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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?
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.
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.
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