and Chinese military officers as very carefree and bombastic until, when wargaming, the Chinese side would give claims for how many casualties that they would proudly sacrifice in defense of their homeland, the US side would bring out then-classified nuclear calculators and give casualty estimates, and the difference between the first numbers and the second numbers would leave everyone at the table in very morbid moods.

I'm not sure how much I trust these claims -- China pledged to no-first-use in 1964, even if Americans (not unreasonably) believed the policy to have some flexibility, those early meetings necessary come from a tiny number of original sources who were more than a little biased.

I'd love a source for the wargaming story if you have one. I don't recall similar stories from my reading of nuclear history books.

From "Nuclear Warfare 101" by Stuart Slade:

Aha, I hear you say what about the mad dictator? Its interesting to note that mad, homicidal aggressive dictators tend to get very tame sane cautious ones as soon as they split atoms. Whatever their motivations and intents, the mechanics of how nuclear weapons work dictate that mad dictators become sane dictators very quickly. After all its not much fun dictating if one's country is a radioactive trash pile and you're one of the ashes. China, India and Pakistan are good examples. One of the best examples of this process at work is Mao Tse Tung. Throughout the 1950s he was extraordinarily bellicose and repeatedly tried to bully, cajole or trick Khruschev and his successors into initiating a nuclear exchange with the US on the grounds that world communism would rise from the ashes. Thats what Quemoy and Matsu were all about in the late 1950s. Then China got nuclear weapons. Have you noticed how reticent they are with them? Its sunk in. They can be totally destroyed; will be totally destroyed; in the event of an exchange. A Chinese Officer here once on exchange (billed as a "look what we can do" session it was really a "look what we can do to you" exercise) produced the standard line about how the Chinese could lose 500 million people in a nuclear war and keep going with the survivors. So his hosts got out a demographic map (one that shows population densities rather than topographical data) and got to work with pie-cutters using a few classified tricks - and got virtually the entire population of China using only a small proportion of the US arsenal. The guest stared at the map for a couple of minutes then went and tossed his cookies into the toilet bowl. The only people who mouth off about using nuclear weapons and threaten others with them are those that do not have keys hanging around their necks. The moment they get keys and realize what they've let themselves in for, they get to be very quiet and very cautious indeed.

An email exchange doesn't strike me as a great source for a claim like this. It would be fantastic if Stuart Slade was an army colonel who participated in this exchange, but I don't know who he is or why he should be an authority on this topic. The email is also written as a retelling of someone else's story rather than like a primary source.

Thanks. I could have sworn I'd seen a version of it in print, but the closest book I have on the material was Age of Radiance, and it's not in that book.

It's tempting to read this Mao quote as chest-beating propaganda, not real doctrine. Was there any evidence he intended to follow through?

He launched a skirmish with the Soviet Union (over a worthless island in a river), in 1969. Hundreds were killed. He was an incredible risk-taker.

These quotes were supposedly attributed asides to no-name ambassadors outside of the great powers of the time.

If he was trying to intimidate people, he picked the wrong targets to do so.

Mao saw combat during WW2 in China. I imagine he had a very different view of death and permissive causalities. While per capita China's deaths were not the worst, they were certainly up there. I don't think it's wise to underestimate just how this shaped his outlook.

To me it seems that the man who orchestrated the great leap forward, cultural revolution and pushed the Korean war to stalemate was not what one would consider a chest beater. He was committed and he had a very high tolerance towards Chinese casualties.

What I'm saying is, it would be prudent for Mao to say "eh the bomb is no big deal, they won't dare use it, and if they do they won't kill all of us and if they do then in any case socialism will win" whether it was true or not. That's what I mean by chest-beating.

To be fair he would also say stuff like this to his allies, in private. There was some transcript of a conference of socialist countries I think in the 50s where Mao is like "well, China will naturally be the leaders of the socialist revolution because we have so many people that we'll best survive the inevitable nuclear war," and all the other countries would be like "inevitable nuclear war? Come again?"

I was wondering if sun_the_second was referencing the old Mao story about Italians. I've seen it in a couple forms and I think the main source is Khruschev's memoirs.

Mao: In the worst case, half the people would die, but the other half would survive, and imperialism would be wiped off the face of the earth, and the whole world would become socialist.

Italian Communist: How many Italians will survive?

Mao: None at all. But why do you think Italians are so important to humanity?

That must have been what I was thinking of since it's from the 1957 Moscow Conference of Communist countries. I read it first in Julia Lovell's "Maoism: A Global History". I do remember it having a little more, or maybe just her having some specific commentary, but unfortunately I've only got the physical book and can't search through it.

"normalize" means to not be on a war footing against them, or maybe even be trading with them.

No, it means establishing diplomatic relations with them, and thereby recognizing them, not the regime in Taiwan, as the legitimate government of China.

And, it was a huge deal at the time. Kissinger and Nixon were named Time Magazine Men of the Year, and there is a reason that "Nixon to China" is a well-known figure of speech.

The normalization of US relationship with PRC had the extra hurdle of US having recognized the KMT government in Taiwan as the legit government before that.

Conspiracy theorists see him as a creepy technocratic-totalitarian new world order type. I'd have to look it up, but I seem to recall he was writing some pretty spicy books until quite recently.

Its pretty easy to hate Kissenger. He arranged wars that killed millions. Much harder to accept that he did what he did to avoid Soviet world domination, which would have been very very bad for humanity, and was very very close to happening.

I make no claim to speak for others, but amongst a lot of veterans and a lot of folks on the populist right Kissinger occupies a similar space in the zeitgeist as Macnamara. Somone whose decisions often made the situation worse, but who also gets a pass because he did so in a matter that flatters the egos of the chattering class. He's also viewed as the start of the US State Department's downward spiral, the man who tore down the institution that McClane and Hay had built and replaced it with the towering monument to incomitance that we have now.

I assume a typo in the last sentence?

Perhaps he was being poetic.

In addition to what @Skibboleth mentioned below Kissinger was also instrumental in US support for Pinochet's coup against Allende in Chile.

Even if you’re a bleeding-heart internationalist who thinks he’s bad for killing foreigners in Indochina, his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed.

I do not think people's unrelated good and bad acts somehow function to cancel each other out. Maybe if the evil things were in some way necessary to do the good things we can say the things were on net good but I don't think a case could be made that Kissinger's evils were actually necessary to accomplish his good deeds. You don't get, like, one free murder for every life you save. Or every thousand. Or every million. You get no free murders!

US support for Pinochet's coup against Allende in Chile.

So saving hundreds of thousands of Chileans from poverty?

I do not think people's unrelated good and bad acts somehow function to cancel each other out. Maybe if the evil things were in some way necessary to do the good things we can say the things were on net good but I don't think a case could be made that Kissinger's evils were actually necessary to accomplish his good deeds. You don't get, like, one free murder for every life you save. Or every thousand. Or every million. You get no free murders!

The dissolve all government and trust in the inherent goodness of anarchy, because otherwise that's exactly what you get if you accept the legitimacy of policy at scale.

Policy is about choices, including not making choices. People will die as a consequence of not only action, but also no action, and also regardless of action. There is no world where government action at scale doesn't negatively impact many people, there are only worlds where you don't mind the losers because you like the winning more. This is why 'good' and 'evil' policies are judged on more than just the presence of deaths.

This is where individual-level morality of individuals fails to be coherent at scale, because 'acts' and 'deeds' can be individual actions independent of eachother. You can conduct one with no need to conduct the other. But this isn't true at the policy level of not just national, but international level. The good and the bad are not independent of eachother, they are often outputs of the same sort of policies. To pick a mostly benevolently-seen example, the same 'let's save the environment' policies that push for electrical vehicles also drive mass strip mining and enable the geopolitical blackmail shenanigans of the resource-controllers that not only enable, but empower, abuse of people at regional scales. You don't actually have the policy finess to go 'I want the good stuff, but none of the bad,' particularly when inconsistent strategy can deliver worse of both. This is how Responsibility to Protect legal theories that won the public argument about western intervention in Libya led to... open-air slave markets in Libya.

When it comes to Kissinger's career, the evils and the goods both came from the same overarching Cold War policies of communist containment that led to the Soviet Union's defeat in the Cold War. Despite some nostalgic revisionism, there was nothing pre-ordained about the fall of the Soviet Union, or that it would occur in the way it did. The Soviety Union was not, in fact, too poor to keep itself together by force- it lacked the will, not the means, to maintain a nuclear-deterrence repression state. In so much that Kissinger's good deeds entailed the relatively peaceful dismantling of the Soviet Union, so did his bad crimes.

This is how Responsibility to Protect legal theories that won the public argument about western intervention in Libya led to... open-air slave markets in Libya.

But Kissinger just straightforwardly bombed and wrecked Cambodia. He created the conditions for Pol Pot to take power just as much as NATO created the conditions for open-air slave markets in Libya. He didn't even get the US much in the way of gains from that war - US credibility was greatly damaged. Vietnam was a huge disaster that could've been a moderate disaster if he'd shown a little more restraint. America losing a big Vietnam war as opposed to a small Vietnam war surely helped the Soviets in the Cold War.

If your thesis is that anti-communist containment was a global good that should be pursued despite a few megadeaths, then doing what he did in South East Asia was actually really bad since it hurt the anti-communist agenda, tarred it with the sting of defeat, led to the Ford/Carter years of pullback and consolidation.

But Kissinger just straightforwardly bombed and wrecked Cambodia.

There was considerably more to it than that, so this would be a reductionist rather than accurate summation of the reasons involved.

If your thesis is that anti-communist containment was a global good that should be pursued despite a few megadeaths,

That is not the thesis, no.

then doing what he did in South East Asia was actually really bad since it hurt the anti-communist agenda, tarred it with the sting of defeat, led to the Ford/Carter years of pullback and consolidation.

Pullback and consolidation is a considerable part of what Nixon-Kisenger were trying to do, seeking to create the conditions for, and saw as a key point in the anti-communist containment vis-a-vis a position of unsustainable overreach.

This is not the counter-argument you think it is.

There was considerably more to it than that, so this would be a reductionist rather than accurate summation of the reasons involved.

OK, so in pursuit of negotiating leverage over North Vietnam he oversaw the carpet-bombing and wrecking of Cambodia. Is that better?

Nixon and Kissinger sought, eventually and after much unnecessary bloodshed, to Vietnamize the conflict. They did not want to pull out and have the South Vietnamese get crushed after so much effort had been put in to prop them up. He wanted US allies to do more of the heavy lifting, sure. But he didn't want to lose. Nixon and Kissinger did not get what they wanted, they doubled down on a bad gamble that, predictably, failed. A recurring issue for US statecraft, that.

How did losing a big Vietnam War put the US on course to achieve its foreign policy objectives or peacefully dissolve the Soviet Union? On this issue alone, surely Kissinger's input was unhelpful to US interests and immoral to boot.

OK, so in pursuit of negotiating leverage over North Vietnam he oversaw the carpet-bombing and wrecking of Cambodia. Is that better?

It is considerably more honest to not ignore context, reason, and the utilitarian considerations at play for the decision makers making decisions, yes. It might even be relevant to note the targets, which were not, in fact, distributed across all of Cambodia.

One in no way needs to believe such reasons are sufficient for them to be relevant, of course. But critiques of amorality are not strengthened when ignoring reasons.

Nixon and Kissinger sought, eventually and after much unnecessary bloodshed, to Vietnamize the conflict. They did not want to pull out

They absolutely wanted to pull out.

Nixon ran on a platform to pull out. Both Nixon and Kissinger were willing to incur significant political costs previous Presidents did not to establish the conditions for how to pull out. Nixon and Kissinger were literally the driving forces for the January 1973 Paris agreements which led to the American pull out.

and have the South Vietnamese get crushed after so much effort had been put in to prop them up.

They did not want South Vietnam to get crushed, but they were absolutely willing to accept the risk of it being lost, because- notably- they were not Domino Theorists, and thus did not believe any defeat would be catastrophic everywhere, and didn't consider Vietnam or the Indo-China border area a vital interest worth pouring the level of resources into.

Kissinger and Nixon thought of Vietnam as a distraction from the bigger and more important issues and areas relevant to strategic competition. Managing a loss in Vietnam was preferable to trying to 'win' Vietnam because 'winning' Vietnam meant being more likely to 'lose' the Cold War.

He wanted US allies to do more of the heavy lifting, sure. But he didn't want to lose.

By your implied conditions of losing, he did. They just would have disputed it was an actual American loss in a meaningful sense of win-lose, as opposed to taking the preferable loss of a lose-lose.

Nixon and Kissinger did not get what they wanted, they doubled down on a bad gamble that, predictably, failed. A recurring issue for US statecraft, that.

Careful, Ranger. Your typical competence on when trying to snidely deride American competence is showing.

Nixon and Kissinger did get the crux of what they wanted: they forced forward negotiations for how the US would get out of Vietnam, got out of Vietnam, recovered the POWs, established a framework for allowing the US to re-intervene if North Vietnam broke the Paris accord, and a few other incidentals that history has generally forgotten. They didn't get everything that they wanted- and some of that it is due to facts beyond the control of American statecraft, by the design of the American state- but no one ever does, and insisting a failing to achieve some things is equivalent to an overall failure is incompetent analysis, particularly when lacking the context behind failings.

The policy choices that let the South Vietnamese get crushed as it did, most notably the cutting off aid that the South Vietnamese government had been dependent and the refusal of the US to re-intervene when North Vietnam broke the Paris accords and began its conventional invasion, were not Nixon-Kissinger policies, and occurred independently of the Cambodia policy. The cut-off of aid was a result of the American Congress throttling the budget, against the wishes of the politically-dead Nixon (who was at the tail end of Watergate), and for a host and variety of reasons of which Cambodia was not particularly salient or relevant to.

How did losing a big Vietnam War put the US on course to achieve its foreign policy objectives or peacefully dissolve the Soviet Union?

This is the not particularly complex concept of reallocation of resources. Unless you think the US was somehow gaining more ability to fight the Soviet Union across the globe by fighting a big war in Vietnam, not-fighting a big war in Vietnam gave the US government big-war resources to use elsewhere.

Which, in fact, we know happened. Just from the military component, once freed from Vietnam responsibilities the post-Vietnam military subsequently went onto a number of deliberate reforms and paradigm shifts that took the US from the 'they couldn't beat peasants guerilla fighters in a jungle' reputation to 'they defeated a million-man Soviet-style army with more casualties to friendly fire than enemy fire' in less than 20 years- and thus part of the psychological setup of perceived and actual inferiority that undermined the willingness of the Soviets to violently resist the separatists and dissolution of the Soviet empire-state. Meanwhile, back to the 70s, the reallocation for forces / focus from Vietnam allowed the US to re-balance in other areas including Korea (where the North Koreans had been trying to use the US preoccupation with Vietnam to attempt it's own insurgency-uprising), Europe (where nearly a seventh of the American military that was the critical assumption of NATO was tied down in Vietnam), the Middle East (where american logistical networks no longer pre-occupied supporting Vietnam played a significant role in the Yom Kipper resupply efforts), and elsewhere.

The benefit of resource reallocation only holds, of course, if you consider Vietnam a 'big' war in the first place. At its height, the US military presence in Vietnam was only about half a million active-duty service members.

The policy choices that let the South Vietnamese get crushed as it did, most notably the cutting off aid that the South Vietnamese government had been dependent and the refusal of the US to re-intervene when North Vietnam broke the Paris accords and began its conventional invasion, were not Nixon-Kissinger policies

What, the consequences of illegally and secretly invading or bombing neutral countries finally caught up to the President and Congress spat the dummy, demanding total withdrawal? Nixon and Kissinger were playing their own game, haughtily excluding everyone else from their plans and then turn around with a shocked expression when they got the rug pulled out from under them.

Expanding the war into Cambodia was a direct cause of much of Nixon and Kissinger's political woes, it went squarely against his electoral promises to withdraw and scale down the war. It caused considerable public anger and distrust, including in Congress. The duo's loss-management skills were poor, especially since fighting in Cambodia didn't change the outcome.

they forced forward negotiations for how the US would get out of Vietnam, got out of Vietnam, recovered the POWs, established a framework for allowing the US to re-intervene if North Vietnam broke the Paris accord, and a few other incidentals that history has generally forgotten.

And what was the fruit of the Paris Accords? The North Vietnamese had no plan to abide by the terms of such an open expression of US defeat (withdrawing US forces without withdrawing NV forces...) - better to drop the pretence and negotiate directly with North Vietnam to get the POWs and leave unilaterally.

The benefit of resource reallocation only holds, of course, if you consider Vietnam a 'big' war in the first place. At its height, the US military presence in Vietnam was only about half a million active-duty service members.

That's a big war, albeit not a world war.

Just from the military component, once freed from Vietnam responsibilities the post-Vietnam military subsequently went onto a number of deliberate reforms and paradigm shifts

Unless you think the US was somehow gaining more ability to fight the Soviet Union across the globe by fighting a big war in Vietnam

America losing a big Vietnam war as opposed to a small Vietnam war surely helped the Soviets in the Cold War.

You completely misunderstood my point, obviously it was better to leave Vietnam sooner, which is a process that Nixon/Kissinger ironically undermined with their determination to claw out a draw by coercion - it was never going to happen. I don't see how I'm stupidly deriding American competence when they made the exact same mistake again in Afghanistan, launching these ill-planned interventions over low-value regions, realizing they've lost, wasting a lot of time negotiating and trying to bully people who are playing a fundamentally different game with far higher stakes. The North Vietnamese were ferociously determined and were not going to accept defeat, or even a draw. If 500,000 troops couldn't beat them, a piece of paper certainly wasn't going to help - this is the error Kissinger and Nixon made.

What's the quote about repeating the same thing again and expecting a different outcome?

What, the consequences of illegally and secretly invading or bombing neutral countries finally caught up to the President and Congress spat the dummy, demanding total withdrawal?

Not really, no. Cambodia was not particularly relevant to the American political opinion or actors involved at the time. This isn't exactly some social secret either- there still exists public opinion polling and records of remarks and interviews from the period that you could look at if you cared to.

This is more of a demonstration of your lack of awareness of relevant subject matter.

Nixon and Kissinger were playing their own game, haughtily excluding everyone else from their plans and then turn around with a shocked expression when they got the rug pulled out from under them.

Simply because you believe the framing you subscribe to should be the one others subscribe to does not make it so. It does, however, make you wrong when trying to characterize the reasons that actually held influence to those others.

Expanding the war into Cambodia was a direct cause of much of Nixon and Kissinger's political woes, it went squarely against his electoral promises to withdraw and scale down the war. It caused considerable public anger and distrust, including in Congress. The duo's loss-management skills were poor, especially since fighting in Cambodia didn't change the outcome.

This would be demonstration two...

And what was the fruit of the Paris Accords?

Exactly what was described in the answer you ignored but dismissed as they didn't seem relevant or important to you. Which would be demonstration three....

That's a big war, albeit not a world war.

Absolutes that seem big to people with smaller frames of reference are not the same as big things in absolute terms. A seventh is a considerable and non-trivial fraction, but it is not a big fraction.

America losing a big Vietnam war as opposed to a small Vietnam war surely helped the Soviets in the Cold War.

Since the Soviets subsequently lost the Cold War to the results of the post-drawdown reorientation of the US, that would surely be an uninformed conclusion, even without the fallacious attempt to assume a conclusion that doesn't even hold.

You completely misunderstood my point,

I understood your point, it was simply characteristic of you and unsubtly trying to ignore previous points to make a jab.

I don't see how I'm stupidly deriding American competence when they made the exact same mistake again in Afghanistan,

You are stupidly deriding because you are demonstrating a considerable lack of intelligence, awareness, or understanding of the things you deride.

Such as here. This line, and the paragraph that was clipped, is its own example. It does not take some sort of uncommon insight to identify multidues of differences- and things to critique- between Vietnam and Afghanistan from political, social, diplomatic, economic, military, opposition, local regional, and many other relevant factors. Breezing past them for a not-partiuclarly-well-constructed historical metaphor to force a commonality on topics you have stronger opinions than knowledge about is quite characteristic of you, but also a stupid form of derision.

What's the quote about repeating the same thing again and expecting a different outcome?

You never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

More comments

I am pretty sure the quoted section explicitly acknowledges that good outcomes can justify evil acts, so I'm not sure what your first three paragraphs are doing. As to the last paragraph, if you want to make the case that America's bombing of Cambodia, or supporting a coup of Allende, or supporting Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh were actually necessary to topple the Soviet Union I am open to hearing the argument but I do not believe it just because you assert it.

Despite some nostalgic revisionism, there was nothing pre-ordained about the fall of the Soviet Union, or that it would occur in the way it did.

I think that after the mid 70s it was clear. In the early 80s everyone just waited for the regime to die. Probably there were signs during the space race too - but then the smart people were either too pro USSR or too blinded by anti communism to be objective.

In the early 80s everyone just waited for the regime to die.

This is completely wrong.

The most amusing anecdote to that effect: in 1987 Star Trek TNG's future history included launches from Baikonur Cosmodrome, USSR in 2363; in 1989 another mention established the USSR as still active at least through 2123.

But most of the rest of the recent Twitter thread where I saw that is good too, and a more academic view can be found here.

Probably there were signs during the space race too

I keep harping on this lately for some reason, but for a decade and a half the position of "the smart people" was that, as Walter Cronkite put it, “It turned out there had never been a race to the Moon”. It wasn't until 1989 that the very existence of the N1 rocket, including the most powerful rocket stage ever flown until the SpaceX SuperHeavy tests this year, finally leaked.

The argument is that Kissinger enabled genocides/mass murders in Cambodia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, East Timor, etc... and thus bears responsibility for millions of deaths.

I'm not sure how much I buy that argument. Kissinger generally reacted to these events with callous indifference and took the position that they shouldn't affect US foreign policy (see also, his illustrative remark about Soviet Jews: "If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."), but that sort of indifference is pervasive in international politics and Kissinger was mostly just crass enough to be on the record saying it instead of mouthing platitudes. While it doesn't exactly speak well of his moral character, attributing responsibility to him in particular mostly seems to stem from the tendency to treat the US as the only country with agency.

his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed.

Almost nobody actually thinks in these sort of brute consequentialist terms.

I'd go further that Kissenger violated a number of ideological tropes and expectations.

Kissinger was a Holocaust surviving Jew (by narrow evasion of the fascists) who became strongly aligned with the American political right rather than left, a European who became an ardent anti-communist rather than a social-democrat, and thus something of a ideological/race-traitor theme which akin the progressive reaction to prominent black conservatives. He also worked directly against a common preconception/trope of a successful diplomat being someone who is supposed to avoid war at all costs and speak in universalist rather than national-interest terms. More to the point, he was a flagrantly ambitious and a publicity hound at various points, and so rather than quietly exist within the state apparatus or quietly retire to obscurity, he made a good part of his later-life about trying to be an elder statesman and defending his legacy.

That made him an active proponent of an otherwise often faceless machine, but also means that people's desires to anthromorphize broader collectives had an easy target to pin collective actions and policies onto, which has the effect of re-allocating responsibility away from less subtle actors in more flattering ways. It becomes a singular personal issue (Kissinger and his cronies were the cause of State Department anticommunist policy) rather than a broader trend (Kissinger was just the most prominent of an extensive line of anti-communists in the State Department who would have attempted by and large the same things regardless).

While there's plenty to criticize, I do agree that a good deal of the motte-expansive criticism of him rests on hyper-agency/hypo-agency distinctions. Very few Cold War critics treat anti-communists as having their own agency to commit atrocities rather than as American dependents operating at the direction of the Americans (and thus who would not have acted/been successful in their crimes without it). (And, by extension, anti-communists have no agency and commit atrocities; pro-communists have agency in resisting the US/west, and their crimes are brushed over as able. Who, whom, and all that.)

Edited for clarity of the memtic nature of the point.

That made him an active proponent of an otherwise often faceless machine, but also means that people's desires to anthromorphize broader collectives had an easy target to pin collective actions and policies onto, which has the effect of re-allocating responsibility away from less subtle actors in more flattering ways.

It's a bit like Klaus Schwab and the alt-right. People see big institutions doing bad things, and some sinister-looking guy gets up to the podium and says "Yes, it's me, I'm the bad guy. Look at my important title, I'm responsible." If you're willing to wear that mantle, outsiders will gladly heap superhuman agency on you.

Kissinger was a Holocaust surviving Jew

Not really; his family left in 1938

a European

Again, not really. He came to the US at age 15, graduated from a public high school in NYC and then got an accounting degree from the City College of New York.

became an ardent anti-communist rather than a social-democrat

Those are not mutually exclusive categories. It describes tons of people on the left during the Cold War, including LBJ, Scoop Jackson, and the Kennedys.

Fifteen years in Germany, especially the first fifteen years of ones life, when born to parents who themselves were born in Germany, typically makes one European.

Hell, he's named after a city in Bavaria.

Kissinger enabled genocides/mass murders

The US directly and intensively bombed Cambodia to advance his policies. It's not so much 'enabling' mass death, it's directly attacking other countries and killing their people, in the pursuit of a reckless and ill-thought out war with unclear and unachievable goals.

That alone wouldn't single out Kissinger for particular hate amongst other US foreign policy leaders during the Vietnam era, but he is. Nor would it explain why his critics hold him responsible for, e.g., genocide in Bangladesh

He wasn't responsible for the genocide in Bangladesh, but it's fair to hold him responsible for playing a primary role in knowingly aiding the genociders:

Kissinger was well-informed about the atrocities being committed by his allies in West Pakistan. In fact, on April 6, 1971, the US consulate in Dacca cabled a telegram to Washington in which the diplomatic staff expressed “strong dissent” to US policy in Pakistan and accused the country of carrying out a genocide in East Pakistan. The telegram expressed dismay over Washington’s refusal to “denounce atrocities.” Kissinger, therefore, was fully aware of the violence for which he was advocating support.

During the conflict, the United States provided Pakistan with arms via Jordan and Iran. Kissinger and Nixon supported this policy despite being warned in legal briefs from both the State Department and the Pentagon that such actions were illegal. Washington did not even ask the Pakistani military to refrain from using American weapons during the conflict.

Kissinger was desperate to see West Pakistan emerge as the victor. On December 10, he decided to send in the US Navy. Kissinger delivered a presidential order to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff commanding that the US aircraft carrier Enterprise be relocated from Vietnam, where it was stationed at the time, to the Bay of Bengal. The Enterprise was to be accompanied by nine warships and 2,000 marines...

Kissinger’s task force emboldened Pakistan’s leaders in their resolve to suppress the independence movement in East Pakistan. Pakistan’s president, Yahya Khan, even hinted to his colleagues that the American military would intervene. Kissinger had earlier urged him not to accept a ceasefire in East Pakistan, which would have prevented at least some casualties. Taking this, along with the presence of the Enterprise in the Bay of Bengal, as signs of a forthcoming US intervention, Khan extended the war by a few days...

despite having great leverage on the leaders of West Pakistan, Nixon and Kissinger failed to prevent the military crackdown in East Pakistan. And the two men really did have the power to influence West Pakistan’s leaders. When they had asked General Yahya Khan, in the midst of the unrest, to get rid of Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, a West Pakistani military man, from governing East Pakistan, Yahya Khan promptly did so. Kissinger and Nixon also convinced Khan not to execute Mujib-ur-Rehman, future president of Bangladesh, when a wartime trial was held against him.

The US certainly discouraged Indian interference in the Bangladeshi genocide of 1971. Since that was at the peak of Kissingers powers, that is one real genocidal accusation that he cant easily shirk responsibility for.

1971, the year of the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, the treaty that marked the de-facto alliance of the Indians and the Soviets that endured for the rest of the Cold War, was the peak of Kissinger's powers over India?

This would seem to be another case of American hyperagency.

The US gave India over half a billion in direct aid and loans at the time, much more than the Soviets (though the Soviets provided more military aid ofc). He's reffering to Kissinger threatening to suspend that aid if India declared war on Pakistan, a pretty serious threat indeed.

Almost nobody actually thinks in these sort of brute consequentialist terms.

I would agree that nameless faceless third world (second world?) people being killed can’t be meaningfully compared to things that one personally cares about, but they can certainly be compared to other nameless faceless third world people being killed.

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