Does America Need a Foreign Policy?
Henry Kissinger
Simon & Schuster £20, pp318
An advert for the Economist from the mid-1990s had an astonished corporate manager look up to find Henry Kissinger sitting next to him in business class. A scintillating conversation which might be relayed to the grandchildren is on offer, if, that is, the businessman has read enough to keep up with the statesman. The Economist should fire its marketing department. About the kindest comment one can make about the Kissinger presented in Does America Need a Foreign Policy? is that the dullest executive would learn more from fixing his eyes on the in-flight teen movie - and keeping them there.
Kissinger's writing is ugly - 'Asia's economy is becoming ever more important for that of the United States and the world' - and is studded with travel-brochure clichés - 'Bordered on the south by the Indian Ocean, on the north by the Himalayas, on the west by the nearly as formidable mountains of the Hindu Kush, and in the east by the marshes and rivers of Bengal, India has existed for millennia as a world apart.'
European readers receive a thoughtless justification of American supremacy. We are instructed that we have no right to oppose the son-of-Star-Wars programme, even though it turns American bases in Britain and Denmark into unprotected targets. Star Wars also tears up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty he negotiated in 1972, and which defenders of Kissinger have used in pleas for even-handedness ever since. On the one hand, Nixon's and Kissinger's administration was a criminal conspiracy, the argument runs. On the other, it reduced the danger of war with the old Soviet Union. Kissinger now confesses without contrition that he didn't want the ABM treaty and is happy to see it go. Nixon was forced into détente because Congress refused to fund the nuclear arms race at the frantic level he required. There goes the other hand, then.
The book is worthless in all respects except one - it is a masterpiece of evasion. Ever since the House of Lords ruled that Pinochet could be prosecuted, the possibility that Kissinger may be arraigned for war crimes has received alternately shocked and serious consideration in the American media. Readers can find a helpful digest of the charges against him in Christopher Hitchens's The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso, £15). They range from Kissinger's probably small part in Nixon's sabotage of the 1968 Paris peace talks to end the Vietnam War, through his approval of the assassinations and murders that accompanied Pinochet's seizure of power, to complicity in the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. The body count from these and other acts of statesmanship must be counted in hundreds of thousands, and it isn't only journalists and historians who are totting up the total.
An Argentine judge has tried without success to persuade him to testify on US organisation of the kidnapping and slaughter of South American leftists in the 1970s. Kissinger left Paris in May after he refused to accept a summons from a judge asking him to give evidence on French citizens who disappeared in Pinochet's terror. (I imagine him flitting through Charles de Gaulle Airport in mirror shades and a false beard.) A Chilean judge wants to question him about the murder of Charles Horman, a young American journalist, during Pinochet's overthrow of democracy.
In these circumstances, any reputable man would surely mount a vigorous defence or provide what help he could to grave judicial inquiries. But, like a terrorist who refuses to recognise the validity of the court, Kissinger rejects the validity of prosecution in the abstract without once mentioning the charge sheet or declaring his interest.
Despite appearances to the contrary, Kissinger intends this book to be an 'argument against American hegemony'. By hegemony, he doesn't mean the military power he and Nixon wielded to devastate Cambodia, which seemed pretty hegemonic at the time, but the imposition of moral values through the belated confrontation with Milosevic, which he dislikes with the intensity of Noam Chomsky. The claims of universal principles of human rights to override national jurisdictions are just as deplorable as 'humanitarian interventions'.
Kissinger confronts them with the unfamiliar vocabulary of the bleeding heart. 'The instinct to punish must be related, as in every constitutional democratic political structure, to a system of checks and balances,' he moos. The world must not substitute 'the tyranny of judges for that of governments.' (Did he mean to write that government was tyranny? An interesting admission.) 'Inquisitions and even witch-hunts' must be discouraged.
He glumly admits that he had promoted human rights as an American negotiator at the 1975 Helsinki Conference with the Soviet Union. But the principles in the final accord were meant to be 'a diplomatic weapon to use against Soviet pressure on their own and captive peoples, not as a legal weapon against individual leaders before courts of countries not their own' (individual leaders such as Pinochet and, indeed, himself).
His adherence to a double standard that a child could see through in no way inhibits him from accusing his opponents of hypocrisy. 'So far universal jurisdiction has involved the prosecution of one fashionably reviled man of the Right while scores of East European Communist leaders - not to speak of Caribbean, Middle Eastern, or African leaders who had inflicted their own full measures of torture and suffering - have not been obliged to face similar prosecutions.'
Germany, in fact, tried her neo-Stalinist leaders and Romania executed Ceausescu, thus dispensing with the need for universal jurisdiction, while the Lords' ruling on Pinochet was followed by international efforts to indict Saddam Hussein and Hissen Habre, former dictator of Chad. In any case, double standards are resolved by equality before the law, which is precisely what Kissinger doesn't want.
He complains that politicians who may have murdered thousands are treated like'ordinary criminals' who kill one or two. Not once does he acknowledge or attempt to refute the allegation that he is covered in enough blood to make a psychopath wince. The silence of this volume speaks volumes.
