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