Thomas Fazi
UnHerd, May 24, 2023
“Kissinger’s defenders focus on his diplomatic achievements, which are hard to dispute.”
How one chooses to celebrate Kissinger’s Century depends on where you sit in the “Kissinger wars”. To his detractors, Henry Kissinger was an imperialist who pursued US global supremacy with unmatched ruthlessness and cynicism. To his supporters, he was a diplomatic genius and a peacemaker.
In The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens famously called for his prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offences against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture”. For him, the Kissinger Doctrine was dangerously straightforward: the US reserved the right to intervene anywhere in the world in defence of its interest, including by conspiring against democratically elected governments.
This manifested itself in a number of ways: in Kissinger’s support for Pinochet’s violent overthrow of Allende’s socialist government in Chile and for the 17-year-long dictatorship that followed; in his approval of the equally brutal Argentinian military junta of Jorge Videla; in his enabling of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor and the campaign of state-sponsored terror that followed; in his secret support for Pakistan as it committed shocking atrocities in Bangladesh; and in his encouragement of Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against neutral Cambodia and Laos, which killed an estimated 150,000 civilians. So wide-ranging was US interventionism under Kissinger that, in 1976, a 33-year-old Joe Biden accused him of trying to promulgate “a global Monroe Doctrine”. … [To read the full article, click here]