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